ABSTRACT
Much of the thinking about the history of education in the Arab world is predicated on a very specific vision of Arab history as a whole. According to this view, the Arabs began to coalesce around a shared language about the time of the rise of Islam. They achieved their period of greatest cultural achievement with the creation of an Islamic civilization based largely on the Arabic language. For the bulk of the “golden age” of Muslim history, which corresponds, roughly, to the period of Abbasid rule from the mid-eighth to the mid-thirteenth century c.e., Arab greatness was synonymous with Muslim greatness even though the Arab monopoly on political power eventually gave way to the universalist principles of Islam.1 Thereafter, a period of decline and stagnation set in. Not until the “reawakening” of Arab national consciousness was rekindled by the literary renaissance or Nahda of the late nineteenth century-and its attendant social and political manifestations-was the Arab “house” and, by extension, the Arab “school” and “university”—ready to be put back in order. This view is shared by a diverse spectrum of historians.2 Recently, the Arab authors of the UN’s widely circulated Arab Human Development Report 2003: Building a Knowledge Society articulated a version of this paradigm demonstrating how widespread the view remains:
Arab intellectual heritage, embodied in the Arab historical experience in its golden age, i.e., since the beginning of the Islamic period until just after the era of Ibn Khaldun (early 1400s AD, early 800s AH), relies upon a set of knowledge, scientific and cultural foundations and formations . . . And once the central state had fallen, in the middle of the seventh century ah (the thirteenth century AD), the Islamic civilization retreated and gave way to a new kind of human association, to use Ibn Khaldun’s term. “Arab reason” moved toward mysticism and its supernatural, transcendental sciences. It was released from those pursuits only at the dawn of the nineteenth century due to a number of historical factors including communication with Western modernity.
