Medieval Islamic Philosophers Offered a Radical Vision of Physical Education

A new study published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications argues that the intellectual roots of a genuinely holistic physical education may lie far earlier than modern curriculum theory, in the writings of classical Islamic philosophers who treated the training of the body as inseparable from the cultivation of the soul. The research, conducted by Refat Asaad Fathy Hodwa Eid and Zhao Zi jian of the School of Kinesiology and Physical Education at Zhengzhou University in China, reconstructs a coherent philosophical framework for bodily cultivation from texts written nearly a thousand years before the term physical education entered academic vocabulary. The work is theoretical rather than empirical, but its implications reach directly into contemporary debates about what physical education is for.

The starting point of the study is a striking gap in the literature. Physical education, as an academic discipline, has rarely been examined through the lens of classical Islamic philosophy. Muslim philosophers did not develop physical education as a separate institutional field, and the authors are explicit about this limitation. What they did instead, the study shows, was discuss bodily cultivation within broader accounts of ethics, medicine, and human development. The task the researchers set themselves was therefore reconstructive: to read across a body of classical Arabic texts and identify the recurring concepts through which these thinkers understood the body, health, moral formation, and education, and then to test whether those concepts speak to present-day discussions in physical education and educational philosophy.

The methodological approach is qualitative conceptual analysis combined with textual interpretation. The researchers worked from primary Arabic sources and established scholarly translations, focusing on six major figures of the classical Islamic philosophical tradition: Ibn Sina, known in the Latin West as Avicenna; Al-Razi, the physician-philosopher Rhazes; Al-Farabi; Al-Kindi; Ibn Miskawayh; and Nasir al-Din Al-Tusi. These thinkers span several centuries and distinct intellectual projects, from medical encyclopedism to political philosophy and ethical treatises, yet the analysis found that certain concepts recur across their writings with remarkable consistency, forming what the authors describe as an integrative framework rather than a scattered set of opinions.

Two concepts emerge as central to that framework. The first is Iʿtidāl, a term carrying the sense of balance and moderation. In the classical texts examined, the well-ordered life, whether understood physiologically or ethically, is one organized around measure and equilibrium. Excess and deficiency are treated as the twin sources of disorder, a view that applies as much to the humors of the body and the regimen of exercise and rest as it does to the passions of the soul. Physical activity, in this reading, is not valued for its own sake or purely for performance, but as a means of maintaining the equilibrium on which both health and moral stability depend. The body that is neither neglected nor indulged becomes a precondition for the disciplined self.

The second organizing concept is Takāmul, meaning integration or wholeness. Where Iʿtidāl governs the internal regulation of the person, Takāmul describes the way the dimensions of human development fit together. Across the texts studied, physical cultivation is never treated as an isolated track running parallel to intellectual and moral education. Instead, the training of the body is embedded within a unified account of human formation, in which health serves character, character serves reason, and the whole person moves toward completion. This is the horizon against which the study’s title concept appears: al-Insān al-Kāmil, the complete or perfected human being, an ideal of full human realization that classical Islamic philosophy placed at the summit of education in the broadest sense.

Read through this framework, the classical sources connect physical activity to outcomes that modern readers might not immediately expect. The analysis finds that bodily exercise is linked not only to health but also to character formation, self-discipline, and social responsibility. A person who has learned to govern the body has, on this view, practiced a form of self-governance that extends outward to ethical conduct and to obligations toward others. Physical education, reconstructed from these texts, is thus a moral enterprise as much as a physiological one, and the gymnasium of the ideal city is, implicitly, a workshop of citizenship. The researchers emphasize that this connection is philosophical rather than institutional: the classical authors offered no curriculum, no schools of sport, and no theory of physical education as a discrete field, but they supplied the conceptual architecture from which such a theory can be assembled.

The study then performs a careful comparison between this reconstructed framework and contemporary ideas in physical education and educational philosophy. The resonances are substantial. The modern concept of physical literacy, which frames movement competence as a foundational capacity developed across the lifespan, echoes the classical insistence that bodily cultivation is a lifelong component of human flourishing. Holistic education, with its critique of narrow cognitive schooling and its call to educate the whole child, finds an unexpectedly deep ancestor in the Takāmul-oriented account of the integrated person. Values-based learning, which seeks to embed ethical formation within practical activity rather than deliver it as separate instruction, parallels the classical treatment of exercise as a site where self-discipline and responsibility are forged. The authors are careful, however, to note that these parallels should not be overstated: the contemporary ideas and the classical framework rest on different philosophical foundations, and mapping one onto the other without attention to those differences would distort both.

This attention to difference is one of the study’s methodological strengths. Rather than presenting the classical tradition as a proto-modern anticipation, the researchers treat it as an independent theoretical resource with its own internal logic. The framework they reconstruct does not need to justify physical education by appeal to measurable health outcomes, national fitness, or economic productivity, the justifications that dominate much modern policy discourse. Instead, it grounds bodily cultivation in an account of what a complete human being is, and in the claim that a person out of physical balance is a person whose ethical and intellectual development is compromised. That grounding offers contemporary educators a different kind of argument for physical education, one that may prove persuasive precisely where instrumental arguments have grown stale.

The practical significance of the work is likely to be greatest in culturally diverse and Muslim-majority educational contexts, where curricula imported from other traditions can sit awkwardly with local intellectual heritage. By demonstrating that classical Islamic philosophy contains a rich, internally coherent account of bodily cultivation tied to ethics and human development, the study provides scholars and curriculum designers with an indigenous theoretical vocabulary for physical education. The authors position their findings as a basis for future research rather than a finished program: the framework identifies concepts that may broaden current discussions about the aims of physical education, and invites empirical and comparative work that tests how these ideas can inform teaching, teacher education, and policy. The study also carries a candid caveat, repeated in its abstract, that it reconstructs a framework from texts in which physical practice was embedded within broader accounts of ethics, medicine, and human formation, and that no classical theory of physical education as a discrete institutional field existed to be recovered.

As a piece of scholarship, the study exemplifies a growing movement to mine non-Western philosophical traditions for resources that can reorient contemporary educational thought. Its contribution is deliberately modest in form and ambitious in scope: no new data, no experiments, only a close conceptual reading of six classical thinkers, yielding two organizing principles and a set of documented comparisons with the present. Yet the payoff is considerable. If the aims of physical education are currently contested, oscillating between fitness metrics, sporting excellence, and vague appeals to wellbeing, the classical Islamic framework suggests that the deepest question is not how much exercise children need, but what kind of person bodily cultivation is meant to produce. In answering that question with the paired ideals of balance and wholeness, philosophers writing in Arabic centuries ago may have left contemporary physical education one of its most complete blueprints, waiting patiently in the library for someone to read it again.

Subject of Research: Physical education and human development in classical Islamic philosophy

Article Title: Physical education and the formation of al-Insān al-Kāmil: integrative frameworks in classical islamic philosophical thought

Article References: Physical education and the formation of al-Insān al-Kāmil: integrative frameworks in classical islamic philosophical thought. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41599-026-09435-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41599-026-09435-7

Keywords: physical education, Islamic philosophy, al-Insān al-Kāmil, Ibn Sina, Al-Farabi, Iʿtidāl, Takāmul, physical literacy, holistic education, character formation, ethics, history of ideas