Given the challenges Arabic and Islamic studies are facing in the increasingly culturally diverse contexts of contemporary societies, meaningful new methodologies and tools of research need to be explored. The Göttingen Database and Handbook of Classical Islamic Pedagogy is devoted to addressing some of these issues in a three-year research project conducted at the University of Göttingen, Germany.

The main objectives of the project are, in a first step, to identify, collect, and systematically analyze large amounts of data on Islamic educational theory and practice, drawn from a large variety of classical Arabic texts. This will facilitate, in a second step, to elucidate key principles and theories of classical Islamic education, reintroduce them into contemporary intellectual discourse and, thus, respond to the very real need to better understand the larger purposes and values that underlie and animate Islamic education on social, ethical, psychological and religious levels.

In order to document, administer, and examine the data on Islamic education extracted from the classical Arabic sources, a specific database was designed. This presentation discusses the underlying themes and theoretical premises of this database and handbook project, along with its structure and research opportunities within the context of digital humanities.

Author: Sebastian Günther (Univ. of Göttingen)