Al-Ghazali's multiplex epistemology and implications for contemporary education

A talk by Professor Recep Şentürk, President of Ibn Haldun University in Istanbul, Turkey. Recorded on Tuesday, 2 March, 2021, as part of the Cambridge Philosophy of Education Seminars.

Ghazali’s human ontology and epistemology are multiplex. So is his pedagogy. More concretely, Ghazali accepts that human beings are constituted by three levels: body, mind and soul. In line with this, his epistemology is constituted by two levels: objective and subjective epistemology. Objective epistemology consists of reason, sense perception and divine revelation while subjective epistemology includes spiritually gained knowledge via heart, dreams, intuitions and inspirations. In practice, this approach requires combining rational education (ta’lim) with spiritual and moral education (tazkiya). The purpose of Islamic education is to elevate students from unawareness (taqlīd) to awareness (tahqīq) about their own reality along with the meaning and purpose of their existence. This is how they achieve the goal of becoming ideal human beings (al-insân al-kâmil). This view on human ontology, epistemology and pedagogy have the following implications on contemporary education: (1) Replacing the present concept of human in the text books with a multiplex one. (2) Replacing the positivist epistemology in the text books with a multiplex one. (3) Redefining the ultimate goal of education as raising ideal human beings prior to training employees for jobs. (4) Using academic education to teach how to use objective epistemology. (5) Using spiritual and moral education to develop competency to use subjective epistemology. The multiplex approached Ghazali—along with other Muslim thinkers--adopted in education is very much needed today to overcome the problems emanating from the materialist uniplex pedagogical approaches.

Dr. Recep Şentürk is the President of Ibn Haldun University (IHU) in Istanbul, Turkey. Professor Şentürk holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University, Department of Sociology, and specializes in civilization studies, sociology and Islamic studies with a focus on social networks, human rights, and modernization in the Muslim world. Among his books are in English, Narrative Social Structure: Hadith Transmission Network 610-1505, and in Turkish; Open Civilization: Towards a Multi- Civilizational Society and World; Ibn Khaldun: Contemporary Readings; Malcolm X: Struggle for Human Rights, Social Memory: Hadith Transmission Network 610-1505. Dr. Şentürk’s work has been translated to Arabic, Japanese and Spanish.