Dr. Miqdad Yelcin
School of Social Sciences, Imam Mohammad Bin Saud Islamic University-Riyadh

This type of work may look easy by title, and may pass as an achievement with minimum effort. But the fact remains that trying to identify books and published and unpublished papers, then listing them according to title or according to names of researchers in alphabetical order is a job that needs a lot of effort and that is also time censuring.

Among the difficulties is in fact that researches in this field have grown lately and are still increasing rapidly. By the time you finish cataloguing what is known to you, new papers and researches are written, and you have to start again.

Another difficulty is to obtain information from research centers and publishing houses abroad. There are many studies in the western world, in addition to those in the Muslim world.

Dr. Miqdad Yelcin
School of Social Sciences, Imam Mohammad Bin Saud Islamic University-Riyadh

In our preface, we outlined the importance of unveiling and building the Islamic education theory. Building or unveiling a theory in any field is rather important for researchers, since the theory would guide studies in a certain direction, and help in developing that certain discipline, while helping in explaining operations, procedures and steps of research. As a result, researchers could justify and defend whatever steps they have taken in accordance with the theory.

Building or unveiling a theory on Islamic education, whether from old sources of our heritage or from Quranic verses and the Prophet's hadith, is rather important.

It is not easy to build a theory or unveil it. This needs a specialized lengthy study of the theory's field. To be useful, the theory should be all rounded, and to finalize any theory would extend beyond a fixed period of time, hence, many theories need elaboration and/or amendment.