ABSTRACT
Every culture is transmitted by various agents of socialization, ranging from the family to the social institutions of training and education. These agents compete with one another in the socialization process, and which of them has the greatest influence is an empirical question. Islam has evolved patterns of training and education of its own and has been able to retain them for many centuries. Muslim philosophers, natural scientists, and hellenized theologians lacked a comparable institutional structure beyond that of the brief flowering of the dar al-'ulum. The worldwide North-South gap is widening all the time, and the problems of Muslim and other developing countries in the south of the international society are becoming increasingly dramatic. The preceding remarks clearly show that the education system, next to the institution of law, forms the second mainstay of the Islamic religious system and its transmission.
