I was invoted to give a table talk on Islam and education in the Netherlands and below I include some parts of my talk.
So, aspects of my speech:
1. The prelude:
Islam as a provider of medical and natural science
In 1612 Thomas Erpenius was nominated professor of
Arabic in Leiden at the university that was established in 1572. He was not
teaching to do research related to the religion of Islam, but he taught Arabic
mainly as a support for medical and natural sciences, because the Arab
textbooks in these fields were still highly praised. In 1644 the gifted but also
adventurous Levinus Warner (1619-1665) travelled to Istanbul, where he would
stay until his death. He was in the 1650s nominated as the official ambassador
of the Netherlands in Istanbul. He collected more than 1000 precious
manuscripts, mostly on science and these still are the kernel of the collection
of Arab manuscripts in Leiden university. Only later, mostly in the 19th
century the study of Arabic concentrated on Islam as a religion. – This is a
nice start and it reserved to be remembered, but this is absolute over and a
finished past. We now live in a reality where sciences have their autonomy and
if we talk about universities and Islam, we talk either about the political
reality of the Muslim world or about Islam as a principal player in the
spiritual market.
2. The practical
needs for knowledge of Islam in the colonial period
From 1596-1942 Indonesia was the largest colony for
the Netherlands and the dominant religion in this vast archipelago was Islam.
There were three reason for colonial officials to study Islam and this also
dictated the academic courses to start a colonial career.
1° There were shari’a courts under colonial rule and
therefore sections of Islamic law were studied, mostly in the field of
marriage, divorce and inheritance. This field of study is still developed in
Leiden university at the Vollenhoven institute where shari’a law, adat and modern national law is compared.
2° For linguistic studies of the Indonesian languages,
especially Malay and Javanese, old manuscripts with religious texts were
studied. Most western scholars liked the mystical texts much more than fiqh or Qur´an commentaries and
therefore they spent much time on mystical scholars. This is a general trend
until now in Islamic studies in Europe. When I was teaching at an Islamic
university in Indonesia, my students often asked, why the orientalists did like
the heretics and the marginal figures much more than the orthodox.
5. The wisdom of
two dreams
When I was a student of Arabic and Islam at the
Catholic University of Nijmegen, the Jesuit priest Prof. Jean Houben told us
about his dream: If all Christians should follow the philosophy and theology of
Thomas Aquinas, ánd if all Muslims should follow the philosophy of Ibn Rushd,
the two communities would easily live in harmony and mutual understanding.
Another
dream was told to me by someone present here, before coming from Turkey to
Europe to teach. He saw Said Nursi in his dream, telling him that he should go
to Europe to help the Christian to fight secularism, because without the help
of Muslims they cannot defeat the decline of religion.
The
wisdom of these two dreams is for me that Muslims and Christians also in the
universities have to evaluate their common roots and history. But they cannot
return to the giants of the past: they must reformulate their message in
dialogue with modern science and culture. Also the universities have their duty
in this important project: not only to observe development in actual Islam, but
also to propose new solutions.
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