New Directions in Islamic Education

Pedagogy and Identity Formation

Abdullah Sahin

• Publisher: Kube Publishing Ltd
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781847740649
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildungstheorie & -praxis

"This ground-breaking book is one of the most significant contributions made in recent years to Islamic education."—John M. Hull, University of Birmingham, United Kingdom

New Directions in Islamic Education is a radical rethinking of Islamic education in the modern world. It explores the relationship between pedagogy and the formation of religious identities within Islamic education settings that are based in minority and majority Muslim contexts.

Abdullah Sahin, PhD, directs the Centre for Muslim Educational Thought and Practice and is the course leader for the MEd program in Islamic education at MIHE in Leicestershire, United Kingdom.

PART I

CONTEXT AND METHODOLOGICAL ORIENTATIONS

1

BRITISH MUSLIM YOUTH

Between Secular Exclusion and Religious Extremism

MY INITIAL RESEARCH explored the religious life-world of British Muslim youth by investigating attitudes towards Islam and modes of religious subjectivity among a selected group of British Muslim adolescents. Originally (see Appendix 1), the instruments for data collection were put together under the broad title ‘You and Your Faith’, which constituted the content for the Muslim Subjectivity Interview Schedule (MSIS). I sought to understand the relationship between attitudes towards Islam and types of Islamic identity among young British Muslims. The study explored the roles of gender, age, and religious behaviours in the formation of attitudes to Islam and the degree of intergenerational difference in the conception of Muslim faith. On the basis of this research and further study in Kuwait (see Chapter Six), I have rethought the theological and pedagogical assumptions underpinning the Islamic Education of young British Muslims.

My first study sample included a selected group of British-born and educated young Muslims in the mainstream sixth form colleges in the multicultural metropolitan city of Birmingham.

I empirically explored the following questions:

Against the background of a secular multicultural context and religiously-informed traditional home cultures, how do Muslim young people construe their sense of identity and religious belonging? Do they appropriate Islam in their lives? What is the nature of their attitudes towards Islam and the character of their Islamic subjectivity? Is there an intergenerational difference or conflict in the faith perceptions of the British Muslim community? What is the degree of personal construction of faith among Muslim young people, and how do they relate to the values of their community and the values of society at large? How do Muslim youths’ religiosity and religious orientations influence the ways in which they construe the processes of learning within traditional Islamic educational settings, as well as within the broader educational system?

I have employed the following key theoretical constructs: attitudes towards Islam and modes of Islamic subjectivity. These are based on the main components of Islamic faith; their operational definitions employ methods and procedures offered by the traditional empirical research measures of attitudes towards religion and understanding identity development among adolescents. My data collection and analysis were carried out using both qualitative and quantitative research strategies. The research design was contextualised within a post-foundational, phenomenological approach to investigating the character of participants’ religious life-world. As will be explained, this means using two interrelated levels of phenomenological analysis: the constitutive and static; and the genetic and generative. The constitutive and static phenomenological analysis was undertaken through the implementation of a large-scale attitude survey, while exploration of religious subjectivity constituted the core of genetic and generative level phenomenological analysis.

Participants’ attitudes towards Islam were measured by the 25-item Likert Scale (Likert, 1932) (see Appendix 1) which was modelled upon the well-known Francis Scale of ‘Attitude toward Christianity’ published first in 1978. The scale of ‘Attitude toward Islam’ included both negative and positive statements concerned with an affective response among Muslim young people to four central components of Islamic faith recognised by the participants and traditionally known as iʿtiqād (belief), ʿibādāt (worship), muʿāmalāt (social relationships) and akhlāq (ethics). Each item is assessed on a five-point scale (where ‘one’ is ‘strongly agree’ and ‘five’ is ‘disagree strongly’). Age, gender, and frequency of performing prayer were the independent factors of the scale. The scale was later published separately as the ‘Sahin–Francis Scale of Attitudes towards Islam’ (Sahin and Francis, 2002; Sahin, 2005) and has been applied in a majority Muslim context (Francis et al, 2006, 2008) and widely used by diverse groups of international researchers (Johnstone and Tiliopoulos, 2008; Khan and Watson, 2006).

The scale was administered to a selected group of 383 Muslim students (219 male, 164 female) in three sixth-form colleges in Birmingham. Statistical analysis of the data supported the unidimensionality, internal consistency, reliability and construct validity of the instrument. Participants’ modes of religious subjectivity were investigated through a semi-structured ‘Muslim Subjectivity Interview Schedule’ (MSIS) appropriated from the adolescent identity research model (Identity Status Interview) developed by psychologist James Marcia (1993). This model is in turn based on Erik H. Erikson’s theoretical framework of identity development in the human life cycle. MSIS is used as the main qualitative research strategy to explore participants’ patterns and processes of religious subjectivity. The experiences of exploration and commitment by the participants in the religious domains of their life-worlds are the key theoretical properties that determine the modes of religious subjectivity as revealed by the MSIS.

The above identity model constitutes a nominal typology; each mode is uniquely defined by a combination of placements on the dimensions of exploration and commitment. A mode is defined within a flexible framework that does not possess strictly-defined qualities associated with the idea of structure. Thus, the research provides a post-structural and phenomenological critique of the most widely used structural–developmental research frameworks in the study of religiosity and faith development. Although each mode possesses a relative independence, it does not fall into a simple developmental sequence. Rather, a clearly articulated self-presence is found among both ‘foreclosed’ and ‘achieved’ modes of religious subjectivity. The processes by which each mode is organised, produced and articulated are different.

MSIS included completion of a self-characterisation sketch appropriated from Kelly’s Personal Construct Psychology (Kelly, 1957). A selected group of 15 students (six female and nine male) completed the MSIS. The ethnographic data generated by MSIS was analysed using J. Marcia’s original scoring manual and other strategies offered in qualitative research paradigms in social sciences. Exploration of the processes and patterns that underpin discernment of religiously-based core values in multicultural, secular society constituted one of the central themes of the research. The other main aim of the study, in the light of the empirical findings of the research, was to rethink the Islamic education of young Muslims in Britain.

Dynamics Informing the Sense of Identity in the British Muslim Diaspora

The economic needs of post-War Europe and the harsh socio-economic and political conditions of the post-colonial reality in the Muslim world have resulted in a permanent Muslim presence in modern Europe and the West. However, even within the explicitly multicultural, official social policies of countries like Britain, the overriding liberal secular expectation was that Muslims would gradually absorb the values of the wider society. The events of 9/11 and the 7/7 bombings in London have changed the scene so dramatically that the issue has begun to be framed as the ‘new Muslim question of Europe’. This question, in some quarters, is now perceived to threaten the very existence of Western secular democracies, and has been used to justify a security-centred response within a strategy of long-term containment.

Within the context of this overwhelming interest in the European Muslim communities, their faith and religious identities are still largely explored through a mix of social science disciplines, including political, sociological and anthropological discourses, which discuss faith in an indirect fashion, by proxy. Thus, there have only been a few serious attempts to explore Muslim religiosity directly and the issues concerning the development of Muslim faith as these community elements gradually become embodied and articulated within the fluctuating and challenging conditions of modern Europe. Given that there are well-developed, empirical, interdisciplinary research strategies within the psychology and sociology of religion that have examined Judeo-Christian religiosity in Europe and the wider Western world (e.g. Allport, 1967; Fowler, 1981; Oser and Gmunder, 1991; Spilka et al, 1984), it is unfortunate that their equivalents have yet to be properly developed with respect to Muslim religiosities.

The study does not aim to replicate the research design of Judeo-Christian studies, but to treat them as resources for both Muslim and non-Muslim researchers in order to come up with more meaningful and effective ways of studying Muslim religiosity and the individual and social experience of Muslim faith within its complex theological, cultural and political realities. The existing plethora of studies on religious radicalisation and extremism within Muslim communities are almost exclusively produced by experts in political science, cultural studies, sociology and anthropology. These studies appear to be guiding official attempts to produce de-radicalisation strategies and prevent religious extremism. There are only a handful of studies that examine extremist religiosity within the research perspectives of psychology and social psychology, and there is almost a complete absence of contributions from educators to develop models for the prevention of extremism. It is important to note that although the Muslim tradition contains ample resources to differentiate between an unhealthy extremist and a mature religiosity, contemporary Muslim theological reflection does not appear to venture beyond the confines of popular preaching and occasional legal pronouncements on the topic.

It is significant to note that the two comprehensive literature reviews (Bacal, 1991; Foner, 2000) of the social scientific research on ethnicity and the process of cultural change in the lives of migrant communities conducted before 9/11 do not include a single entry on religion and its possible impact upon on the construction of ethnic identity. Generally speaking, in the ethnicity–race paradigm, religion is taken to be an element of cultural identity that does not possess an autonomous function in the lives of minority groups. Religion is taken to be a contributing factor to the construction of boundaries of difference in some minority communities, but its role in ordering the overall structuring of identity has not been explored.

After 9/11, empirical social science research underwent a significant shift to include faith as a structural dynamic alongside the study of the process of migration, settlement and the constructs of race, ethnicity and gender. It is unfortunate that controversial topics like terrorism, extremism, radicalisation and militant Islamism have become over-researched areas of social scientific investigation to the detriment of wider research questions.

However, studies conducted to investigate Muslim communities’ migration and settlement processes and the interaction of these communities with wider society tend to be historical or ethnographic in nature. The Muslim communities’ economic profiles (i.e. their working conditions, initiatives in setting up private business etc.), together with their attitudes towards politics and educational issues, have been subjected to several ethnographic studies. Social psychologists and linguists have also explored the consequences of bilingualism, acculturation and patterns of child-rearing for the overall personal, social and educational development of second and third generations of Muslim communities. The great majority of these studies employ a race or ethnicity-centred research framework to address different aspects of the Muslim community in Britain. As a result, the core of Muslim identity – religion – is only given consideration by social scientists as an element of ethnicity. Academic disciplines considering the psychology and sociology of religion also have largely neglected the religious experiences of the British Muslim community.

Following the reaction of Muslim communities to events such as the Rushdie Affair, social science researchers began to recognise the religious dimension of the communities. But this awareness does not seem to have initiated a serious research interest in exploring the religious life-world of Muslim communities. The 1990s witnessed the emergence of a new concept: the discourse of ‘Islamo-phobia’, which rightly alerted the general secular public to the everyday reality of prejudice against Muslims. Although the discourse of Islamophobia created a much-needed awareness of the importance of religion in Muslim communities, it has remained a discourse largely aimed at criticising the prejudice of others. Hence, it diverted the focus of research from investigating how the religion of Islam is being experienced to how it is used as a coercive force in moulding the personalities of its adherents and ordering their subjectivity in a diverse society. The changing self-perception of the community and its response to the challenges of modern life have remained, with the exception of a few general studies, entirely unexplored (Sahin, 2010c).

There are complex reasons for this negligence among researchers to consider the reality of the Muslim context. The still-influential secular bias in the social sciences in general and Muslims’ lack of appreciation for the importance of empirically studying their understanding of Islam are the two main factors contributing to this negligence. This insufficient attention to investigating the role of religion within the cultural economy of the Muslim community has lead the researchers who monitor minority–majority social interaction to assume that Muslims will be gradually assimilated into the secular cultures of their countries of residence. According to this naïve expectation of gradual secularisation, the emergence of British-born and educated members of Muslim communities will cause a decline in religious identification and observance within the community. It has been suggested that, despite some recent evangelical and neo-orthodox revival, Christianity and Judaism have largely become domesticated into a wider secular social polity (Brown, 2009; Rex, 1991; Taylor, 1976). However, the reality of Islam as an international force clashing with the interests of the West (the acute problematic situation in the Middle East), the consequences of the establishment of the modern Islamic state in Iran in 1979 and new developments in international politics after 9/11 have exerted a continuous influence upon the maintenance of a global Islamic identity among the diverse Muslim communities in Britain. In other words, even if we assume that upward social mobility and inevitable acculturation in the lives of third and fourth generations of British Muslims will produce a decrease in their religious practices, it is unrealistic to underestimate the continuing impact of international Islam upon the self-understanding of many Muslims in Britain. In addition, the strong social charter of the Islamic faith is itself one of the major dynamics of resistance against secular assimilation.

This study argues that a better strategy for evaluating the position of Muslim communities vis-á-vis secular multicultural society is to engage in a process of understanding the character of Islamic religiosity that takes shape in the context of Britain.

The Emergence of the British Muslim Diaspora

According to the latest census (2011), there were approximately 2.8 million Muslims in the UK. These were mainly living in the metropolitan cities of London, Birmingham, Manchester and Glasgow. Families of the majority of British-born Muslims originate in Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. Responding to post-war Britain’s need for manual workers to help rebuild the country was the main motive behind the mass immigration of Muslims into Britain during the 1950s. There is a significant number of British-born Muslims whose parents are Turkish Cypriot who settled mainly in London, while there are many Yemeni Muslims living in the West Midlands. More recently, there are settled Muslim refugees from Afghanistan, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Bosnia, Somalia and Albania. In addition, there are now a significant number of Muslims of African-Caribbean and European origin living in Britain.

The inclusion of a specific question on religious affiliation in the 2001 and 2011 Censuses has provided us with a much more accurate picture concerning the demographic profile of British Muslims. The question on religious affiliation generated large-scale data about the different aspects of religious minorities. It is interesting to observe that in addition to the wider general secularisation trend long noted by the researchers (Brown, 2009), the last Census reveals high percentages of those who identify with ‘no religion’. This interesting finding calls for further investigation in order to explore the complex dynamics, including the possibility that the events of the last decade where religion, mainly Islam, cam be to associated with violence might have had played a role. Of course, the inclusion of the religious question was not free of controversy. While Muslim groups campaigned in favour of the inclusion, there were fears that the data could be put to an undesired and potentially harmful use in the hands of far-right groups if they ever assumed political power. Some more subtle objections came from professionals who favoured the multicultural public policies in, for example, the field of education. They feared that demographic profiles based on religion, if indicating a concentrated presence of religious minorities in certain parts of the country and their relatively small percentage within the overall national picture, might be used to argue for the irrelevance of observing culturally plural and inclusive polices at the national level. However, despite some legitimate concerns, the inclusion of the question of religion did help to go beyond the focus on race and ethnicity and particularly helped to highlight the central role of faith within ethnically and culturally diverse Muslim communities.

Researchers have closely analysed the 2001 Census data relating to Muslim communities in Britain (Hussain, 2008). The data reinforces the already known, rather grim suspicion that Muslims experience marginalisation on a number of socio-economic measures. They appear to suffer from a vicious circle of poor educational qualifications, economic inactivity and poor job prospects when compared to other minority faith communities and the national profile as a whole. On the other hand, Muslims seem to have stout social networks, dense family organisation, and strong religious commitment.

There is strong documentation that the post-war Muslim immigrant communities have been underrepresented in almost all of the major British public institutions since their arrival after the second world war (Ouseley, 2001; Rose, 1969). Many educational reports also testify to the reality of underachievement and social exclusion among Muslim students in the educational system; these include The Swann Report (National Union of Teachers, 1982), reports by the Office for the Standards in Education (1999, 2001) and reports by the Department for Education and Skills (2000, 2001, 2007, 2008).

The problematic situation of the Muslim community in Britain is further complicated by the cultural transmission processes that are active among the second, third and fourth generations of Muslims. Many of these young people construct their senses of identity against the background of a traditional religious upbringing and the largely secular liberalism of wider British society. As a result, Muslim youngsters’ life-worlds are characterised by a strong cultural multiplicity that informs...