Professor Keppel Archibald Cameron Creswell (1879-1974, better known as K.A.C. Creswell or simply Creswell, was definitely one of the most prominent and prolific scholars in the field of Islamic art and architecture. His gigantic two-volume Early Muslim Architecture, of which Volume I was first published in Oxford in 1932, remains widely acknowledged as the most important reference for early Islamic architecture so far. Nevertheless, Creswell's hypothesis on the genesis of the mosque type and his perception of the first mosque in Islam betray a considerable amount of dubiety and suffer a myriad of critical deficiencies. As he maintains, the making of the mosque, as defined in the modern sense, was launched not by the Prophet, as commonly believed, but by Ziyād b. Abīh when he reconstructed the mosque of Baṣra in 45/665. Astonishingly, these views of Creswell were adopted and further enhanced by quite a number of notable specialists over eighty-five years. This article will subject such views to scrutiny with the aim of identifying the first mosque in Islam and the religious as well as historical contexts in which it emerged. This discussion becomes more persistent, however, given the dominant misconceptions about the topic in Western as well as Muslim scholarships.
In medieval Islam, traditional primary educational practices laid special emphasis on learning the Qurʾān by heart. Ideally, a pupil was primed to memorize the entirety of the Holy Book―a feat known as khatma or ḥadhqa. The successful learner would earn the prestigious sobriquet of “ḥāfiẓ”, for which he/she was to be proudly known for the rest of his/her life. Muslim youngsters continue up to present times to memorize the Qurʾān, in conceivably more or less the same way, in traditional Qurʾānic schools. In a sense, this practice developed into a symbol of Islamic conservatism and nationalism in the face of modern non-Islamic ideological forces. Against this backdrop, recent pedagogical trends tend to lay blame on rote learning as a markedly ineffective teaching method. The pedagogical issues of contemporary educational apparatus in the Muslim countries and the traditional Qurʾānic preschools in and beyond the Muslim world are usually ascribed to persistence of “abortive” medieval practices in such institutions. However, this hypothesis and the lingering presumptions related to it are based on defective modern applications of such medieval educational practices and inaccurate conceptions of how these practices are described by the sources. Generally, the intrinsic characteristics of traditional Islamic pedagogy have been explored, albeit partly, by only a limited number of Western surveys. This paper seeks to re-evaluate the efficiency of the pedagogies related to memorizing the Qurʾān in medieval Muslim primary schools. It opens the vista to explore the extent to which such pedagogies resonated with the educational and cultural milieus of the time. To that end, the paper applies literature and theoretical analysis of classical scholars. It also examines primary and secondary Islamic texts as well as the Qurʾān, ḥadīth and fragments of poetry. The main finding is that, contrary to modern misconceptions and generalizations, rote memorization was intertwined in the classical Islamic pedagogy with the ability to contemplate, reflect and understand. It was a multidimensional learning experience that was set to advance a plethora of cognitive, linguistic and intellectual abilities.
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