 The challenge facing the Ummah of providing an Islamic education to our young is both extremely important and extremely difficult. Knowledge is the foundation and basis of the religion of Islam. The knowledge revealed by God to mankind led ignorant and backwards Muslims to world leadership and created a civilization which enlightened the world for a thousand years. The importance of the knowledge which was gathered by the Islamic civilization has been hidden and suppressed and concealed in history, but it is actually the foundation for all knowledge known to mankind today. Islamic society was founded on certain principles which have been forgotten and lost. One of them is equality, all human beings are brothers and sisters, sons and daughters of Adam and Eve. The knowledge is at the heart of the civilization, ink of scholars is most precious than blood of martyrs. The state has responsibility to provide justice and a society is built on cooperation, generosity, social responsibility and trust. All of these ideas are unique to Islam and have been lost in modern societies. Societies replicate themselves by providing education to their young and for a thousand years this educational system produced scholars and saints and governors and scientists and all branches of knowledge. But in early 20th century colonization and conquest led to the dominance of Europeans with control of over 90% of the Islamic civilization. This process of colonization destroyed the indigenous Islamic educational systems and replaced them with western oriented ones which taught the superiority of the west and the inferiority of indigenous traditions. The process of colonization requires the colonizations of the minds, the ascent of the colonized to the rule by the colonizers. So this requires creation of a coconut class which is white on the inside and brown on the outside and this was deliberately and explicitly created by the educational process which was designed to create respect and awe and liberation for the western civilization and contempt and hatred for the heritage and the culture. After political independence the coconut class came into power and they continued the educational process which creates colonized minds. As a result the political independence did not lead to intellectual independence and the educational process continues to teach the Eurocentric worldview that humanity was in darkness and ignorance until the son of reason grows in Europe and all knowledge currently known to mankind is the product of the west and the west is the most advanced civilization in the planet and so on and so forth. There has been widespread recognition that western education teaches western superiority and we need to change this and create alternative educational model. The indigenous models were destroyed by the process of colonization and we need new ones to replace the modern western education currently being used in use all over the ummah. But how can we create such a model? The processes fought with difficulties. The general approach currently being taken all over the world is to combine western studies and Islamic studies. Two universities were launched on this premise. I was actually Director General of Islamic International Institute of Islamic Economics for more than 10 years and I personally witnessed the failure of this approach. Why does this process combining western education and Islamic education fail? Because the two sets of educational processes are radically different piecing them together integrating them requires some principle. One of them is to say that western education is about this world and the Islamic education is about the Akhara. But this division is not true to Islam which provides us with complete and perfect guidance in all spheres and does not admit of a sphere of knowledge which is not subject to Islamic teachings. So another way to integrate is to say that well Islam tells us to pursue knowledge from all over the world and so pursuing and acquiring western knowledge is part of obedience to Islamic teachings. This would be true except for the fact that western knowledge is dramatically in conflict with Islamic knowledge. So Islamic teaching cannot teach us to learn kufr, the worship of gold, the capitalist system and the political system of the non-Muslims. So the third approach says that I recognize as the toxicity of western knowledge as it is and says that what you need to do is extract the valuable and reject the poisons and this is potentially valid and this was the base of the educational process all over the world but practically this problem this is beset with huge problems. So what happens to students who study in parallel the western and the Islamic studies this I can say from experience. First we have to understand that this education is taking place within a society which is governed by a capitalist economic system and in the capitalist system things are valued and measured by money. So the purpose of education is to create human resources to teach students job skills which will enable them to make the maximum amount of money. So once the student comes into the university with this goal I have to get a degree and I have to make money in the market he is quickly sees that the Islamic studies will not help him to get the degree will not help him to get the job so they are just a useless waste of time. As a result the student ends up learning from an Islamic education that western knowledge is far superior to the intellectual heritage of Islam and that the Quran and Sunnah have no guidance to offer us in terms of getting degrees and getting jobs and making money and also they realize that western knowledge shapes our lives today to a minute to minute basis while Islamic knowledge plays almost no role in our modern lives. So the dilemma facing Islamic educators is that Islamic education should lead the student to understand that the knowledge given by God to mankind is superior to all possible knowledge which could be created by human beings. But how can we teach this when we see with our eyes that western knowledge shapes our lives from minute to minute and western social systems dominate the globe, the economics, the politics, the finance, the educational processes. Every dimension of our life is shaped by western ideas and so the student is forced to conclude that Islamic teachings are no longer revolutionary because if they had the possibility of launching an evolution then we Muslims would have launched this revolution, would have shaped society and shown the world a model of how to build a better world. Obviously Islamic teachings are not capable of doing this, are not capable of launching a revolution today like they did 14 centuries ago. So this is the challenge facing the Ummah today, how to demonstrate the superiority of the complete and perfect guidance from God to all human knowledge and it must be said that we are failing at this miserably and we do not have an answer at the moment although an answer can be devised. In order to create an answer to this challenge we have to first overcome a large number of obstacles, the first of these is an inferiority complex because we lost to the west so we think we are inferior and so the first thing we need to do is to emulate the west our conquerors to make progress. In creating this inferiority complex fabricated history which puts Europe at the center of the world and marginalizes all Islamic contributions is very important so we have to unlearn this history, we have to learn about how Europeans came to think in the ways that they do and we have to overcome the dazzle of western knowledge which blinds us and makes us unable to see the reality, the deep truth of Islamic teachings and their power. So how can we move forward? The central message of Islam is that human beings are infinitely precious, we cannot be bought and sold at the market so the idea that my life is for sale, for money in the labor market is false. Islam teaches us how to become human beings instead of human resources. Western education does not offer us guidance on how to develop the potential for excellence which we are all born with to become the west of the creations. So an Islamic education should not compete with the west on their grounds, it should compete on the grounds which west does not address, focus on building human beings and creating life skills. The methodology of how we might go about building an alternative is discussed in the Ghazali project. Ghazali faced the similar problem that Greek knowledge or Greek philosophy was considered by some Muslims to be superior to Islamic teachings and so he showed how to counter this toxic idea and some references given on this page show the details of lectures which outline how we might carry out the Ghazali project today. Our goal in this lecture was to articulate clearly the problem we face and not to provide the solutions which are actually quite complex, the solutions are discussed elsewhere. So let us end with prayer. Allahumma ar-Rina haqta haqtawwur zubnat taba'ahum wa ar-Rina ba'at al-laba'at al-murza taba'ahum. Subhanah rabbika rabbil-u'zid yamma yisafum. Wa salamun nul masaleen. Al-hamdu lillahi rabbil-u'alameen.