ABSTRACT
Relying heavily on how the critical voices among faculty in colleges of Shariah report about their colleges and their curricula, this chapter will focus on seven problematic characteristics shared by Arab Shariah colleges: oscillating between support and refusal of knowledge integration; pedagogical approach of monotony and blind imitation; contradicting reason and logic; over-specialization; weak academic quality of master’s and doctorate dissertations; limited abilities of Shariah students; and high rates of female enrollment. These problems are related to the social and political context, such as the difficulty Shariah sciences graduates face while engaging with some social scientists who often belong to the Arab Left (being liberal or illiberal). This is also manifested in how political repression tries its utmost to control the religious field and obstruct engagement between the official political religion and the unofficial political religion, which makes Shariah knowledge as a whole more about function and technicality than critique.
