关于等度遗产和伊斯兰政治思想的注释: 教育的例子

人类历史的一个不幸特征是宗教差异和冲突倾向于用无知和偏见的毒酒滋养自己. 虽然有时可以做很多事情来减少偏见, 在我看来，学者和教育工作者应该主要关注减少无知的更基本和持久的目标. 一个人在减少无知方面的成功——包括自己的——将取决于一个人的动机.

伊斯兰教育哲学的研究可能受到当前实际问题的推动: 英国穆斯林渴望拥有伊斯兰学校, 无论是私人资助还是国家资助, 是一个典型的例子. 从教育哲学的角度, 然而, 这样的动机是极其狭隘的, circumscribed by the concepts and categories of the local political disputes of the moment. For those motivated by a desire for knowledge and understanding of a tradition outside their own, it is most doubtful that any study of Islamic philosophy restricted by current practical concerns can be at all productive. There is no simple correspondence between knowledge and “relevance.”

There must, 然而, be some connection between two traditions of thought and practice if there is to be a point of departure, and a point of entry, which allows the scholar to step from one tradition to another. The legacy of Isocrates may constitute one such point of departure, which will help us to understand the relation between two traditions, the classical Greek and the Islamic. The dominance of the Isocratic legacy in Western education is well established and widely known among historians, classicists

and political philosophers, although awareness of it has only just begun to surface among educationists.2 Similarly, the Isocratic legacy to education (and the rich tradition of Arabic Platonism in philosophy) has in uenced Islamic thought, though in ways that are

still not yet well understood. The intention of this paper is to suggest that a modiŽ ed form of the Isocratic educational tradition is a fundamental component of Islamic political thought, 即, Islamic educational thought. This general wording of the intention of this paper in terms of Islamic political thought may give rise to a misunderstanding. 伊斯兰教, 当然, is regarded by its adherents as a uniŽ ed and universal system of belief and behaviour.