House of Wisdom

Over de Mu'tazila, het Huis der Wijsheid en het hoe en wat om radicalisering tegen te werken bij jongeren. Originele tekst uit 2007 met kleine aanpassingen. Rudi Roth.

Etienne Vermeersch schreef hierover:
Ik vind dit een boeiende tekst en een uitstekend uitgangspunt voor de discussie.
Voor degenen die de (enigszins overdreven) lof zingen van de Islam-invloed op het Westen, is het nuttig de belangrijke rol van de Mutazila daarin te beklemtonen.

The Islamic Golden Age—from the 8th to the mid-13th century—was one of the greatest periods of human flourishment in knowledge and progress, with Baghdad as its focal point. A truly global repository of human knowledge, this Arab-Muslim imperial capital also welcomed—indeed encouraged—scholars from across the known world. As its wealth and fame grew, more and more scholars and engineers were drawn to the city from all over civilization. But in January 1258, a vast Mongol army reached the city’s perimeter and demanded that the caliph—al-Musta’sim, the nominal spiritual authority of the Islamic world—surrender.

The socio-political rise or fall of a culture necessarily goes with its moral rise or fall. But, the case seems to be different with intellectual development. A nation may decline in the socio-political sphere and yet its decline may under suitable circumstances itself become a stimulus for its intellectual advance. The political and moral decline of the Abbasid Caliphate of Baghdad began in about the middle of the ninth century but the deep rooted tradition of the patronage of learning in the Muslim world kept its intellectual achievements rising from peak to peak right up to the time of Mongol Devastation. During the period of Abbasid's, the Persian, Indian, Greek and Arab civilizations had chance to make representation in one or other way in the Islamic world. There is no doubt that the Arabs were acquainted with the Greek thought before translation work started, but that was by way of interaction with the foreigners, this acquaintance was deepened with coming of the period of translation. This paper will seek to find out how the Muslims get interacted with the Greek Philosophy.

This article presents Al-Kindi as the first Arab intercultural curriculum theorizer, rather than the first Arab philosopher as often argued. He envisioned an intercultural and interdisciplinary curriculum within the Arabic intellectual tradition. This article proposes Al-Kindism as a conceptual framework for education that revisits interdisciplinary and intercultural possibilities geared toward conflict resolution and synthesis. It also explores how Al-Kindi was arguably the first in the Arabic intellectual tradition to initiate a move from Majlis to Minhaj, that is from Masjid learning practices centered on theological studies to schooling. In other words, in the absence of actual schooling, his educational vision offered a possibility of a conceptualized curriculum to be taught. Al-Kindi’s scholarly eagerness was driven not necessarily by, as generally perceived, the desire to promote philosophy, but more importantly, by the need to develop an intellectually responsive educational tradition to accommodate emerging intercultural encounters. In his attempt to eliminate the tension between Greek thought and the Islamic culture, he believed that the acquisition of true knowledge could only be achieved through intercultural competence. Thus, as a curriculum theorizer, Al-Kindi initiated a Minhaj marked by indebtedness to intercultural encounters, by a shift away from Majlis, and by the implementation of interdisciplinarity.

This study challenges present-day dualisms and divisions, which are reflected in socio-political and intercultural dialogue. The aim of this study is to connect the philosophical discourse of the ninth-century House of Wisdom to modern conceptions of Islam by extending the dialogical rhetoric of that discourse. This study revisits the House of Wisdom, first, to invoke an inclusive, intercultural Islamic tradition that negates the circumscription of Islam by radical views. Second, it reintroduces the liberal arts as pedagogical tools that are central to the Islamic wisdom tradition. Third, it explores the notions of Aql and Fitrah and how they prescribe Hikmah.

The digital classroom can impede the cognition necessary for independent learning according to belief and behaviour undermining engagement, health, delivery, participation and curriculum.  Surveys of adolescents, students, teachers and successful users of the digital domain together with neuroscience show that teaching digital literacy and control, through a range of digital, printed and oral cognitive tasks can set the emotions and mood to overcome these impediments to produce the higher order thinking of successful learners.  Transforming successful learners into independent ones in the digital domain is possible by heeding the lessons of moving from oral to printed learning, cognizant of the risks, so as to provide balanced learning that challenges the student’s inhibiting metaphors and teaches how to test information, scaffold the critical thinking skills needed and use self-control strategies.

Much of The Iliad is explicable as Homer creating an epic calling for the male elite of the city states and diaspora of Greece to unite so as to become a major power to rival and surpass those of Anatolia, Mesopotamia and Egypt in the Near East by expressing superior gods, war goddesses, demigods, heroes, military might and implying that Greeks hold the power to rule life by governing death and whose men can match the gods themselves. 
13-10-2015

Teaching to Independent Learners in the Digital Classroom prompted the tailoring of it to invigorate thinking for the lacking of it in this domain.  Investigating pedagogy led to steering student behaviour and attitudes into independent learning by requiring consideration of significance, digital formats to reflect on relevance, oral discussion and visual mood setting to transform passive into participatory engagement, lesson scaffolding to wise up by explicit instruction in thinking methods to seek evidence and refine this into wisdom so as to provide the self-control required for independent learning.