AlMaruf Organization for Islamic and human development in cooperation with the omokewu initiative on Saturday launched an educational project to solve the challenges facing students of traditional Arabic and Islamic schools in Kwara State and beyond at FOMWAN Hall Ilorin
Speaking to journalists, the founder of Almaruf Organization, Dr. Maarouf Raji Owoyemi, said that the main agenda in creating the project is the unification of Arab and Islamic schools. ‘some of my mentors see that Muslims are divided in curriculum, opinion, methodology, etc’
Our grandfathers who founded these schools have done their part in making people like us achieve a lot of things, we need to add and support their efforts so that we can raise the Islamic school to a higher level
The project is registered here in Nigeria and Malaysia, the aim of the initiative is not to solicit funds from people, we intend to contribute our share as part of the Community’s Social Responsibility. The CSR is to allocate 30% of our annual profits in our business to finance the educational project.
After Ramadan, we started visiting Islamic schools with diverse scholars in teaching and bringing innovations
Returning from abroad does not mean that we should break or destroy what our forefathers worked so hard to achieve, we are here to support the mission of our forefathers and make their schools more valuable and relevant
On his part, a member of Omokewu Initiative, renowned community development practitioner Dr. Muhammad Lawal Olohungbebe, said the organization has specific goals which are unity among Arabic schools to spread the message of Islam together instead of being competitors, added that the second goal is to ensure that Arabic and Islamic Knowledge is equipped in a way that can suit current and future challenges by ensuring that entrepreneurship is integrated into scholarships.
Speaking further, Dr. Olohungbebe said regarding the Ministry of Education, we have our activities and visits to ensure that they are also fundamental in this initiative and to see how we can cooperate with them to achieve collective growth and development
A member of the Al Maruf organization, Mallam Abdulhamid Yusuf said that the organization is trying to contribute its share to human development. ‘we are all aware that human development has many aspects and our organization will focus on educational and humanitarian aspects, our ancestors founded these traditional schools, they did it to serve some purposes when they were alive but now things have changed we have to make sure that the products of these schools are useful to the contemporary society.’
Dean of Students Affairs Kwara State University, (KWASU) and Chairman of Kwara State Arabic board, Prof Mahmud Jimba, implore proprietors of Arabic and Islamic schools to apply modern technologies into their curriculum and step up in their method of teaching.
Chief Imam of Kwara State University Malete, who was also the guest lecturer at the event, called on the need for governments at all levels to prioritize Arabic and Islamic schools without political interference.
Speaking on the challenges facing Arabic schools, he mentioned the curriculum, he said the curriculum comprises the syllabus, the teachers, classes, etc
The Objectives and Philosophy of Arabic and Islamic Schools, in this clime we don’t have a clear philosophy so there are no well-stated objectives in absence of these factors what do we expect the students of Arabic schools to be in future
While the proprietors and managers of Arabic and Islamics are doing their best the government needs to do its part by ensuring they deploy teachers of various subjects to Arabic schools so that by the time these student graduates, we will not doubt that we will have well-balanced graduands
