Religious education, religious literacy, and Islam as an exceptional religion
http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/markaz/posts/2015/03/31-susan-douglass-religious-educationSusan L. Douglass | March 31, 2015 3:39pm
In early analyses of the terrorist attacks of September 11, the issue of religious education rose quickly to prominence. Discussions of causation implicated religious schools, in educationally underserved areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan, although the 19 men associated with the attack had not attended these institutions. The accusations led to the simple Arabic word madrassa (a school) becoming a negative term.
Religious education courses in Saudi Arabia, and the ministry textbooks used in these courses, came under the microscope for allegedly fostering hatreds that may have motivated the attacks. These ideas circulated widely and caused a ripple effect. Within weeks, Muslim private schools in the United States—of which there are fewer than two hundred, most less than 20 years old—also came under suspicion.
As an educator working in both private and public school settings, I noted journalists’ surprise upon hearing that Muslim schools teach “the 3 R’s” (reading, writing, and arithmetic) alongside religion classes, and that nearly all such schools in the United States actually follow local public school curriculum, though they are not legally required to. The number of Muslim schools in the United States was overstated in the press, with little attempt among journalists to correct the reports based on empirical studies.
As the tide of Islamophobia in the United States rose in the decade after 9/11, critics of multicultural education latched onto the notion that teaching about Islam in public school textbooks and classrooms might be implicated in the existential national security threat. Initial arguments maintained that coverage of Islam in textbooks—like coverage of all world religions, only recently expanded from briefest mention—was excessively positive.
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That's how it usually goes in this kind of discussion.
Take the Pakistani media. The workers in the media are pretty much all Muslims, some secular and some fairly religious.
In the aftermath of 9/11 they, too, had a problem with madaris. The difficulty is that the word just does mean "school" in some contexts, but specifically "religious school" in others. The Pakistani government was trying to compel (some of) the Pakistani madaris to do more than teach whatever fiqh they followed, the Qur'aan, and the Sunnah. The graduates knew religion and could recite the Qur'aan by memory; they knew precious little else. And in droves they were the ones that headed north to join the Taliban, even after the Soviets had left.
But the media also showed (some) madaris that were exemplary from an academic standpoint: Not only did they teach Qur'aan, but they also taught maths, English, history, science (and not just "Islamic science"
. Such articles would be referenced on DU as defense of madaris.
The problem was leaving out "some". It led to an all-or-nothing approach. All madaris were nasty Islamofascist jihadist brainwashing institutions. All madaris were enlightened, tolerant bastions of the best of Islamic thought. It dulled thinking on both sides as both sides decided fighting bested truth.
Even in the US, there were perfectly fine examples brought forth of madaris that taught ethnic and religious hate. Not all were in cities; some were in the boonies, and less under the control as under the radar of most civic authorities. Presumably they were reformed or the errors corrected; then again, they had defenders, what they were teaching at the time they were discovered was pretty bad at the time and unacceptable but still being done, so who knows? Just as they had defenders then, they'd still have defenders now. And we still have the all-or-nothing paradigm, unchanged.
