Pedagogic Discourses and Immagined Communities by Thobani

7/28/2019 Pedagogic Discourses and Immagined Communities by Thobani

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Pedagogic discourses and imagined communities: knowing Islam andbeing Muslim

Shiraz Thobani*

Department of Curriculum Studies, Institute of Ismaili Studies, London, UK

Academic disciplines in the school curriculum which engage explicitly withcultural identities pose a major dilemma for liberal, pluralist societies seeking tofoster the dual imperatives of diversity education and social cohesion. This paperuses the case of Islam as school knowledge to analyse the relations between

political stances and symbolic constructions in English religious education. Forthis purpose, the study applies an interdisciplinary theoretical framework,integrating diachronic concepts of the nation-state with cultural recontextualiza-tion theory from the sociology of the curriculum.

Keywords: sociology of the curriculum; cultural nationalism; religious education;Islamic education; Muslim identities

One of the persisting binaries forged in the heat of the September 11 events, despite

now having been moderated by field-based evidence, feeds on the linkage made

between madrasas and terrorism, sectarian schooling being perceived as a seedbed

for the incubation of the radicalized identities of militant extremists. In the context ofBritain, this association between Islamic instruction and Muslim activism has been

further reinforced by the threat of home-grown terrorists, the suspicion that the

recent manifestation of extremist tendencies is in some manner tied to acts of

seditious grooming, nurturance, cultivation or indoctrination within the very

confines of the domestic environment.

At a more general level, the connection between Muslims and education has

come to be perceived as highly problematic, as revealed by a variety of events

legal enforcement of the school dress code in answer to the jilbab challenge (Haw,

2009), state McCarthyist bids to implant spies on campuses to curb the infiltration

of militant influence (Thorne & Stuart, 2008), demands for a tighter regulation of

British madrasas (Hayer, 2009; Muslim Parliament, 2006), including the injection of

citizenship education in their curricula (Hurst & Norfolk, 2007), and growing

suspicions about the agenda of Muslim faith schools (MacEoin, 2009). At the core

of these controversies is the relation projected between knowing Islam and being

Muslim, a presumed codified doctrine transmitted in communal contexts

supposedly generating fundamentalists if not jihadist extremists, a stereotype

lodged prominently in the popular psyche through politicized events in the tabloid

media.

The nurturance of home-grown terrorists, however, is not attributed solely to the

imparting of Islam in communal institutions,1 not at least by some critics who assign

*Email: [email protected]

Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education

Vol. 32, No. 4, October 2011, 531545


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a heavy share of the responsibility to the states multicultural policies, the terrorist

outrages and inner-city riots perceived by these advocates as sounding the death

knell for the post-immigration arrangement of plural co-existence (see Allen, 2007).

In Britain, advocates on both sides of the liberalconservative divide have associated

the failure of multiculturalism, and in some cases even its presumed death, either

tacitly or explicitly to stances encouraging the fostering of Muslim communal

identity instead of curtailing it (Liddle, 2004; Pfaff, 2005). David Camerons speech

(2011) at the Munich Security Conference juxtaposing the failure of state multi-

culturalism with the rise of Islamist extremism is one more instance of this rhetoric.

This logic views misjudged state policies on cultural pluralism as responsible for

creating ghettoized communities leading parallel lives, which in turn has produced

conditions rife for the breeding of jihadist militants. Although the causal connections

imputed in this syllogism are tenuous, the implications the allegations raise are

disturbing in perceiving Muslims contradictorily as exposing the deficiency of

questionable multiculturalism, and at the same time, undermining the plurality

hitherto propped up by this very stance. What is to be noted here is the associationmade between a social philosophy and a religious identity, the two in some way

mutually accountable for the crisis spurred by radical fundamentalism.

Insinuated in this connection, and in many respects viewed as forming the central

plank of misguided pluralism, is the role of multicultural education, enacted over

some five decades in schools across the country, in supposedly creating a fractured,

divided society. Within this framework of diversity tolerance, and in the light of the

concerns highlighted above, the teaching of Islam in state schools assumes critical

significance, and yet surprisingly little has been researched on this aspect. While

Islam as preached in mosques and madrasas, and to some degree in Muslim private

schools, has been subjected to public scrutiny, including its presentation ininstitutions of higher education (Siddiqui, 2007), its formulation in state schools

has been largely overlooked, a puzzling neglect in the light of the critique on

multiculturalism and considering the fact that the majority of the school-age

population receives a substantial part of its formal knowledge on Islam from the

statutory subject of religious education. The recent drive to inject the interdisci-

plinary theme of citizenship into religious education (Pike, 2008) exposes renewed

anxieties on the subject in its handling of religious identities, with the teaching of

Islam in particular assuming an uneasy state in the present climate.

The formulations of school-based Islam in the British context, however, cannot

be understood without engaging with the changing policy contexts which have

shaped religious education since it became a regulated discipline in state schools. In

particular, two policy stances in recent history have had a substantial bearing on

defining Islam in the school curriculum: the liberal, multi-faith project that became

ascendant in the 1960s and 1970s, and the neo-conservative backlash to pluralized

religious education which followed in the late 1980s and 1990s, introducing

nationalistic and communitarian politics in the policy-making process. Over this

period, specific constructions of Islam came to be presented through religious

education to students in state schools (Thobani, 2010b).

Given the concern on the Islamic education of young Muslims today, I probe in

this paper what forms of school-based Islam have been imbibed by them as a

consequence of liberal and neo-conservative policies. For this purpose, I seek toexpand the theoretical frame I applied to an earlier study on Islam in the English

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educational context in which I used Basil Bernsteins concepts of pedagogic discourse

and cultural recontextualization for my analysis, along with other cognate concepts

in the sociology of the curriculum (Thobani, 2010b). In order to extend the analysis

here, I begin by discussing selected perspectives from political theories centred on the

nation-state dynamic to gain a better purchase on the relation between educational

governance and cultural construction in the school curriculum. Using this theoretical

optic, the latter part of the paper proceeds to explore the implications of pedagogic

formulations of Islam engendered by regulative measures adopted by the state in its

political shift from liberal multiculturalism to cultural neo-nationalism in the 1980s

and 1990s.

Cultural recontextualization and conceptions of the nation-state

Located within the sociology of the curriculum, Bernsteins (1990, 1996) notions of

pedagogic discourse and recontextualization provide a rich conceptual vocabulary for

analysing constructions of school-level Islam in religious education as outcomes ofthe interaction of various fields. Pedagogic discourse is defined by him as a special

discursive relay, differentiated from other forms of communication, in which

regulative and instructional discourses combine, through the processes of curricular

classification and pedagogic framing, to output a virtual rendering of culture.

Bernstein (1990) views the symbolic production of knowledge in intellectual sites as

being recontextualized by mediating agencies, including the regulative apparatus of

the state, before being reconstituted in the pedagogic field as school knowledge. In this

framework, he posits the play of various forces political, economic and cultural

which selectively condense, dilute, reorganize and reframe intellectual productions so

that, through distributive rules, the unthought (or perhaps, more appropriately, theunthinkable) is rendered into school knowledge which is politically and culturally

palatable. Through this process, cultural categories are taken out of their original,

indigenous contexts and re-presented in host environments, becoming subject to new

power configurations. In what is a refinement of his class and codes argument,

Bernstein (1996) establishes a close relation between the structuring of forms of

knowledge and the construction of social identities, the social order to some degree

influencing as well as influenced by symbolic classification, a thesis inspired by

Durkheim.

Within this somewhat hierarchical structure, the state is assigned the role of a

significant regulator of culture selected for pedagogic consumption, but it is the

concept of class conflict, broadened to include contestations on gender, ethnicity,

religion and other identity signifiers, which is accorded greater emphasis in defining

pedagogic discourse. Bernsteins framework is therefore well suited to addressing the

dynamics between state and class interests, but does not have an adequate theory of

the state itself (Apple, 1995), or in broader terms, a theory which engages with the

nation-state as a binary and diachronic manifestation.2 The nation-state as a

composite construct calls for perspectives which address the changing relation

between the state as a regulative mechanism and the nation as an ideological

projection deployed for the purposes of engendering social unity and identity. Having

emerged in the 1970s when class-based neo-Marxist perspectives dominated the

political analysis of education, the sociology of the curriculum generally overlookedthe concept of the nation in its preoccupation with the state (Young, 1971). From the

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mid-1980s onwards, the critical significance of the dyad of the nation-state to

education became increasingly evident with the institution of the National

Curriculum, a move that signalled the changing concern of the state from a

detached, impartial agency in relation to school knowledge to an interventionist

regulator of the national culture imparted in schools (Crawford, 1996). The

embedding of discursive framings of nationhood by the state within education was

to have direct consequences on how ambiguously perceived categories like Islam were

presented in religious education, history and other subjects, an educational shift

which had substantial bearing for the symbolic representations of cultural identities

(Thobani, 2010a).

In order to sharpen the focus of Bernsteins conceptual lens, his notion of

educational governance is broadened here by taking into account selected

perspectives from political theories which offer a diachronic concept of the state.

Both state formation theories (Corrigan & Sayer, 1985; Green, 1997) and theories of

nationalism (Anderson, 1991; Bhabha, 1990; Gellner, 1983) reveal important insights

into the role of education as a critical site for the production of the nationalimaginary in modern nation-states, especially in their formative phases. In high-

lighting the deployment of education by the state for political, economic and social

reasons, these theories also draw attention to its appropriation for the purposes of

cultural reproduction in order to create and maintain the imagined community that

comes to be constituted as the nation.

Contemporary states are viewed by political theorists in both bounded and fluid

terms: having a defined sense of territory and history, but also subject to

reconfigurations through regional alignments and transnational shifts. The response

of states confronted with increasing plurality has encompassed a variety of socio-

political strategies for diversity management, from the exclusion or containment ofalterity through citizenship legislation to cultural assimilation and integration, and

more recently, the move towards the cosmopolitan ethic of civic pluralism. These

swings reflect a changing relation in the binary of the nation-state, whether the state

perceives itself as the guardian of the nation preserving social unity and homogeneity

through the safeguarding of an atavistic culture, or instead as an impartial, regulative

arbitrator of the kaleidoscopic plurality that characterizes contemporary society

(Alonso, 1994). Western European states in the post-colonial period disclose a

protracted struggle to identify appropriate solutions which respond effectively to

their changing demographies, as reflected in contrasting stances ranging from the

adoption of liberal multiculturalism to the resort to cultural neo-nationalism.

Both these tendencies have been played out in the British context, education in

particular being a critical arena where symbolic identities and their pedagogic

representations have become a ground of heated contestation. In the post-

immigration phase, research on policies, theories and practices on plurality and

education has come to be increasingly influenced by multicultural perspectives, a

stance that continues to present itself as problematic, whether one refers to its early

manifestations based on the reification and essentializing of the ethnos of immigrant

groups, often portrayed in exotic terms, or the more recent socially critical forms

questioning institutional barriers to greater political participation which perpetuate

the disenfranchisement of minorities (Parekh, 2005). What this preoccupation with

multiculturalism as a stable and definitive concept obscures, notwithstanding itspurposive intents, are the shifts by the state in the ideological appropriation of

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discursive stances on culture arising from changes in the socio-political conditions

from one decade to another, and the consequential impact on policies on cultural

pluralism in education.

This shifting make-up of state policy is no more evident in recent times than in

the backlash of neo-conservatism against multicultural tendencies. Taking the

political form of cultural neo-nationalism, and cast in terms of a moral crisis

(Critcher, 2009), this particular reaction can be viewed as an attempt by a modern,

liberal state to manage social diversity through cultural containment as a result of

rapid demographic changes. Theories of ethnosymbolism (Smith, 2009) draw

attention to the use of cultural apparatuses and artefacts as devices by which

national identity, unity and consciousness are invoked. Ritual performances are

rehearsed as an important part of this strategy, as is the national narrative that

commemorates ancestry, territory and other hallowed cultural symbols. Religion, in

particular, may be recruited as a potent means by which to bolster a sense of national

belongingness. Being the predecessor of nationalism, and in certain respects having

paved the conditions for the rise of national imaginaries, it offers a readily availablemobilizing ideology of order for engendering horizontal solidarity, fraternity and

allegiance (Juergensmeyer, 1995). Anderson (1991) highlights the concepts of sacred

language, time and authority as forging the pre-national religious community,

concepts which have been reworked to create the imagined community of the

modern nation-states. Together with these concepts, the discourse of moral purity is

co-opted by neo-nationalists to argue for the preservation of what is most sacred to

the nation.

Crucial to the project of realizing social cohesion is the impulsive need by cultural

neo-nationalists to exercise boundary maintenance through policies of inclusion and

exclusion. For this purpose, the symbolic arena in education, that space which dealsspecifically with the representation of self-concepts, becomes appropriated as a

strategic site for cultural reproduction and diversity management. The nationalizing

of the curriculum, in terms of the regulation of the aims, content and pedagogy of

subjects of special symbolic significance, exemplifies the regulative mechanisms the

state becomes predisposed to deploy in leaning towards cultural nationalism.

Subjects such as history, geography, civics and religious education become fertile

ground for delineating what is indigenous to national culture, and, in doing so,

casting the otherness of the foreign and the alien (Crawford, 1996).

The construction of alterity within the symbolic arena is a subject that has come

to receive increasing attention in recent studies (Corbey & Leerssen, 1991). At a basic

level, alterity features negatively through symbolic exclusion or marginalization, by

being located outside or on the peripheries of the curriculum as trace or vestige, and

therefore transmitting the subtext of a subject deemed not worthy of academic

attention. At a more complex level, the structural and organizational positioning of

symbolic categories, through conceptual and formal distinctions between the

indigenous and the foreign, allows for alterity to gain presence while ensuring that

it remains contained. In substantive terms, discourses of conventionally acceptable or

questionable knowledge are used to engender identification or distinction, the

regulative policies of the state filtering or domesticating what is considered

dangerous knowledge. As a consequence, foreign categories usually tend to

be rendered in diluted, formulaic, historically static and reified terms, resulting inthe essentializing of alterity. Identity management is thus pursued through the



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classification and hypostatizing of symbolic content, with an attempt to assign

defined social status and relations to the diverse groups composing the social order.

The nationalizing of the curriculum reflects Bourdieus (1998) claim that the state

seeks to impose symbolic classification that is most in conformity with its notion of

moral order.

Within the curriculum, religious education presents a subject where constructions

of alterity feature most prominently. State legislation regulates which faiths are to be

privileged, what relations are to prevail between them, and how they are to be taught.

The sacralizing of identity through the elevation of some groups over those perceived

as being wholly other lends itself to the nationalistic agenda of the containment of

alterity, the idea of the holy being extended to ancestry, territory and culture. The

recontextualizing of religious categories in periods of (neo-) nationalist resurgence is

prone to deploy the same principles as those used in the formation of the imagined

community, namely the principles of authority (one god), unity (one people) and

synchronicity (one time) as identified by Anderson (1991). In the conflated case of

religious nationalism (Juergensmeyer, 1995), the discourse of purity, authenticity andessence, together with imposed notions of orthodoxy and heresy, further reinforces

the bid to contain alterity, leading to the quarantining of alien symbolic categories.

Classification and framing devices are applied in a nationalized curriculum to

impose hard and fast boundaries between the faiths to ensure insulation and the

prevention of doctrinal leakage. Through identity management, complex, diffused

and overlapping social identities come to be clearly defined, simplified and pigeon-

holed, in the same way as colonial map making and census taking was used as a

means of regulating vast swathes of undefined and amorphous social collectivities in

the imperial realm. What is also to be noted are the applications of the notions of

cultural purity, homogeneity and authenticity, all of these being strategies throughwhich the identity management of diffused categories can be effected, with a view to

establishing clear, demarcated symbolic boundaries between multiple collectivities.

The net outcome is the production of symbolic categories that essentialize non-

indigenous religious identities, and cast them as historically static (not of our time),

posit them as belonging elsewhere (not of our land), and assigning their loyalties to

alternative sources of authority (not sharing our way of life). The singular imagined

community of the nation is achieved in some measure by the projection of foreign

imagined communities, the construction of the social unity of the majority arising

from the formulation of the alterity of minorities who do not fit into the national

narrative.

In sum, the state in adopting a stance of cultural nationalism exercises policies

and strategies of diversity management through an active regulation of the national

imaginary of culture. The construction of alterity is the by-product of the state

seeking to impose clearly defined notions of national unity and identity in the

symbolic arena.

Neo-nationalism and the reconstitution of pedagogic Islam

The above theoretical perspectives, implanting the political construct of the

diachronic nation-state into the sociology of the curriculum, provide a refined lens

for analysing the recontextualization of Islam. Studies undertaken in various parts ofthe Muslim world reveal the close relation between national imaginaries and the

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representation of Islam in educational contexts. Eickelman and Piscatori (1996) draw

attention to the objectification of Muslim consciousness that has transpired in

modern Muslim societies as a result of mass education and formal approaches to the

study of Islam. Starrett (1998) shows through the case study of Egypt how Islam has

become functionalized by a contemporary Muslim state to serve its own national

interests. Studies undertaken on Turkey (Kaplan, 2006), Iran (Arjmand, 2004),

Pakistan (Nayyar & Salim, 2002) and other Muslim majority countries reveal similar

traits of the ideological deployment of Islam for nationalistic purposes. Berkey

(2007) sees this trend as a direct outcome of Muslim states using institutionalized

education as a means of controlling Islamic beliefs, resulting in the emergence of a

univocal Islam due to the formalization of the madrasa system and the codification

of the sharia. As a final example, my analysis of the development of pedagogic Islam

as a modern school subject (Thobani, 2007) reveals its appropriation by policy-

makers as a strategic site for control in the forging of new national identities in the

formation of post-colonial Muslim states. These studies collectively point to the

reconstitution of pedagogic Islam from a diffused, inspiring ethic and ethos into a

univocal, ideologized code, and the impact of this recasting on emerging Muslim

identities.

The forms of reconstitution that school-based Islam has experienced in the

liberal, Western context offer interesting and contrasting lines of enquiry. Studies

undertaken in the USA (Douglass & Dunn, 2002; Moore, 2006; Rizvi, 2005) and

France (Limage, 2000; Scott, 2005) reveal some of the controversial dynamics that

have surfaced around Muslims, Islam and national politics in the West. In the

specific case of Britain, Islam in English religious education has passed through three

phases in the post-immigration period: liberal multiculturalism from the 1960s to the

1980s with its interest in the exotic based on superficial and skeletal treatments of

religious and cultural forms, on the one hand, and on the other, its preoccupation

with their essence from phenomenological readings (Smart, 1968); neo-conservative

nationalism in the 1980s and 1990s with its project of cultural restoration and the

deployment of the Christian Right ideology of national religionism (Hull, 1996);

and more recently, in the post-September 11 phase, civic enlistment with its insistence

on the incorporation of citizenship education and civic values in religious education,

as one of the responses to fundamentalist radicalism (Ajegbo, 2007).

The period of particular interest here is the neo-conservative nationalism of the

New Right, bringing about a pivotal shift from loose to hard Islam through

national and local policies foregrounding communitarian conceptions of religion.This phase saw one of the most radical policy changes in modern British educational

history with the institution of the National Curriculum, including the reinstatement

of Christianity to its former privileged position in religious education through the

1988 Education Reform Act (Crawford, 1996). To some degree, this determination to

nationalize education was an outcome of the neo-conservative backlash to liberal

multiculturalism, a sharp reaction to the mish-mash of diffused symbolic boundaries

and identities perpetrated by the thematic and integrated approaches in the

curriculum dealing with religious and cultural categories. Through the machinations

of the Christian Right, this move was a bid to purge from religious education what

was claimed to be cultural syncretism, and to impose clear boundaries between thereligious traditions. To institute this demarcation, model syllabuses promoting a



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communitarian reformulation of the faith traditions were circulated as paradigmatic

references for local policymakers and practitioners (Thobani, 2010b).

The event of the National Curriculum and the revised legislation of religious

education in the 1988 Act represents a belated action on the part of the English

nation-state to regulate its educational content, a measure which featured as a

founding act in most nations in their formative phase. The nationalizing of education

was justified by the New Right on the grounds of raising educational standards and

asserting central control, but also for promoting national unity and identity

(Crawford, 1996). Within this strategy of cultural neo-nationalism, religion became

a critical category over which to re-impose control. It is interesting to note that in

England, religious education was legislated from the inception of state-maintained

education in 1870, made compulsory in 1944, and reinforced legislatively in 1988.

The revised clauses of the 1988 Education Reform Act are a clear attempt to conflate

national identity with Christianity as the faith of the majority; other faiths, though

recognized as principal religions, are assigned a lower status as reflected in their

reduced teaching time in the religious education curriculum. The communitarianemphasis on religious education that resulted in the 1990s was closely linked to the

resurgence of neo-nationalistic tendencies reacting to liberal pluralism, and to the

project of cultural restoration effected through the National Curriculum (Ball,

1990, 1994). This phase, representing in effect an attempt by a liberal state to manage

its social plurality through nationalistic instincts, invites a closer examination of the

relation between educational governance, the representation of symbolic categories,

and the production of cultural identities.

Centralized imperatives and local exigencies

In the neo-conservative period, following the introduction of the revised clauses on

religious education, the local educational policies in many cases became a contested

ground between the conflicting forces of the local Liberal Left and the nationalist

New Right, the former upholding the principle of social equality and the latter

communitarian identity, leading to tensions which became embedded in state school

policies and curricular content. Muslim schools, too, were not exempt in this phase

from the discursive tensions surfacing in their local boroughs, leading to an

engagement with the politics of identity and equality in the communal context.

In both the state and Muslim private schools I investigated in the late 1990s in a

local community study (Thobani, 2010b),3 the dominant ethos was one that fostered

social co-operation, tolerance and respect, given that multiculturalism and social

equality were strongly promoted by the local education authority. This commitment

to a co-operative ethos of social harmony tended to be marked by unease with

cultural differences on the part of the practitioners, divergence being perceived as

compromising intercultural relations. To address this concern, the practitioners

found it necessary to stress the importance of commonality among students of

different backgrounds, and in the process of doing so, subdued what was distinctive

to each religion. While the state schools emphasized similarity between the diverse

faith groups, in the Muslim private schools it was directed at what was common to

all Muslim traditions. When probed further on how this principle of commonality

was approached specifically with respect to Muslims, it emerged in both contexts thatthe practitioners tended to avoid a discussion of differences internal to Muslims,

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viewing the denominational traditions as being an unnecessary divergence, whether

for practical or policy reasons. In many cases, even the basic distinction between

Sunnis and Shias was ignored. In the Muslim schools, the emphasis on the common

was underpinned by the necessity for promoting unity, to a point where some

practitioners perceived immigration to Britain as a valuable opportunity to forge a

new, British Muslim community.

When the interviews turned to the subject of Islam in the curriculum, it became

evident that the principles of commonality and unity were being applied to produce a

form of Islam defined by notions of authenticity and orthodoxy, and centred

exclusively on the canonical sources of the Quran and the Sunna, without reference

to different approaches to these sources among Muslim traditions. Interestingly, the

responses foregrounded the principle of orthodoxy as a primary determinant of true

Islam, overlooking the point that this concept does not find legitimacy in Muslim

contexts in the way that it does in Christianity. Moreover, notions of orthodoxy are

inextricably linked to issues of hegemony and the exercise of power, leading by

implication to justifications for the demotion, marginalizing, and in extremeinstances, the persecution of those deemed to be heterodox or even heretical

(Berlinerblau, 2001; Saeed, 2007). The positing of the canonical sources as being the

sole basis of Islamic orthodoxy invites examining since, while undeniably all Muslim

traditions accept these two sources as foundational, their interpretation and

application varies widely from one community to another, a crucial point which

was not given serious consideration in either the state or Muslim schools. In some

cases, the principle of orthodoxy became converted into the notion of a pure Islam,

with a few practitioners inclined to sift the pure from the deviant. In these

contexts, the belief in a pure Islam gave rise to perceptions of non-orthodox

interpretations as doctrinally distorted, leading to a rift between the school-basedversion upheld as the legitimate view and the Islam of the domestic sphere being

adulterated with cultural accretions that needed to be purged. School policies

promoting this purist view of Islam could take on an evangelical turn, encouraging

students to convert parental notions and practices to what was deemed as religiously

desirable.

This local community study conducted at the tail-end of neo-conservatism

exhibits a dominant strand that became apparent in state and Muslim schools,

although I must stress here that an alternative outlook was also expressed by a

minority of the respondents, recognizing the need to approach Islam in the context of

Muslim diversity, but generally articulated in a subdued tone. While this dominant

strain represents the state of affairs in one English borough, and therefore care needs

to be exercised in generalizing from it, the case study provides revealing glimpses into

the relations being developed between Muslim identities and the formulation of

Islam as school knowledge in a multi-ethnic locality of England in the prelude to the

9/11 period.

Evident from this study is the strong homology between state and Muslim private

schools, despite their different aims and curricula. The strong parallels between

the suppressing of differences and the forging of unities, and the similarities in the

construction of a pure, orthodox Islam, are prominent. What might account for this

affinity is the national and local policy contexts influencing school orientations in

this borough, through the need to create an ethos of social equality, on the one hand,in line with the multicultural policies of the Liberal Left, and the expectations of the



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New Right to establish externally distinctive but internally homogenized identities

for each cultural group. These expectations were formally channelled through

curricular frameworks, the state practitioners beholden to the local agreed syllabus

which made little allowance for Muslim diversity, while Muslim schools answered to

their stakeholders aspirations for a united Muslim community with an ecumenist

conception of Islam in their curriculum.

Common to both the state and Muslim private schools was the emphasis on a

single, unified Muslim identity through the suppressing of national, ethnic and

denominational differences of the students, and in the Muslim context, this unity was

promoted with the aim of creating a new British community. In state schools too,

the tendency to lean towards the idea of British Islam was discernible, though used

in a guarded and qualified sense. At work in this unifying process are wider

influences of social reconfiguration in the post-immigration phase, forcing the

coalescence of distinctive Islamic denominations through their reclassification into

the more generalized, blanket category of Muslims. This process appears to have

been propelled by the same tendencies as the earlier assimilationist project in thepost-settlement phase which used the signifiers of class (immigrants) and race

(Asians) to congeal disparate groups into simplistic but manageable categories, but

now belatedly extended to religion (Muslims). In the case of Islam and the other

faiths, the local and national policies of liberal multiculturalism and New Right

communitarianism combined to exert a strong influence on the representation of

essentialized cultural identities which found their way into the pedagogic space.

Closely connected to the projection of social identities was the symbolic

construction of Islam as a monolithic and reified category. The responses of the

practitioners disclosed a unified self-concept of Muslims feeding into the construc-

tion of a homogeneous Islam, and reciprocally, the potentially solidifying influenceof an undifferentiated Islam on diversified Muslim identities. Thus, the wider

reclassification and essentializing processes at work in the receiving post-colonial

context found pedagogical reinforcement through the foregrounding of a con-

sensual or orthodox Islam. In the Muslim schools, a parallel concern of managing

internal diversity was addressed through a concerted attempt to purge Islam off its

historical and cultural accretions, slanting towards a form which almost verged on

neo-Salafism in its orientation.

At the core of this tendency to essentialize Islam and Muslims is the problematic

relation established between religion and culture in both the school contexts. In

the case of Britain, the first generation of Muslims brought with them forms of Islam

embedded within their particular ethnic cultural matrices. The majority of immigrant

groups who settled in Britain in the postwar period originated from South Asia. The

first generation of these settlers were largely from a rural background, and the nature

of Islam espoused by them was generally folklorish, integrally tied to the village

culture from which they came (Geaves, 1996). In having been born and raised in

Britain, most of the new generation has been exposed to two contrasting forms of

Islam: one through family socialization and the Quranic teachings received in

madrasas; and the other through statutory religious education in state schools.

Not much has been studied on how Muslim students have negotiated the two

forms of Islam, the one embedded in its cultural roots, and the other largely

formalized, objectified, codified and disembodied from the social context, resultingin a culturally integrated notion of faith pitted against an abstract, orthodox Islam

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(Lewis, 2007). Identity studies disclose the complexity of factors influencing young

Muslims in their attempts to define themselves, highlighting self-constructs that

question the simplistic casting of the emigrant and British-born generations as a

clash of two cultures. While inter-generational change among British Muslims has

been closely analysed from political, economic and cultural perspectives, little is

understood of how Muslim youth have dealt with contrasting forms of Islam

imparted to them. What awaits closer scrutiny is the formation of social identity

resulting from the change in religion as part of a wider cultural milieu to one where it

has become objectified and codified in the particular form of multicultural,

pedagogic Islam.

Recontextualized Islam and social identities

The case of Islam as school knowledge, reconstituted through successive phases and

various structural levels, reveals diverse influences operating on the formulation ofcultural categories as educational subject matter. Using Bernsteins theory (1990,

1996), we are led to trace the extraction of Islam from its indigenous socio-historical

contexts, its formalization in intellectual arenas in the West through disciplines such

as Oriental, religious or Islamic studies, and its recontextualization by official

agencies into religious education through education acts, local syllabuses, non-

statutory and advisory frameworks, and other regulative protocols.

The outcome is a symbolic category which has become domesticated and

reconstituted as a homogenized and reified cultural quantity. In essence, the social

identities projected through the classroom are imagined communities, founded on

what Bernstein (1990) calls virtual knowledge, not being true to the complexity of

social reality, having been diluted, condensed and made superficial through the

process of cultural recontextualization and the exercise of the national imagination.

The outcome is a form of virtual Islam, skeletal and uniformized, that fails to reflect

the complex, multi-layered and polyvocal phenomena given expression in manifold

ways across the Muslim world.

Under diasporic conditions, religion becomes a primary focus, inclining

transnational Muslims to give greater weight to Islam, as a decontextualized

phenomenon, in their overall identities than they might have done in their

homelands. We are witnessing a move away from the specific cultural renderings

of Islam, as observed by the first generation of Muslim immigrants upon entering

Britain, to a formal, codified Islam based on suppositions of authenticity, orthodoxy,

purity and essence. The outcome is a hard and fast division between culture and

religion, leading to the question of the nature of the shift in generational

perceptions and upholdings of Islam, from an open and diversified understanding

to a uniformist, doctrinaire tendency.

The role of state and Muslim private schools in bringing about this shift raises

implications for the post 9/11 period to what extent have liberal and commu-

nitarian forms of religious education, enacted in the multicultural and neo-

conservative phases, contributed to the creation of a class of Muslims who have

turned to a purist interpretation of Islam, divorced of historical, political and socio-

cultural underpinnings that have shaped the diverse expressions and manifestationsof Islam in Muslim histories and across Muslim societies?



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Implications

Being Muslim in the plural, liberal context of Britain is a problematic that has been

closely tied up with the different responses the state has adopted towards incoming

minority groups. The immigrant Muslim, the communitarian Muslim and the

fundamentalist Muslim are all constructions of religious identity which are in somerespect intricately connected with the passage of the state from multicultural to neo-

nationalist to civic stances in dealing with increasing social plurality. In this venture

of managing cultural diversity, education has become a pliable medium appropriated

by the state over these successive phases to attain its particular policies. Of strategic

importance to the state has been the need for exerting influence, if not direct control,

over the symbolic space in the curriculum where cultural identities are reproduced or

reconstituted for socio-political purposes. Symbolic categories in history, religious

education, citizenship education and other disciplines modulate different forms of

identities, depending on the political complexion the state adopts towards plurality

and the degree to which it chooses to express its nationhood. On the question of

Muslimness in a liberal, plural state, religion necessarily becomes a defining element

in the construction of Muslim identity, taking on different constructions such as

phenomenological, communitarian or civic Islam, depending on the particular

orientation expressed in the policy field. These policy shifts raise the interesting

question of the nature of the relation between governance, social identity and

symbolic representation.

It emerges that the pluralist state finds difficulty in managing cultural diversity

due to the nation within the state periodically finding resurgence in reaction to the

alterity in its midst. Islam in Britain as a symbolic category, perceived as the

quintessential other, has been especially difficult to address. The recontextualization

of Islam as school knowledge in Britain has converted it into a reified and monolithic

phenomenon, disembodied from its historical, cultural and social contexts. In doing

so, it may have produced a generation of Muslims who perceive Islam through new

discursive frames which privilege orthodoxy, uniformity and consensuality. State

education that fosters essentialized identities based on exclusive and excluding

definers of subjectivity, whether it be race, class, gender or religion, needs to be

challenged for its questionable assumptions and the implications it raises for social

co-existence (Sen, 2006).

In the post-September 11 phase, state policies have increasingly moved towards

forms of multiculturalism which emphasize civic values. Yet even here, difficulties

have arisen with proposals stressing the need for developing a British national

identity among Muslim youth, a concept that continues to revert to the imagined

community of the primordial nation. In doing so, it provokes a reactionary response

from these youth who do not find themselves featured in the national narrative, who

confront religious discrimination in their everyday lives, and whose self-constructions

and perceptions as Muslims are much more complex than the mono-dimensional

stereotypes that circulate in the wider society (Lewis, 2007). Compelling arguments

have been made for promoting universal civic as against nationalist principles

(Ajegbo, 2007; Crawford and Jones, 1998), a potentially productive framework which

needs to be complemented by an approach to Islam at the school level that is broadly

educational rather than narrowly doctrinaire. By this, I mean the study of Islam thatapproaches it from civilizational, historical, cultural and humanistic perspectives, in

542 S. Thobani


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