Values-Based Education as a Religious Imperative: Perspectives from the Shi’i Marjaʿiyya on Faith-Based Schooling

Abstract

This paper argues that the Twelver Shi’i tradition offers a constructive framework for values-based education built on three interlocking principles: the right of the child to a holistic education encompassing academic, pastoral, and spiritual dimensions; the duty of the parent to ensure that this education is delivered; and the collective obligation of the community to build, fund, and sustain the institutions that make it possible. Drawing on the foundational Risālat al-Ḥuqūq of Imam ʿAlī b. al-Ḥusayn, the philosophical framework of Murtaḍa Muṭahharī, and the formal rulings of Sayyid Abū al-Qāsim al-Khūʾī, Sayyid Muḥammad Saʿīd al-Ḥakīm, Imam Rūḥullāh al-Khumaynī, Sayyid ʿAlī al-Sīstānī, and Shaykh Nāṣir Makārim Shīrāzī, it articulates a positive vision of the educated young Muslim — not a defensive posture against Western schooling, but an aspirational account of what faith-based education is for.

1. The Child’s Right, the Parent’s Trust

The Shi’i tradition possesses a foundational text on the education of children that is remarkable for its clarity: the Risālat al-Ḥuqūq (Treatise on Rights) of Imam ʿAlī b. al-Ḥusayn Zayn al-ʿĀbidīn (d. 94/712). In his exposition of the right of the child (ḥaqq al-walad), the Imam articulates a tripartite parental duty:

وأما حقّ ولدك فأن تعلم أنّه منك… وأنّك مسؤول عمّا وليته من حسن الأدب والدّلالة على ربّه والمعونة له على طاعته… فمثاب على ذلك ومعاقب.

As for the right of your child: know that he is from you… You are responsible for what you have been charged with — good upbringing, guiding him to his Lord, and aiding him in obedience… You will be rewarded or punished for this.¹

Three obligations emerge. Ḥusn al-adab — good upbringing, cultivation of character — corresponds to pastoral care. Al-dalāla ʿalā rabbihi — guiding the child to his Lord — is the spiritual dimension. Al-maʿūna lahu ʿalā ṭāʿatihi — aiding the child in obedience — encompasses ethical and practical formation. Taken together, they describe what contemporary discourse calls values-based education: the formation of the whole person, not merely the intellect.

Crucially, the Imam frames this as a ḥaqq (a right the child holds against the parent) and a masʾūliyya (a responsibility for which the parent will answer). The language of reward and punishment leaves no ambiguity: the education of the child is a matter of salvific consequence.

2. The Philosophical Framework

The most sustained Shi’i philosophical treatment of education is that of Murtaḍa Muṭahharī (d. 1979), whose Taʿlīm wa Tarbiyat dar Islām opens with a structural argument: any worldview that makes claims about the nature of the human person, the purpose of life, and the good society necessarily entails a corresponding educational philosophy. Islam is such a worldview.² Muslims cannot coherently outsource the education of their children to institutions operating from different foundational commitments and expect the result to be an integrated Islamic personality. This is not a polemical claim. It applies equally to secular humanism, Catholic social teaching, or the classical liberal arts tradition. Any comprehensive value system requires an educational expression.

Muṭahharī makes a further distinction that elevates the argument. Drawing on Imam ʿAlī’s saying that knowledge is of two kinds — masmūʿ (received) and maṭbūʿ (innate) — he argues that the purpose of education is not to pour information into a passive vessel but to ignite the child’s innate capacity for reasoning.³ He offers a striking metaphor: the difference between pouring fire into a cold oven and placing kindling and lighting it so the oven burns from its own fuel. Values-based education is not indoctrination; it is the cultivation of a reasoning capacity oriented toward truth, beauty, and moral seriousness.

Muḥammad Taqī Falsafī (d. 1998) provides the complementary psychological argument. Moral-religious formation, he argues, is categorically different from academic instruction: “knowledge of good and evil, self-mastery, love of beauty, and faith in God… can only take place in a specially designed educational environment.”⁴ The claim is not that secular schools are malicious but that they are structurally insufficient for the task of holistic formation — the same claim that animates Catholic parochial schools, Jewish day schools, and every serious tradition of values-based education.

3. From Individual Duty to Collective Obligation

What happens when the individual parent, acting alone, cannot discharge the duty to provide a holistic education? The contemporary Shi’i marjaʿiyya has answered with unusual directness: the obligation then extends to the community. Building and supporting faith-based educational institutions becomes a collective religious duty.

3.1 Al-Khūʾī’s Foundational Ruling

The doctrinal foundation was laid by Sayyid Abū al-Qāsim al-Khūʾī (d. 1992) in Ṣirāṭ al-Najāt. Asked about Muslim girls in mixed schools, he responded:

لا بدّ من إعداد مدارس خاصّة بهنّ، ولو بالبناء وتحصيل الإجازة من الدولة وتهيئة الأساتذة… ولو كان ذلك ببذل المال الكثير. ولا بأس بصرف شيء من سهم الإمام عليه السلام في تحقيق هذا الأمر.

It is necessary to prepare schools especially for them — even by means of building them, obtaining a licence from the state, providing teachers… even at the cost of expending a great deal of money. And there is no objection to spending some of the share of the Imam (peace be upon him) for the realisation of this matter.⁵

Three elements are noteworthy. The ruling is framed as a necessity (lā budda min). The obligation extends to every dimension of institution-building: construction, licensing, staffing. And al-Khūʾī explicitly authorises sahm al-Imām — the largest pool of discretionary religious revenue in the Shi’i system — to fund the project when voluntary donations fall short.

3.2 Al-Ḥakīm’s Pastoral Call

The most sustained statement on the community’s obligation comes from the late Sayyid Muḥammad Saʿīd al-Ḥakīm (d. 2021), addressing diaspora Muslims directly in Murshid al-Mughtarib:

فالأمل بالمسلمين والمؤمنين عامّة… التعاون والتعاضد… وذلك بالسعي لإنشاء مدارس لهذا الجيل في تلك البلاد، تتكفّل مناهجها بتدريس أصول الدين وفروعه في أحكامه وأخلاقياته وسلوكياته… وذلك وإن احتاج في أوّل أمره إلى تضحيات مادّية لا يُستهان بها، إلّا أنّ المشكلة بأهميّتها وحجمها تستدعي مثل هذه التضحيات.

The hope is that Muslims and believers everywhere will cooperate and lend mutual support… by striving to establish schools for this generation in those lands, whose curricula will undertake to teach the principles and branches of the religion… And although this in its early stages requires material sacrifices that are not to be underestimated, the problem in its importance and magnitude calls for such sacrifices.⁶

3.3 Khumaynī’s Endorsement of a Diaspora School

In a letter from Najaf (c. 1973–74) to Sayyid ʿAbbās Mihrī, founder of the al-Madrasa al-Jaʿfariyya li-l-Banāt in Kuwait, Imam Khumaynī wrote:

والمرجوّ من أهالي الكويت المحترمين أن يساعدوا هذا المشروع الهامّ الديني معنويّا وماديّا وأن يجدّوا تمام الجدّ في نشر التعاليم الإسلامية القيّمة بين الشباب.

It is requested of the noble people of Kuwait that they assist this important religious project both spiritually and materially, and that they exert all their effort in spreading the precious Islamic teachings among the youth.⁷

This is the clearest marjaʿ precedent in the modern corpus for the direct endorsement and funding of a faith-based school in a non-Muslim-majority country.

3.4 The Contemporary Consensus

Sayyid al-Sīstānī treats the school question as a matter of parental juridical accountability: the guardian “bears full responsibility” for the educational environment chosen.⁸ Makārim Shīrāzī explicitly lists schools alongside mosques, ḥusayniyyāt, and hospitals as legitimate uses of sahm al-Imām, subject to the marjaʿ’s permission.⁹ Al-Fayyāḍ, in his Mabāḥith Uṣūliyya, names religious schools as the first example of obligatory public charitable projects.¹⁰ Across the current marjaʿiyya, the position is consistent: the establishment of faith-based schools is not optional — and the tradition provides both the mandate and the funding mechanisms.

4. The Vision of Success

The preceding argument establishes why the tradition mandates values-based education and who bears the obligation to provide it. But a vision grounded solely in obligation risks becoming defensive — animated by what it fears rather than what it loves. The deeper question is: what does success look like?

4.1 The Ignited Furnace

Muṭahharī’s metaphor is the key. The graduate of a successful Islamic school is not a warehouse of correct answers but an ignited furnace: a young person whose innate reasoning has been kindled, who thinks independently from a grounded worldview, whose faith is a living intellectual and spiritual commitment rather than an inherited habit. Success means a graduate who thinks as a Muslim, not one who has merely memorised Muslim texts. They are equipped to engage difficult questions — from a position of rootedness, not rootlessness.

4.2 The Beautiful Effect

The Imam al-Sajjād’s Risālat al-Ḥuqūq contains a phrase easy to overlook but profound: the parent should act “as one who adorns himself with the good effect he has on him” (al-mutazayyin bi-ḥusn atharihi ʿalayhi). The well-raised child is not a burden discharged but a beauty in which the parent — and the community — takes legitimate pride. Success is generative. A community that invests in its schools should expect to see the return not merely in preserved faith but in flourishing: young people who are confident, articulate, and joyful in their identity.

4.3 Rooted for Their Own Time

The ḥadīth cited by Imam Khumaynī in his address to the teachers of Madrasa-yi ʿAlavī — “Do not coerce your children to your customs, for they were created for a time other than yours”¹¹ — is a corrective against the nostalgic impulse that can afflict diaspora communities. The goal of a faith-based school in London or Toronto is not to produce a child who would have fitted seamlessly into Najaf in 1960 or Qum in 1975. It is to produce a child who fits confidently into their own city, their own century, their own professional and civic life — while carrying within them a living connection to the Qur’an, to the Ahl al-Bayt, to the ethical and spiritual vocabulary of their tradition. Rootedness and contemporaneity are complementary, not opposed.

4.4 The Complete Human Being

The holistic curriculum outlined in the ḥadīth tradition — tawḥīd, love of the Prophet and his family, prayer, Qur’anic literacy, writing, health, moral proverbs, beneficial poetry, swimming, archery¹² — paints a portrait of the educated person that is strikingly expansive. This is not a pious recluse or a narrow specialist but a complete human being: theologically literate, devotionally committed, physically capable, aesthetically sensitive, and practically competent. The tradition’s vision is closer to the classical ideal of liberal education than to any caricature of religious schooling as narrow catechesis.

4.5 Transmitters, Not Merely Receivers

Finally, the Risālat al-Ḥuqūq’s teacher-student passage contains an implicit measure of success. The student, the Imam says, becomes “his messenger to those you encounter among the ignorant” — a transmitter, not merely a receiver.¹³ For a diaspora community, this is the ultimate marker: a generation that does not simply retain its faith but articulates it — to peers, to colleagues, to its own children in turn. The school succeeds when its graduates have internalised its values and can carry them forward independently. This is Muṭahharī’s furnace burning from its own fuel: a self-sustaining flame.

5. Practical Implications

If the tradition’s vision of success is clear, the community’s task is to build the infrastructure that can deliver it. Four concrete areas demand attention:

Institution-building. Al-Khūʾī’s ruling extends the obligation to every stage of development — construction, licensing, staffing, “whatever else this requires.”¹⁴ This includes physical schools, but also supplementary programmes, weekend schools, online platforms, and hybrid models. The obligation is to the educational outcome, not to any specific institutional form.

Teacher formation. The Risālat al-Ḥuqūq frames the teacher as bearer of a sacred trust. The person charged with the religious and moral formation of children must possess not only academic competence but also personal integrity and a sense of vocation. This calls for structured teacher-training programmes integrating pedagogical skill with religious literacy and pastoral sensitivity.

Curriculum development. The holistic ḥadīth curriculum is not a “religious studies” syllabus appended to a secular timetable; it is an integrated philosophy in which theological literacy, devotional practice, ethical reasoning, literary cultivation, and physical formation are dimensions of a single project. The challenge is to translate this vision into modern curricula that meet national academic standards while honouring the tradition’s aspirations.

Funding. The tradition provides its own means. Sahm al-Imām is explicitly authorised by al-Khūʾī and Makārim Shīrāzī for school construction.¹⁵ Waqf endowments are treated by al-Sīstānī as the paradigmatic form of institutional philanthropy.¹⁶ And al-Ḥakīm’s call for “cooperation and mutual support” envisages a collaborative community effort that may, over time, become self-sustaining.¹⁷

6. Conclusion: From Obligation to Aspiration

The tradition’s deepest contribution to the conversation about faith-based education is not the obligation it imposes but the vision it offers.

That vision is of a young person who is Muṭahharī’s ignited furnace — thinking independently from a grounded worldview. A young person who is the Imam al-Sajjād’s ḥusn al-athar — the beautiful effect in which the community takes legitimate pride. A young person who is rooted in their tradition but equipped for their own time — who navigates the modern world with confidence and contributes to their society as an engaged citizen whose faith is a source of strength, not a mark of separateness. A young person who can read the Qur’an and write a compelling essay, who understands tawḥīd and can swim, who loves the Ahl al-Bayt and appreciates poetry, who prays with sincerity and engages with the intellectual challenges of their age. And a young person who does not merely retain what they have received but transmits it — carrying a living tradition forward.

This is not a vision of retreat. It is a vision of formation — the formation of human beings who are academically excellent, morally serious, and spiritually alive. The three dimensions are not competitors for curricular time, nor optional supplements to “real” education, but constitutive elements of what it means to educate a child well.

The practical demands are real: schools must be built, teachers formed, curricula developed, funds raised. The tradition provides both mandate and means. What it asks of the community is the will — and the confidence that the investment is worth making.

The Imam al-Sajjād’s words are both summons and promise: the child is from you and attributed to you. You are responsible. But the tradition does not leave the parent — or the community — alone with the weight of that responsibility. It offers a vision of what the child can become, and calls that vision beautiful.

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