Pre-modern Islamic scholars trained across fields rather than within single disciplines

Evidence

Unlike modern education, where “expertise” tends to segregate fields of specialization (resulting, in late modernity, in the pervasive call for interdisciplinarity), Islamic learning was generally constituted by cross-fertilization through what may be called dialectical traditions. Whereas a modern historian typically studies and writes about history, and may perform a scholarly incursion into another subject when her field intersects with that subject, a typical Muslim historian normally undertook his basic and main training in other fields, nowadays considered outside of history. Thus, a Muslim historian was usually at once an expert, or at least proficiently educated, in Quran, hadith, history, adab, “law,” biographical sciences, and, not unusually, theology, Sufism, and mathematics. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 146

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the notion of Islamic learning as ‘predisciplinary’ and dialectical rather than specialized.
• XREF: Connects to themes in other scholarly work on the guild/latifundia structure of classical Islamic education systems.