In an interview with FMT, Professor Mohamad Tajuddin Mohamad Rasdi of UCSI University said teachers in Islamic education were not trained to keep up with the times and remained narrow minded.

“The idea of ‘me and the other’ is given too much emphasis,” he said. “Graduates do not understand the idea of differences being the essential ingredient of a meaningful wholeness of life,” he said.

He said Malaysia could continue to be at a middle ground only if it re-addressed these issues by looking into the new universal spirituality, emphasising the values of the Quran and the values of universal brotherhood taught by the Prophet, promoting education in pre-Islamic civilisations and the influence of the cultures from these civilisations, and acknowledging the weaknesses of education caused by religious institutions.

Much of today’s madrasah education around the world, he claimed, were handled by teachers with a limited understanding of the contemporary world.

“The madrasah curriculum has been handed down from generation to generation across time, oceans and land mass by books written by scholars who thought in the contexts of homogeneous socio-political cultures,” he said.

“The premise may not be relevant for a modern and metropolitan nation-state political environment.

“Islam is eternal but the interpretation of scholars is not eternal and subject to failings in experiencing different technologies, sciences, economic systems and political structures.”

Muslims therefore needed to be exposed to other civilisations, now more than ever, he added.

He said Muslims in Malaysia needed to know of possible political influences on religion. For instance, he said, the Roman Emperor Constantine and the Council of Nicea framed Christianity in a certain manner and may have acted with both political and spiritual intentions.

Also, according to him, the wars of the Crusades may in all probability have been political and not religious, perhaps on both sides.

“The Sunni-Shia split was maybe political or tribal. The Palestinian issue is political but possibly made into a religious one. The Iran-Iraq war may have been a superpower play, not a religious clash.”

To understand all this, he said, people should first understand the fallibility of religious institutions.

According to Tajuddin, religious messages would typically start losing their purity when the disciples of the originator begin to interpret and teach, creating schools of thought and jurisprudence.

“When the political authority begins to adopt one school of thought, a religious institution is born. Or when a school becomes powerful and big, it becomes an institution of its own.

“This limits the scope for a religion because those who govern are men who have desires, vanity and greed. Religious institutions can be used by a political authority to justify actions that are un-Islamic.”

That is why, he said, university students must be taught that institutions can be followed when they are good and ignored when they have turned bad.

“Students must be taught that religious institutions are created by man, but religion is created by God. So an institution can be changed and improved.

“There must exist checks and balances on religious institutions.

“Students must know that being at one with all creation is the beginning of the journey to Allah. This way, we can stop the tide of extremism.”