Prince Khalid Al-Faisal, Emir of Makkah region, inaugurated an international symposium on quality of higher education and accreditation hosted by Umm Al-Qura University in Makkah on Sunday. The symposium was organized in partnership with Islamic Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (ISESCO). Prince Khalid said the symposium was a good beginning to promote a quality education accompanied by developed and clear administrative and financial procedures. Islam urges its followers to do as perfect a job as possible when they are assigned one, he said. Islamic civilization emerged and sustained momentum based on thriving knowledge and outstanding performance of scholars, he said. It is time for the Islamic universities to pay more attention to quality than quantity to match the international standards of quality of higher education without losing their Islamic and cultural identities, he said. The symposium will continue for three days featuring seven sessions about total quality management in higher education, connection between Islamic foundations and international standards, and accreditation standards in the West and mechanism of continual improvement of quality education in Islamic universities. “The symposium will tackle the concept of quality and Islamic standards in Islamic universities,” said Adnan Bin Muhammad Wazzan, president of Umm Al-Qura University. The symposium comes amid increasing criticism of quality of higher education in the Kingdom. A study conducted recently revealed that Saudi universities were at the bottom of the list of international universities which provoked the anger of the Kingdom's higher education officials. They argued that the classification was neither academic nor satisfactory and the topic was an ongoing controversy. In part, the symposium will shed light on pressing issues in today's world to keep the integrity of Islamic ethics, practices, and values in the Islamic universities, Wazzan said. He said that the failure of Islamic university institutions in the third millennium to cope with the concurrent challenges has urged a total re-evaluation and shakeup of these academic institutions and their ability to reach international standards of quality education. With the existing academic expertise of Islamic universities across the world, he said there is a glimmer of hope that improvement of education in Islamic universities would come and more new disciplines in Islamic studies would emerge to an international level of study and research. Besides discussing academic disciplines, the symposium would also aim at improving administrative and financial procedures of universities through a total quality management system, said Abdulaziz Al-Tuwaijri, director of ISESCO. There is a plan of cooperation among Islamic universities to boost their quality education in consultation with international and Arab experts, he added.
