Table Of ContentMEDIEVAL MUSLIM PHILOSOPHERS
AND INTERCULTURAL
COMMUNICATION
This book examines the works of Medieval Muslim philosophers interested in intercultural
encounters and how receptive Islam is to foreign thought, to serve as a dialogical model,
grounded in intercultural communications, for Islamic and Arabic education. The
philosophers studied in this project were instructors, tutors, or teachers, such as Al-Kindi,
Al-Farabi, Al-Ghazali, and Averroes, whose philosophical contributions directly or
indirectly advanced intercultural learning.
This book describes and provides examples of how each of these philosophers engaged
with intercultural encounters, and asks how their philosophies can contribute to infusing
intercultural ethics and practices into curriculum theorizing. First, it explores selected
works of medieval Muslim philosophers from an intercultural perspective to formulate
a dialogical paradigm that informs and enriches Muslim education. Second, it frames
intercultural education as a catalyst to guide Muslim communities’ interactions and identity
construction, encouraging fexibility, tolerance, deliberation, and plurality. Third, it bridges
the gap between medieval tradition and modern thought by promoting interdisciplinary
connections and redrawing intercultural boundaries outside disciplinary limits. This study
demonstrates that the dialogical domain that guides intercultural contact becomes a
curriculum-oriented structure with Al-Kindi, a tripartite pedagogical model with
Al-Fārābī, a sojourner experience with Al-Ghazali, and a deliberative pedagogy of
alternatives with Averroes. Therefore, the book speaks to readers interested in the potential
of dialogue in education, intercultural communication, and Islamic thought research.
Wisam Kh. Abdul-Jabbar holds a Ph.D. (funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council of Canada) from the University of Alberta, where he was awarded the
Bacchus Graduate Research Prize for scholarly excellence in International and Multicultural
Education. He also received the University of Alberta President’s Doctoral Prize of Distinction,
among other awards such as the JDH McFetridge Graduate Scholarship and the Andrew
Stewart Memorial Graduate Prize, for outstanding accomplishment and potential in pursuit
of new knowledge. Dr. Abdul-Jabbar held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of
Calgary. He is currently a visiting professor teaching graduate courses in the Intercultural
Communication program at HBKU in Qatar. He is also a faculty member in the Adult
Education Master’s Degree program at Yorkville University, and an adjunct professor at the
University of Alberta, Canada. He is the author of Negotiating Diasporic Identity in Arab-
Canadian Students – Double Consciousness, Belonging, and Radicalization (Palgrave, 2019).
Routledge International Studies in the Philosophy
of Education
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Rethinking the Politics of Education
Nick Peim
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On Heidegger and Wittgenstein
Håvard Åsvoll
Medieval Muslim Philosophers and Intercultural Communication
Toward a Dialogical Paradigm in Education
Wisam Kh. Abdul-Jabbar
For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Routledge-
International-Studies-in-the-Philosophy-of-Education/book-series/SE0237
MEDIEVAL MUSLIM
PHILOSOPHERS AND
INTERCULTURAL
COMMUNICATION
Toward a Dialogical Paradigm in
Education
Wisam Kh. Abdul-Jabbar
First published 2023
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2023 Wisam Kh. Abdul-Jabbar
The right of Wisam Kh. Abdul-Jabbar to be identifed as author of this
work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,
now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording,
or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identifcation and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-0-367-42483-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-42380-7 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-85413-3 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9780367854133
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by Apex CoVantage, LLC
CONTENTS
Preface viii
Acknowledgments xiv
1 The Intercultural, Educational, and Interdisciplinary
Borderlines 1
The Book Project: A Proposal of Three Premises 1
Intercultural Communication and the Meaning of Culture:
Dialogue at the Borderline 3
Intercultural Communication, Interdisciplinarity, and the
Crisis of Disciplinarity 7
Toward Conceptualizing the Intercultural Educational Context 13
2 Intercultural Encounters, Discord, and Discovery:
Medieval Times Amid Evil Times? 21
What’s in a Name? 21
The Middle East, Medieval Times, and Middle-Roads 23
The Bright Ages: Pushing the Cross-Cultural Boundaries
of Islamic Epistemology 27
The Translation Movement, the House of Wisdom,
and Kalam 31
Revisiting Ninth-Century Baghdad’s Intercultural
House of Wisdom 31
Medieval Intercultural Encounters and Muslim Identity
Today 35
vi Contents
3 The Dialogical Paradigm: A Paradigm for the
Intercultural Context 40
A Paradigm Driven by the Dialogic 41
Acting Dialogically: The Dialoguer as an Intercultural
Mediator 46
The Dialectical Shift From Debate to Dialogue 48
A Dialogical Shift in Historical Memory 53
4 Al-Kindi on Education: Curriculum Theorizing and
the Intercultural Minhaj 61
Al-Kindi: The First Arab Philosopher 63
The Historical and Intellectual Milieu of Ninth-Century
Baghdad 63
Why Knock at Al-Kindi’s Door? A Future in the Past and
Familiarity in the Strange 65
Al-Kindi’s Minhaj of Gratitude and Intercultural Encounter 68
A Shift From Majlis to Minhaj 71
Al-Kindi and the Interdisciplinary Approach 74
Conclusion 78
5 Intercultural Fārābism: Toward a Tripartite Model of
Dialogical Education 82
Why Knock at al-Fārābī’s Door? 83
Farabism: A Tripartite Model of the Dialogical Curriculum 84
The Farabian Dialogical Ittisal: Toward the Felicity of
Synthesis 86
Ittisal With Logic Through Language 88
Ittisal With the Active Intellect 89
Ittisal With Foreign Thought 90
Musammaha: Framing Moderation and Tolerance in
Intercultural Education 91
The Fārābīan Fadhl: The Bountiful Curriculum 96
Conclusion 98
6 Rihla as the Sojourner’s Deliverer From Error:
Al-Ghazali’s Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Journey
of Epistemic Crisis 103
The Conceptualization of Rihla as a Sojourner’s Intercultural
Communicative Practice 104
The Question of Authority and the Induced Rihla 108
Contents vii
Al-Ghazali’s Rihla: Toward an Intercultural and Interdisciplinary
Sojourn 110
The A Priori Stage: An Epistemic Crisis 110
The Sojourner Stage: The Road of Interdisciplinary Trials and
Self-Refection 114
The Nostos Stage: The Cathartic Resolution 118
Conclusion 121
7 The Averroesian Deliberative Pedagogy of Intercultural
Education 126
Averroes’s Intellectual and Political Milieux 127
The Averroesian Curriculum: Aristotelian Thought
as the Locus Classicus of Culture 132
The Pedagogy of Deliberation 137
The Intermediacy Model: Toward an Intercultural
Deliberative Pedagogy 142
Concluding Thoughts 146
Concluding Thoughts and Implications 154
Defne a Book by Its Philosophers 154
The Philosophers’ Stones 155
A Dialogical Paradigm in Education 158
The Intercultural Context 161
A Civilization at Intercultural Cross-Roads 164
Muslim and Arab Readers: A Shared or Shattered Cultural
Memory 166
Index 170
PREFACE
Because my philosophical orientation began in the Middle East and continued
as I moved frst to North Africa and then to North America, I have begun as
a native, then became a foreigner, an international student, and an immigrant,
and have become a citizen. My rihla, or educational sojourn of inquiry, has
provided me with opportunities to learn, teach, meet people, appreciate mul-
tiethnic knowledge from diferent perspectives, and identify moments of inter-
cultural convergence among diferent traditions. Exploring more than one
intellectual tradition is a fascinating yet uncanny experience that does not simply
arise from sheer abstraction but entails interdisciplinary training, a bilingual
capacity, and numerous challenging, if not discomforting, encounters with those
diferent cultures. Therefore, the book is born out of my personal experience
traveling between cultures and between academic disciplines. I have spent a
good number of years wrestling with the question of what academic discipline
provides me with a vision that suits my interests. In Iraq, where my journey
started, I majored in English but then did a master’s degree at the College of
Education, which ofered a faint glimpse into a binary educational system. Then,
I did a master’s degree in Humanities at California State University, which
provided my frst interdisciplinary training as I took courses in philosophy, his-
tory, arts, American literature, and world literature. In hindsight, my former
academic years seem to be very experimental, leaving no academic stone
unturned. My interdisciplinary experience continued when I moved to Canada
and started teaching philosophy and social sciences courses in a high school in
Ontario. Although I fnished a third master’s degree in English literature at
Lakehead University, I found myself inquisitively taking nine courses in multi-
cultural education, English language arts, and curriculum theory at the University
of Alberta, where I stumbled on that sense of double consciousness that seemed
Preface ix
symptomatic of intercultural encounters among newcomers. It attracted the
immigrant in me into the dialectical world of the Black Atlantic and the strad-
dling of the uncomfortable line between religion and culture on the one hand,
and my newly acquired national identity on the other. Over the following years,
as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Calgary (funded by the Social Sci-
ences and Humanities Research Council of Canada) and then an adjunct professor
at the University of Alberta, I continued to study diasporic voices and inter-
cultural competence. This “pedagogy of discomfort” urged me to seek answers
that transcend cultural diferences and promote intercultural synthesis, a vision
that this book ardently chases, but one that I leave for the readers to decide if
it has ever successfully captured.
I view culture as a representation of a nation’s response to historical events,
its processes of intelligence, semantic legacy, and level of abstraction. It ceases
to be culture and becomes a cult or slips into tribalism when it limits itself to
individuals and becomes nonparticipating and cloistered. It develops into a
civilization when it successfully transcends its epistemological boundaries and
readily reconstructs itself into universal values. This civilization fades when it
loses the knowledge system that has sustained its existence. It loses substance
when its people internalize the notion that their tradition is still essential merely
and mainly as a repository of human wisdom that had remained a priori and
therefore detached from present-day realities. The book, therefore, asks how we
see Medieval Muslim philosophy as a guide to modern life. It considers the
benefts that a study of Medieval Muslim thought might ofer; if one could ask
a Medieval Muslim philosopher about a contemporary issue, they might still
have practical and compelling insights. Since much of their scholarship looks
quaint today, the purpose of this project is to look for ideas and arguments from
Medieval Muslim philosophers that would be useful to people’s lives nowadays.
The book demonstrates that Medieval Islamic thought still ofers commendable
suggestions for, and ways of, social integration in a world that is becoming
increasingly globalized and a system of education largely informed by secular
realities. This book proposes that what gives contemporary presence to the
Medieval Muslim thinkers discussed herein is not so much their contributions
to metaphysical thought as a shared disposition to develop dialogical ethics with
foreign thought. This book, therefore, argues that dialogical ethics underlies the
philosophical routes that Medieval Muslim thinkers took when two roads
diverged. It proposes a dialogical foundation that gives intercultural substance
to Islamic education and thereby undermines dogmatic thinking. The study
examines what constitutes a dialogical paradigm that bridges the great divide
between the Islamic tradition and modernity.
Little has been written about Medieval Islamic thinkers’ contributions to the
study of intercultural communication. This exploratory study refects on the
historical background and theoretical framework upon which I draw to address
this issue. I am not interested in their philosophical contents as much as in their
