Renowned Islamic scholar and author, Abumazeedah AbdulRauf, has described the belief by members of the Boko Haram Islamic sect that western education is a sin as “a thought of the misguided mind.”
According to him, there was need for Muslims to be sensitized on reading with a view to correcting the wrong impression about western education.
But a lecturer in the Department of Islamic Law at the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria and Director in ABU’s Institute of Administration, Professor Mohammed Bello, said the belief that western education is a taboo was western propaganda.
They both spoke in an interview with journalists on Saturday in Abuja during the opening ceremony of the 4th edition of a one-week Islamic Book Exhibition organized at the National Mosque by a publishing firm, De Minaret International.
Abumazeedah who is the Managing Director/CEO of the company said, “We want to mobilize Muslims and sensitize them on the habit of reading because we believe that if today everybody is campaigning for reading culture, we Muslims should be in the forefront of the campaign because our religion had started on the platform of reading and this exhibition is even more important because it is coming at a time when there is a very wrong impression about the religion.
“Prophet Mohammed never postulated mathematical theory but those who came after him developed a technique of mathematics and today, it is beneficial to the world. So, to assume that western education is a sin is indeed a thought of the misguided mind, it’s not part of Islamic thinking. And this is one of the points that we are trying to prove here like I said earlier, through this education that Muslims are indeed, the custodians of knowledge.”
According to him, the exhibition is to correct the erroneous impression that Islam is vehemently opposed to education and knowledge.
“So we are organizing this exhibition to showcase the beauty of Islam. We are having more than 25,000 collections of Islamic titles here and the works that Muslim intellectuals have done. When you see this, you will agree with me that indeed, Islam is a religion of intellects, a religion of knowledge and that is what we are trying to prove to the world.
“Islam does not distinguish between education, there is no difference between Islamic and western education. In the past, we have among our ancestors, Muslim intellectuals who were basically mathematicians like Aljeberi, like Alberuni, these were Muslims and they were mathematicians,” Abumazeedah added.
He said, “Everybody knows that Islam is a religion of peace. In fact, there is no religion in the world that has the interpretation as peace. If you adhere sincerely to Islam, you will have peace in your mind, you will have peace if a country adheres to Islam, peace will prevail, so Islam is a religion of peace.”
Asked about Islamic faithful who believe that western education is a taboo and sin, the ABU don blamed the belief on western propaganda.
“I think that propaganda has been foiled by westerners themselves and I beg to request for anyone to provide authority that any true Muslim scholar has said that there is a dichotomy between western education and Islamic education. I think the problem is that there is a lot of misguidance, a lot of misunderstandings and a lot of inter-mixing, philosophy, culture, de-culturalisation and of course sometimes, ethnicity. All these things have contributed,” he emphasized.
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