Islam and the Philosophy of Education: The Three Approaches

Abstract

Three strands of thought will be introduced as the main features of interface of Islam and philosophy of education. In the first strand, ‘philosophy’ and famous philosophers’ thoughts are explicitly avoided and, instead, a full and exclusive embrace to Islamic scriptures is taken as the key entrance to Islamic educational views. In the second strand, philosophy is taken to be compatible with Islam as a religion and, thus, it is held that ‘Islamic philosophy of education’ can be sought properly under this rubric. Finally, in the third strand, which I am going to show as preferable to the other two, philosophical methods and procedures are used in order to formulate the educational thought introduced in Islamic scriptures. It is worth noting that the difference between the third and the first stand is that while the latter avoids any philosophical thought and terminology, the former embraces philosophical methods even though there is a similarity between the two strands in dealing with the scriptures.