Reimagining the Vocation of Being a Scholar at the Intersection of Islamic and Western Higher Education: A Proposal

This chapter rethinks the vocation of being a scholar at the intersection of Islamic and Western secular higher education by critically examining the following questions: What is human knowing? How does Muslim tradition define scholarly formation and the purpose of intellectual/scholarly practice? What was the impact of scholarly communities in facilitating ‘Islamic civility’ within ethnically and culturally plural historic Muslim polities? How did the perception of being a scholar and an intellectual change as Muslim societies experienced modernisation/Westernisation? To what extent do secular and Islamic values of being a scholar converge and diverge? What are the effective ways of decolonising scholarship and scholarly formation within an increasingly globalising, Eurocentric secular university? Can Islamic and Western secular traditions of higher education nurture a shared ethics of transformative scholarship? These intersecting questions are explored by taking seriously the historical exchange, colonial legacy (including the persisting conditions of coloniality) and contemporary encounters between Islam and the West. A critical educational hermeneutics guides the methodology of the study, positioning it within the interdisciplinary research discourse of Comparative Education(al) Studies. The chapter concludes by putting forward an ethically embedded, socially engaged prophetic model of being a scholar and scholarship grounded in the entwined traditions of Islamic and Western secular higher education.