Abstract

Modernity, with its attendant processes of secularization and rationalization, has posed a profound challenge to traditional worldviews. Within the Muslim world, this has manifested as a crisis of knowledge, identity, and leadership. This paper examines the comprehensive educational philosophy of Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas as a systematic response to this predicament. It argues that al-Attas identifies the core malady not in political or economic terms, but as an epistemological and spiritual crisis rooted in the "loss of adab”—the loss of the capacity to recognize and acknowledge the proper place of things in the order of reality. The paper is structured in three parts. First, we delineate the foundations of al-Attas's educational philosophy, beginning with its ontological bedrock in the Islamic (tawhidic) worldview, its epistemological sources in the Qur’an and Sunnah, and its central operative concept of education as ta’dīb. This section elucidates his hierarchical classification of knowledge and defines the ultimate aim of education as the cultivation of the "Good Man" (man of adab). Second, we analyzed the challenge posed by the Western educational paradigm, critiquing its secular, utilitarian, and state-centered objectives, which foster a dualistic worldview that leads to the erosion of truth and a profound identity crisis. It frames the "loss of adab" as the central cause of intellectual anarchy and the rise of unqualified leadership within the Muslim ummah. Finally, we present the al-Attas’s solution, a project of "de-westernization" and "Islamization of knowledge." This involves a critical purification of modern sciences from their secular ideological underpinnings and their reconstitution within an Islamic metaphysical framework. The paper concludes that through the implementation of an educational system founded on ta’dīb, al-Attas provides a robust and integrated methodology to restore adab, break the cycle of civilizational decline, and form the complete individual capable of navigating the complexities of the modern world with spiritual and intellectual integrity.