Some Experiments in the Laboratory of Islam and Beyond: Education in Fazlur Rahman’s Modernist Approach.

Abstract

This paper then looks at the influence of and responses to Orientalism and Islamic Modernism in the theories of education forwarded by the leading Islamic scholar of the 20th century, Fazlur Rahman. Education, for Rahman, acted simultaneously as a vital medium for revitalizing Islam, transnational solidarity and collaboration, post-colonial subject formation, state-building, and world-making. Unpacking the many layers of Rahman — as a scholar trained in the Western Academy, a brilliant theologist, an administrator to the Pakistani government under Ayub Khan and an advisor to different Muslim states— this paper argues that Rahman developed a coherent and innovative model of knowledge production and dissemination that aimed to simultaneously counter Orientalist perceptions of Islam and forge ideal Muslim subjects for an ideal Islamic State. Rahman’s hitherto
understudied theory of education offers great insight into how Muslim scholars navigated and shaped Islamic intellectual traditions in the post-colonial milieu.