Rationalism vs. textualism: a comparative analysis of Islamic pedagogical approaches in Iran and Saudi Arabia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Cultivating rational thinking, rather than solely adhering to the text of Islam, can be a different crucial approach to Islamic pedagogy. We can find some of these differences in the post-Prophetic period when influential figures shaped differing interpretations of Islamic thought. This paper examines two major Islamic theological perspectives regarding the role of rational, logic, and interpretation in understanding sacred texts. The Ahl al-Hadith and Ash’ari school emphasises strict adherence to textual sources, often rejecting interpretative approaches, in contrast to the Ahl al-Ra’y and Mu’tazila schools, which give precedence to reason and interpretation. These divergent views have significantly influenced contemporary Islamic education, leading to notable differences in the method of curricula of Islamic studies. This paper explores how these perspectives shape the content of Grades 1 to 6 of Islamic studies textbooks in Iran and Saudi Arabia, focusing on their impact on developing logic, reasoning, and interpretive skills among students at this crucial stage of intellectual growth.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".