Purpose - A preliminary observation reveals that children of Islamic studies (IS) academicians do not choose IS as their career discipline. In view of this, this paper aims to explore the dimensions of parental attitudes, behaviours, perceptions and aspirations in seeing a future in IS for their children. Design/methodology/approach - Fifteen interviews were conducted to explore the attitude of IS academicians. Findings led us to hypothesize that perceived social recognition explains the maximum variance. Later, 126 academicians were surveyed. Findings - Results of regression analysis rejected the null hypothesis. The parental attitude of IS academicians, their engagement and perceived social recognition significantly predicted their aspiration in enrolling their children in IS. The regression model explained 64 per cent of total variance accounted for IS academicians' career aspirations for their children. This study suggests investigating the socio-cultural and geographical impact on the career aspirations of IS academicians for their children. Originality/value - The findings and results of the study can contribute to educational counselling to guide the counsellors. Further study on this issue may reveal whether IS academicians have plans to modify the curriculum or change their socio-economic status. It should also be examined whether they are doing so as a part of their implicit or explicit strategy.

Each classification of science propounded by al-Ghazali is generally based on a specific theoretical background. For religious science, which is relatively more focused in his discussion, he ascribed the entire discourse to a theory called "lubab al-Qur'an" (essence of the Qur'an). This particular theory was born in another concept he calls 'maqasid al-Qur'an' (objectives of the Qur'an) which is increasingly fashionable in contemporary Islamic scholarship. Despite this attention from scholars, the concerned discussion in previous literatures seems more interested in outlining the branches religious science that are enumerated by Al-Ghazali rather than in digging deep into the above-mentioned background theory. In this milieu, the existing gap of study provokes exploring this very theoretical basis and its implications. Hence, to explore various dimensions of this gap and to shed light on it, this research aims at exploring critically the conceptual background of al-Ghazali's classification of religious sciences. It is hoped that this study may lay a new direction for this emerging debate.

This study examines the framework of knowledge integration as propounded by al-Ghazali, one of the most celebrated Muslim scholars in history. Though there are a tremendous amount of studies on al-Ghazali's educational theory, they were focused primarily on epistemology, pedagogy and classification of knowledge. These writings indicate a theoretical gap in the literature regarding the ways and means of integrating between revealed and rational knowledge. Being qualitative in nature, this study adopts a content analysis method to explore al-Ghazali's view on this subject from three of his books where he has expounded his idea of integration of revealed and rational knowledge. It is expected that the result of this research would help to fill the existing lacuna in this field of study.