Interviewer: Sheikh Abdullah Bin Bayyah. Can you hear me?

Abdullah Bin Bayyah: Peace be with you.

Interviewer: Peace be with you too, Your Eminence. I am asking about your vision concerning the means of reforming religious education.

Bin Bayyah: In the Name of Allah, the Most-Gracious, the Most-Merciful. Peace and blessings be upon our master, Muhammad, and upon his family and Companions. Let me first greet my brother Dr. Taha Jabir Al-Alwani, whom I believe is possessed of a brilliant mentality of Ijtihad (i.e., legal reasoning and discretion) and a comprehensive Shar`i vision that considers holistic objectives of Shari`ah. He is the inspirer of a great intellectual movement. I ask Allah to grant him success.

Taha Jabir al-Alwani: May Allah bless and reward you.

Bin Bayyah: Educational reform is an issue of utmost importance, not because of the current focus on it, but because it is one of the bases of renewal, which is an obligation on this Muslim nation. Evidently, there are disastrous flaws in our curricula, including deterioration of the scope of juristic Ijtihad, which results in an inability to cope with contemporary issues in transactions and shallow intellectual production in philosophy and humanities, let alone technology. All such necessitates major surgeries, so to speak, to our curricula and educational systems.

In addition, as my dear brother Dr. Taha said, there are many faults in our heritage that need to be addressed, a mater that involves much difficulty. Educational reform can and should be accomplished only by open Islamic minds with a firm belief that reform and renewal are not synonymous with destruction of classic legacy — minds that are aware of both the present time and history.

Our notion of reform is quite different from the Western model of religious reform. For us, reform is Shari`ah-based and covers such Shar`i sciences as the Qur’an interpretation, Hadith, Fundamentals of jurisprudence, Arabic grammar and linguistics, and logic (which was considered the master of all sciences). Yet, Shar`i sciences are so comprehensive that they cannot be reformed unless using a strategy that tightly links basics of Shari`ah to the lived reality. That link is what I call “renewal”.

The tools or means for attaining reform are universities, scientific centers, and Fiqh academies. If the Muslim nation, or some of its influential entities, has the will to do so, I believe it will be a first step on the road.

So, I commend his call for a reform that links holistic interests to partial interests, considers particularities in light of holistic objectives of Shari`ah, and deals with everything within the context of current reality.

Interviewer: Thank you, the Eminent Sheikh.

Bin Bayyah: And we have acute shortage in philosophy, in humanities, and in the matching of our concepts and such sciences. Thank you too.