Restoring the Soul of Education: Maqāṣid al-Sharīʿah as a Compass, Not a Slogan

Something is amiss when education is measured only by numbers, buildings, accreditation, and stacks of administrative reports. These things matter, but they cannot answer the more fundamental questions: What kind of human being are we forming, and what kind of civilization are we building? These questions open Manajemen Pendidikan Berbasis Maqāṣid Syariah. The book invites readers to see education not merely as administration and institutional management, but as a sustained endeavor to uphold human dignity.

From its opening pages, the book presents maqāṣid al-sharīʿah not as a concept confined to lectures on Islamic jurisprudence, but as a way of understanding and organizing educational life. The authors invoke Imam al-Shāṭibī: “Indeed, the Sharia was revealed to bring about benefits and prevent harm.” This statement becomes the work’s central pulse. If the Sharia seeks to preserve human welfare, education should likewise be assessed by how well it safeguards religion, life, intellect, lineage, and wealth—not simply by how efficiently its institutional procedures operate.

The book’s boldest move is its effort to bring maqāṣid from the realm of normative principle into the space of concrete decisions. The authors do not stop at explaining al-ḍarūriyyāt al-khams; they connect these objectives to educational planning, organizing, implementation, supervision, and evaluation. Maqāṣid is presented as both a value foundation and a framework for assessing policy: does a decision genuinely protect human dignity, advance the common good, and prevent harm?

This proposition becomes especially relevant as the book examines the crises of modern education: identity, commercialization, moral disorientation, digital disruption, and artificial intelligence. At a time when education can easily become a service industry and students can be reduced to statistical figures, the book reminds us that progress is not always synonymous with humanity. Technology may advance and governance may become more sophisticated, but both lose their meaning when detached from ethical purpose.

One of the book’s strengths is its willingness to bring the Islamic intellectual heritage into conversation with contemporary management thought. Its discussion of al-Shāṭibī’s istiqrāʾ and Jasser Auda’s systems theory provides an epistemological foundation for the claim that maqāṣid is more than a moral slogan. It must be understood holistically, contextually, and with sensitivity to complexity. From there, the book turns to policy, governance, curriculum, human resources, finance, school culture, and leadership. In other words, maqāṣid is not left suspended in the realm of ideas; it is brought into meeting rooms, classrooms, and decision-making processes.

The authors’ own narrative reinforces this direction: “Education is not merely the transfer of knowledge, but a process of building human beings and civilization.” This is not a decorative opening statement. It is a thesis with consequences. If education truly forms human beings, institutional success cannot be measured solely through academic achievement or complete documentation. It must also be assessed through moral development, equitable access, healthy relationships, social responsibility, and students’ ability to use knowledge for the common good.

Here lies one of the book’s significant contributions: maqāṣid is positioned as a framework for examining the orientation of educational management, rather than as a value added after policy has already been formulated. The book offers a more fundamental set of questions to ask before a program is implemented: Whose welfare is this policy intended to serve? What forms of harm might it produce? Does it protect students’ intellect and dignity, or does it pressure them in the name of institutional targets? Such questions challenge the assumption that educational management is morally neutral.

Yet the breadth and ambition of the book also point toward further intellectual work. Its maqāṣid framework would become even stronger if each principle were translated into measurable indicators and evaluative mechanisms that could be tested. How, for instance, can an institution distinguish a policy that genuinely serves the common good from one that merely claims to do so? How should conflicts between efficiency, justice, and students’ needs be resolved? These questions do not diminish the book’s contribution. Rather, they show that its ideas deserve to be developed further—from a conceptual framework into an implementation model that can be tested across different educational contexts.

Ultimately, Manajemen Pendidikan Berbasis Maqāṣid Syariah reminds us that education loses its direction when it becomes preoccupied with its instruments and forgets its purpose. The book offers neither nostalgia for the past nor a rejection of modernity. Instead, it invites the Islamic intellectual tradition to engage with the challenges of the present while ensuring that progress remains oriented toward human flourishing.

This is an important book for educational leaders, teachers, students, and policymakers who wish to move beyond management as a technical exercise. What is at stake in education is not merely the success of an institution, but the future of human beings. As the book argues, meaningful education does not simply produce people who know; it forms people who are knowledgeable, ethical, and capable of advancing the common good.

The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Opinion Desk.