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Processing Theory in Islamic Thought

In "Processing Theory in Islamic Thought: A Comparative Analysis of al-Mawardi and Ibn Khaldun with Implications for Islamic Education," published in the November 2025 issue of Tadibia Islamika, Muhammad Farid Asysyauqi undertakes a sophisticated re-examination of medieval Islamic scholarship through the lens of modern cognitive psychology. The article moves beyond the traditional bifurcation of al-Mawardi as merely a jurist and Ibn Khaldun as solely a sociologist, positing instead that both scholars constructed intricate theories of information processing that prefigure contemporary educational psychology. By employing Optimal Matching Analysis (OMA) to dissect classical texts like Adab al-Dunya wa al-Din and al-Muqaddimah, Asysyauqi constructs a compelling narrative that bridges the gap between twelfth-century theology and twenty-first-century information processing theory.

The narrative begins with al-Mawardi, whose contribution is reframed from simple moral instruction to a complex theory of "Depth Level Processing". Asysyauqi argues that al-Mawardi’s renowned emphasis on adab (etiquette) and linguistic precision is actually a cognitive strategy for encoding information. In this view, the jurist anticipates modern psycholinguistics by asserting that language—specifically the articulation (faṣāḥah) and rhetoric (balāghah) of the speaker—serves as the primary filter for cognitive entry. The review elucidates how al-Mawardi distinguishes between surface-level processing (phonology and sound) and deep structural processing (semantics and meaning), aligning his medieval pedagogy with the Levels of Processing Theory found in modern psychology. Furthermore, the author highlights al-Mawardi’s prescription of mudhākarah (remembrance) and munāẓarah (disputation) not merely as scholarly habits, but as mechanisms of "maintenance rehearsal" and "elaborative rehearsal" necessary to move information from working memory into permanent knowledge.

In stark contrast to al-Mawardi’s linguistic "software," the article presents Ibn Khaldun as the architect of cognitive "hardware." Asysyauqi portrays Ibn Khaldun as a proto-neuroscientist who maps the physical geography of thought, offering a structural model that aligns with the modern dual-storage paradigm of memory. The narrative details Ibn Khaldun’s fascination with the anatomy of the brain, which he divides into three functional zones: the front brain for sensory registration (hiss al-mushtarak), the midbrain for executive processing (quwwat al-fikr), and the back brain for perception and long-term storage (al-hāfiẓah). Asysyauqi perceptively notes that Ibn Khaldun’s five-stage processing model is arguably more nuanced than some twentieth-century theories, such as those by Atkinson and Shiffrin, because it explicitly accounts for the translation of sensory data into "imagined" forms before they are processed intellectually. This section of the article compellingly argues that Ibn Khaldun viewed the learner not as a passive vessel, but as an active agent whose "power of thinking" serves as a biological imperative to construct meaning from sensory input.

Ultimately, the article succeeds in synthesizing these two distinct intellectual traditions into a cohesive history of Islamic educational theory. Asysyauqi concludes that while al-Mawardi focuses on the quality of the signal—ensuring clarity and semantic depth through language—Ibn Khaldun focuses on the mechanism of the receiver, detailing how the brain physically sorts and stores that signal. The result is a rich comparative study that validates the sophistication of classical Islamic thought, suggesting that the "modern" understanding of learning as a complex interplay of linguistic encoding and biological storage has deep roots in the intellectual heritage of the medieval Muslim world.

Article Title: Processing Theory in Islamic Thought: A Comparative Analysis of Al-Mawardi and Ibn Khaldun with Implications for Islamic Education Author: Muhammad Farid Asysyauqi Journal: Tadibia Islamika, Vol. 5, No. 2 (November 2025)


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