In Search of a Tawhid Methodology: Toward Paradigms for Islamic Educational Research

• In Event: Toward Fuller Expressions of Knowledge, Being, and Truth in Rethinking Islamic Education

Abstract

How can we, as Muslim researchers, interpret the words and actions of people who live beyond the visible, tangible, measurable? What does living in the spiritual mean for truth? Drawing upon the methodological processes of three Muslim researchers, conducting empirical research in Muslim educational communities in Australia, Canada, and the United Arab Emirates, this paper explores implications for educational research within an articulation of the human being that recognizes faculties of understanding beyond the intellectual.
Previous educational researchers working within Islamic frames of reference have been largely excluded from the academy or relegated to its indigenous margins; this paper builds upon their contributions (eg. Ahmed, 2014; 2021; Al Zeera, 2001; Zine, 2008). Situated at the edges of a post-qualitative horizon (Denzin & Lincoln, 2017), within Islamic Education Studies (Sahin, 2018), this paper’s syncretic conceptual basis suggests that secular academic perspectives and lived spiritual realities are not mutually exclusive but mutually enriching.
Employing auto-ethnographic methodology, each author is in varying stages of research within an Islamic research paradigm. We reflexively analyze our paradigms, and the knowledge they make visible, guided by three research questions:
1. How do Muslim researchers construct paradigms expansive of concepts rooted in Islamic conceptual frameworks?
2. What are those concepts and what functions do they serve?
3. How do such paradigms impact educational research processes and results?
Analysing our own methodological processes, and offering empirical examples, we argue that Islamic research paradigms capture data beyond a normative, secular, rational frame. They enable a) data recognition and b) analytic accuracy within a larger conceptual system meaningful to participants in Muslim educational communities. We illustrate how an Islamic paradigm differs depending upon who is using it, for what, with whom, when, and where; yet key shared paradigmatic principles are resources for other researchers.
In asserting that scholars must be supported in situating research within paradigms relevant to their own interpretive contexts, regardless of how marginal to the epistemic mainstream, we anticipate challenges from within that mainstream. We also face an internal challenge: researching in the shadow of illuminated spiritual and intellectual ancestors:
The representatives of Islamic thought—theologians, philosophers, metaphysicians—have all and individually [...] combined in their investigations, and at the same time in their persons, the empirical and the rational, the deductive and the inductive methods and affirmed no dichotomy between the subjective and the objective, so that they all affected what I would call the tawhid method of knowledge. (Al Attas, 2005, p. 14)
Our attempts to function within a tawhid methodology, and offer guiding parameters for others, are tentative, initial. Rigor must be centered, peer-review is paramount (Ahmed, 2014), and situating research within an Islamic paradigm contributes to both.
Islamic paradigms of research—beyond cultural relevance, indigeneity, or multiculturalism, all of which are positioned as ‘other’ to a secular, Western, hegemonic norm—start with unique developmental and educational perspectives on human beings. This paper illustrates that Islamic paradigms across ontology, epistemology, methodology, and methods are required for interpretive significance, empirical rigor, and cultural relevance for research in Muslim educational communities.

Authors

• Claire Alkouatli, University of South Australia
  Presenting Author

• Dylan William Chown, University of South Australia
  Presenting Author