Islamic Studies At The Graduate level In Malaysia

 Islamic Studies at The Graduate Level in Malaysia

Excerpt #29 from my book:  Qur’an, Hadith, and Hikayat:  Exercises In Critical Thinking.

Nov 2, 2025

 

I once attended a graduate seminar on Islam at a Malaysian university. That course was popular with upcoming Malay executives, professionals, and top civil servants eager to burnish their Islamic credentials, thus enhancing their prospects for promotions.

 

         Ten minutes into his droning lecture, the professor, a distinguished scholar with a doctorate from an elite American university, said something ridiculous. I raised my hand to interrupt but was told to keep my questions till the end as “We have so much material to cover!” At the end it was exactly that. He had no time for questions.

 

         My fellow students sympathized with the professor. He had so much material to impart that he had no time for questions! That is Malaysian education at the graduate level and not unique to Islamic Studies.

 

         That distinguished professor acted as if he had a heavy load of intellectual goods. The sooner he could unload them onto his students, the faster that would lighten him. Then he could claim to have discharged his duties and earned his paycheck as halal.

 

         He was less an educator, more an Amazon delivery man. I am just the carrier, sir, thank you! Any complaints, file a form! He should instead have been on a mission or crusade – to carry and pass on the torch of enlightenment on Islam and ignited the sparks in his students, not damper them. Therein lies much of the problem with Islamic education at all levels and not just in Malaysia. Considering the varied backgrounds of the mature students (academically and professionally), that would have been a splendid forum for that professor to have had a lively discussion.

 

         Bruce Lawrence, retired Professor of Islamic Studies at Duke, once had a graduate engineering student from Pakistan who took the course for his humanities electives. The student was a hafiz (one who had memorized the Qur’an). Lawrence was stunned that the student had understood nothing of the Qur’an until he took Lawrence’s course. The professor too learned much from his student, especially about Pakistani education. Lawrence’s class was an invigorating two-way street, unlike the monotonous one-way traffic at that Malaysian graduate course.

 

         Back to that Malay professor, he was consumed with putting fuel in his students’ lamp pot; Lawrence, with igniting the flame.

 

         There is the famous story of Imam Ghazzali whose caravan was robbed. He pleaded to the bandits not to take away the volumes in the donkeys’ saddlebags. “Those are my precious lifetime work, my only legacy,” pleaded the legendary Imam. 

 

         The bandits’ leader was unimpressed. “It cannot be much of a legacy if it could all be destroyed by a mere bandit,” he scoffed.

 

         Today, Imam Ghazzali’s encyclopedic contributions could fit on a thumb disc or be put safely in I-Cloud and be readily retrieved from anywhere. Indeed, modern Islamic studies at least in the West is focused on digitizing those massive treatises and using AI to extract their wisdom. 

 

         There is yet another crippling blight in much of contemporary Islamic discourses. That is, the unnecessary dichotomous and mutually exclusive temporal versus Hereafter schism. With that comes the unjustified and destructive belittling and dismissal of worldly knowledge and successes. The real and permanent ones would be in the Hereafter.

 

         Medieval Christians too were once trapped by this crippling mindset. It took the 16th Century John Calvin (and others) to disabuse them of this destructive fallacy, and with that Western Europe began its Renaissance and embrace of science and capitalism.

 

         To Calvin, God in His wisdom would show His hand on whom He would favor in the Hereafter. If He were to amply reward you in this temporal world, then that would mean a similar fate awaits you in the Hereafter. Your worldly state foreshadows your fate.

 

         With that came the Calvinists’ famed work ethics, and from there Western Europe leaped out of the Middle Ages into modernity. Everyone worked hard so they would be successful and thus be seen as being favored by God. The hitherto prevailing theology of the poor shall inherit the Earth, a variant of Matthew 5:5, was now seen in a radically different and much less favorable light.

 

Next:  The Day of Judgment As A Concept