الإسلام والغرب: نحو عالم أفضل

@ @ Civilization or Political: The Reality of the Present Tension between the Muslim World and the West

Shari‘a , therefore, developed in relation to the development of the community. It evolved vertically through the ages, reflecting the evolution of the community, and diversified horizontally to embody and accommodate various conditions of social association. In both cases, however, shari‘a developed like a tree that grows by branching out from a living root, its own root. Inherent in this mutual identification between society and shari‘a , was a continuous and creative tension between two dynamic forces: faithfulness to the essence of Islam and embodiment of the community. To express the essence of Islam, shari‘a had to be conservative, and to represent the diverse and ever evolving community, it had to be free. Throughout the centuries, freedom and conservation enveloped every single field of the Islamic experience, from the nature of writing, to the educational environment, to the judicial system. Qur’an and the hadith (the prophetic traditions) lay at the root of all Islamic disciplines, like fiqh , theology and language. The Age of Writing, or Tadwin , began with the collecting of Qur’an and small collections of hadith then developed into various founding texts, or matn s. Both matn s and the following works of summaries (précis, or teaching compendium), or mukhtasar s, whose appearance accompanied the institutionalisation of the Islamic schools of fiqh and theology, would become subjects of further glossaries, commentaries and explanations. While affirming its connection with the primary texts of Islam and the founding texts of the school, the secondary and detailed works would freely incorporate the accumulated knowledge, respond to the demands of the changing times and localities and address the emerging questions of the field of inquiry. Islamic traditional education was another example of the dynamic interaction between conservation and freedom, where the purpose, ethics and the principal elements of what constituted an education were constant. The process of learning, however, was free, open-ended and unlimited. Nothing could signify the essence of traditional Islamic education more than the circle of learning, in which the ‘alim -teacher occupies the centre,

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