A gathering of influential Muslims from around the world in London last month comes amid an increasingly xenophobic United Kingdom general elections campaign. The elections will take place in May this year.
The conference organisers hope it will be an important step to mobilising moderate Muslim opinion. It will aim to promote prosperity in poor countries and be a place where the successes and failures of countries as diverse as Iran, Afghanistan and Malaysia can be rationally debated.
The Aga Khan University in the UK, which organised the conference, can point to the success of its Karachi campus not only in helping to train a new generation of doctors in Pakistan, but in changing attitudes.
When the university opened its medical college and school of nursing in 1983, families were wary of allowing their daughters to train as nurses. After 20 years, the competition for places, even from conservative communities, is intense, said Abdou Filali-Ansary, director of the university’s London-based Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations. In the medical school, half the students and 44% of the teaching staff are women. The only downside, said Filali-Ansary, is that so many trained nurses quit Pakistan for the United States where their skills command high salaries.
The university is one of the development initiatives of the Aga Khan, the billionaire spiritual leader of the Ismaili Muslims, who are scattered through about 25 countries, mainly in west and central Asia, Africa and the Middle East. In 2000, the Aga Khan established the University of Central Asia, with campuses in Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.
Last month’s conference included sessions on university governance and reforms.
Women in higher education, as well as teaching and research and international partnerships, were also on the agenda.
Filali-Ansary stressed Muslim civilisations, rather than Islam as a religion. ‘We want to look at Muslims in their diversity, different languages and cultures and historical processes. It’s an alternative to some existing programmes in the Muslim world, which look at norms, but not at facts.â€
The institute’s approach is to look at the historical facts about how dogmas – Muslim, Christian or Jewish – have developed over time. In this spirit, the institute is launching a two-year master’s degree in Muslim civilisations, bringing students from around the world to London to explore the diversity of their cultures. Filali-Ansary argued that universities have failed to contribute as much as they should to the developing world because they have not inculcated liberal attitudes.
‘In the developing world, education has been looked at as a means to train technicians, medics and engineers, not as a means to educate in the liberal meaning of the word, to open minds, turn people into critical thinkers, enable people to become learners throughout their lives and take control of their own destiny,†Filali-Ansary said.
He gave the example of his own country, Morocco, which founded an engineering school to rival the best in France. It produced, he said, graduates who were superb at maths or physics, but ‘like robots†when it came to handling people. The Aga Khan University in Karachi is currently debating whether to add a seventh year to its medical degrees so that future doctors learn more about history, philosophy and ethics.
These are not the kind of liberal sentiments you would catch one of British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s education ministers expressing in public. Filali-Ansary was tactful and generous in reply. ‘In [the UK], you are building on a very solid base. In the developing world, the problems are different – there’s a need for the solid base first.â€
He wants to see a continuous exchange of ideas between the West and the Muslim world, and links between universities in the developing world. The conference will foster these links, he hopes.
For Moncef Ben Abdel Jelil, head of faculty at the institute, bringing together academics and making them aware of reforms going on in other Muslim countries will encourage them and make them feel less isolated. Reforms and efforts to counter fundamentalist influence predate 9/11 and were not the result of American pressure, he said.
The conference set out to look at reform and innovation in terms of emancipation and social justice, including new and critical approaches to teaching and research. And since the September 11 attacks and the war in Iraq, it has become increasingly clear that the West has an interest in the future success of education reform in the Muslim world, just as much as do students in Tehran or Karachi. –