ROOT ISLAMIC EDUCATION

• Main Author: Al-Murabit, Shaykh Abdal Qadir (Author)
• Format: Book
• Language: English
• Published: Capetown, South Africa Madinah Press 2005
• Subjects: Islamic education; Islamic religious education
• Online Access: Click Here to View Status and Holdings.

 Islam is not and can never be, by definition, in crisis or need of revisionist change, Islam, Kitab wa Sunna, is immutable in all places until the end of time. It is itself critique and balance-principle against which all human ventures must be measured and themselves revised and changed. The mizan of Islam adheres in every case, personal and social. At no time and in no place do the moral and political limits become altered to suit the latest fantasies and ambitions of men. Limits of human behaviour remain decreed by the revelation until the end of the human situation. This involves the delineation of kufr, shirk, and the hadd punishments, as well as hijra and jihad. The limits set on trading transactions and monetary systems have been decreed. Just as warfare has obligations, so too do commodity trading, coinage, marriage, sexual mores, and the maintenance of the public good. Thus, all ijtihad and all analogical extension of these basic elements must derive from the basic Islamic model of Madinah, during its phase when it functioned as the primary model for the future of mankind. The Madinah of the Salafi community was neither a primitive nor a formative society but a complete and blueprint pattern for Islamic societies from then on. It is clear that in Madinah at the time of the Salafi communities man was at his greatest and the social contract at its healthiest and most balanced. The myth of development and progress, an unscientific extension of victorian biological speculation into the realm of sociology, is not tenable. All the evidence points to social devolution, diminishment of freedom, the increasing inhibition of personal life and travel, invasion of privacy, moral degeneration, sexual deviation, the end of the marriage contract, and so on and so on. Today we find that the Muslims have been polarised into two camps, in a dialectic that backs the establishment of anti-Islamic regimes on the one hand and forces men into antithetical opposition and subversive resistance on the other. It is our contention that the Sirat al-Mustaqim, is between these two alternatives a middle-way, an interface and a sunna.