The Journey to Simurgh: A Renewed Approach to Character Development and Wellbeing

What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to nurture human beings? These primordial questions have diverse answers within contemporary education, stemming from competing worldviews. As a Muslim educator navigating the modern world, I find myself with the unique challenge of attempting to overcome the crushing weight of secularism that has led to a discourse in education that reduces the learner to a non-sacred being whose character development and wellbeing are arbitrary, subject to the encroaching Eurocentric worldview. This chapter aims to show how I have been working to overcome this challenge by developing an Islamic framework for character education and wellbeing called the "Journey to Simurgh” programme. The programme is a renewed way of understanding character education and wellbeing through connection to the Islamic worldview by drawing out the principles from the intermediary Islamic tradition. This framework has been applied in our local schooling context. It continues transforming the discourse around character and wellbeing, fostering a language that accommodates the learner’s holistic journey towards God, diverging from a mere humanistic approach to character development.