Assuring Quality Outcomes: Best Practices For Higher Education In Islamic Countries

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the appropriateness of using imported quality standards to assess the quality of education in an Islamic context and whether the resulting education contributes to the achievement of national goals. Using dialectical inquiry and fitness of purpose analysis, this paper compares the purposes and outcomes of education as defined by Western and Islamic standards and suggests quality benchmarking considerations that ensure the sustainability and integrity of education in Muslim countries. The central argument is that overall, the imported quality frameworks do not prevent the implementation of Islamically-based educational systems, but the quality rhetoric needs to be interpreted and applied in an Islamic manner. Suggested best practices include implementing mutual consultation, mastering core concepts, and ensuring that the professors understand the context of Islam. These Islamically-based best practices represent easily accessible and customizable benchmarking guides for universities in the Islamic world that concerned practitioners can adopt when constructing or modifying home grown and foreign institutions of higher education.