Islam and the West… for a better world @
surrounded by a semicircle of students. A student could join a specific circle of learning at any stage of his life, leave of his own will, or stay with it for as long as he wished or according to his own rate of learning. 20 The teacher- student relationship was not only intimate and personal but was also based on the student’s freedom to choose his teacher, his subject and even the specific area of and approach to the subject. Level of achievement in this highly diversified and free process of learning was the function of recognition tendered by the society of scholars and peers, as well as the community as a whole, where not only knowledge mattered but also piety and identification with the interests and purpose of society. The administration of justice in traditional Islamic society represented the ultimate interaction of learning, piety, tradition and diversity. Islamic justice had an absolute, immutable core that is derived from the tenets of the faith, but was also relative to the time, to the locality and its costumes, to life and its forces, to the school of fiqh and the specific reference of the hundreds of available sources, and to the judge’s understanding of the complexity of society and the case. 21 By incorporating elements of the absolute, Islamic justice preserved the links that connected the community to the sources of its moral and spiritual order, by being relative and intimate it became meaningful and comprehensible. During the second half of the nineteenth century, Muslim statesmen, supported by imperialist consuls and officials, launched a systematic effort to reorganise society and social institutions along the lines of west European 20 On the traditional Islamic education, see Timothy Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 84; Dale F. Eickelman, "The Art of Memory: Islamic Education and Its Social Reproduction," in Juan I. Cole (ed.), Comparing Muslim Societies: Knowledge and the State in World Civilization (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1992), 97-132; Michael Chamberlain, Knowledge and Social Practice in Medieval Damascus, 1190-1350 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 69-90. 21 Brinkley Messick, The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 167-86.
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