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Abstract
In order to act resolutely and effectively in history Muslims need to develop critical historical consciousness that would furnish them with the intellectual tools to understand history in light of their faith and help them act out their faith in light of history. This is one message of the Sunnah of the Prophet (peace be upon him) that is often over looked. In order to understand why critical historical consciousness has failed to develop among Muslims we need to cast on the history of Muslims and particularly of Muslim education a critical eye. This may shed some light on why Muslims who once shaped history are now cowed and rendered helpless by historical necessities.
Introduction
The questions one considers important and necessary to ask and seek answers for are not plucked from the thin air, so to speak, but are issues in one's surrounding milieu that impress the consciousness with the urgency to inquire into. To address the pressing issues is to ask questions that one thinks will bring forth answers that get to the heart of the matter. Any one issue, therefore, can give rise to a variety of questions, each asked from the perspective that the one asking the question regards the issue as important and not yet fully explored. Needless to say no one question or a set of questions can ever fully entangle the issue addressed. It is the accumulations of such questions and the answers they elicit that can hopefully, one day, resolve the issue.
That there is much wrong with the Muslim ummah today is one issue on which just about every thinking and concerned Muslim would agree. However, no two Muslims are likely to agree on what exactly is the nature of the problem. Lack of agreement is not so much a reflection of Muslims' inability to understand what ails them, but rather a reflection of the complexity of the problem. It is in the nature of intellectual enterprise that tools and categories of thought by which to investigate the problem get hammered out over the course of all the innumerable attempts to understand it. In fact, even the attempts, however off the mark they may be, contribute to our understanding of the issue at...