“A Neocolonialist Invader or a Postmodern Exile?: the American-Style University in the ‘Desert of the Real’” (original) (raw)
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Arab Education Going Medieval: Sanitizing Western Representation in Arab Schools
In the aftermath of the events of September 11, 2000, debate about Arab education as the new apparatus for religious fanaticism used by Arab extremist groups to entice hate and violence against the West took prominence in Western discourse. Considerable ink was spilled confusing hostile narratives in Arab curricula and the metaphors of identity building with the vilification of Western cultures in Arab textbooks. Western critics and Pentagon scholars produced an extensive body of literature connecting violence to a flawed Arab intellect. Under staggering Western political pressure, Arab states had to rely on Western counsel and implement rapid reforms along the lines of Western methods in order to -polish‖ Western representation in Arab schools and distance their schools from any allegations of teaching hate. This study places the claim of this debate and current Arab educational reforms within the larger context of neoliberal politics and its neocolonial agenda. Moving between political discourses, major school reforms of the last decade, ambiguous teaching material, and new courses added to Arab curricula, the study engages the dialectic of hegemony and counter-hegemony of education not only as a colonial construct but as a renewed venue to recolonization. To this end, this study argues that these reforms did not help improve Western representation but rather disconnected education from reality and made it a mobilizing tactic that aims to teach Arab youth to accept the terms of the neocolonial project.
Minerva, 2019
American university globalization has increasingly targeted and been courted by authoritarian states. While the reasons for these partnerships are manifold—including the ease of top-down large-scale monetary investment, “knowledge economy” development strategies, social engineering programs, and other corporate and imperial entanglements—an overwhelming discourse has emerged around higher education initiatives in places like the Arabian Peninsula, China, Singapore, and Central Asia that juxtaposes liberalism (in the form of higher education) with the illiberal, authoritarian contexts it is supposedly encountering within the framework of neoliberal globalization. Through a discussion of American branch campuses in Qatar and the UAE, this article traces a more complex web of actors whose interests may include neoliberal and imperial inclinations but are not reducible to them. By focusing on the discursive framings of these branch campus initiatives, we show how the notion of “liberal education” operates as a global discourse of power through American branch campuses in the Arabian Peninsula and, by extension, other nondemocratic states around the world. Specifically, we argue that the very concept of “authoritarianism” is discursively produced in and through these university projects, and simultaneously builds (upon) an idealized narrative about the national self in the United States that erases existing and emerging inequalities—indeed, authoritarianisms—within the home spaces of American academia.
The arithmetic of racism and the power dynamics of dominating and dominated groups situate the schoolhouse at center stage of any process and project of social control, and positions minority students as the objects of public indoctrination through education. In other words, the schoolhouse not only is the repository of the status quo, but the offing ground for its maintenance, through implementation of a system of education that reinforces the dominant forms of oppression in society, predicated on the idea of "difference". As a primary tool in the socialization process, the pedagogical content and ideological bend of the educational system likely will become the patterns of the lives of students-cum-citizens .
Book review: Neha Vora, Teach for Arabia: American Universities, Liberalism, and Transnational Qatar
2020
With a provocative title that inherently questions who might be served and educated best by the branch campuses of top US universities in Qatar and Gulf states, Vora's new book debunks some old myths and reminds readers from the outset that "liberalism has Arabian roots" (18). Vora wonders about and studies the transplant of liberal education into "so-called illiberal" countries like Qatar and other Gulf States. Her timely book offers onthe-ground perspectives of students and faculty in these transplant institutions as they engage with curriculum and one another in a new knowledge economy. The book contributes to scholarship about how the cultural ideological framework of liberalism informs and shapes discourses on educational policies and the restructuring of nationalistic reforms for development across the Arab world. Vora frames the book through a knowledge economy perspective that is tension filled. For example, throughout the book she examines the effects of educational reform and nationalism as they are enacted in the US branch campuses of the Gulf. As Vora notes, branch campuses such as Education City in Qatar are simultaneously "spaces of contradiction" and "sites of new agencies and belongings" (29). As such, she argues that conceptions 1 digitalcommons.unl.edu
Colonialism, Postcolonialism, Islam, and Education
This chapter provides a critical overview of Western colonialism and its impact on Islam and Islamic education from the nineteenth century. The colonization of Muslim countries has left lasting and indelible marks on Islam and Islamic education. Not only did colonialism call into question the domination of the Islamic discourse in Muslim countries, it also imposed on these countries secular laws, modern state apparatuses and Western-type education. Consequently , these changes generated a number of dilemmas and challenges for the Muslims during and after the colonial period. In the case of Islamic education, the key debates and controversies centre on the place and mission of Islamic schools against a backdrop of independence, state-building and modernization; the relationship between and integration of 'secular' subjects and religious subjects; and the 'right' way to reform the Islamic schools. This chapter explains how various and competing social imaginaries of Islam and Islamic education such as 'Orien-talism' and 'reformist Islam' were constructed and promoted by both the colonial powers and Muslims. To illustrate the existence of and resulting dilemmas and challenges from the social imaginaries, appropriate examples drawn from former colonised countries such as Egypt and Singapore will be given.
The Pedagogical Divide: Toward an Islamic Pedagogy
The past decade of educational research on Islamic education has increasingly adopted language and trends common to mainstream market-driven educational practices. In the push toward making Islamic schools more effective, mainstream conceptions of effectiveness, efficiency, and accountability have been employed without critical reflection on the values they promote. Several issues and concerns relating both to the purpose of an Islamic education and the values promoted through neo-liberal educational practices, call for a philosophical inquiry. This paper is divided into two sections. The first section addresses the purpose of mainstream public education and the neo-liberal agenda from a critical pedagogical perspective. The second section critically examines how Muslim educators in North America have attempted to negotiate an Islamic education within prevailing discourses of mainstream educational practices. Issues of the purpose of an Islamic education and the criteria, standards, and norms used to determine the quality of Islamic education will be addressed. It will be argued that without such critical analysis, Islamic schooling reproduces existing dominant values and promotes, often unintentionally, success in the market economy as an end rather than a means. In contrast, we propose a foundational return to an Islamic pedagogy that transforms the heart and brings out one's humanity through the enactment of an Adamic education based on an Islamic epistemological framework.
Introduction: the Culture, Politics, and Future of Muslim Education
Schooling Islam: the culture and politics of Muslim …, 2007
, hundreds of radical Islamist paramilitaries sprang up in cities and towns across the country. Several boasted of their ties to Islamic schools. In late 2002, a handful among the country's 47,000 Islamic schools were discovered to have had ties to militants responsible for the October 2002 bombings in Bali, in which 202 people died, most of them Western tourists. For many analysts, these and other examples lent credence to the charge that madrasas are "jihad factories" and outposts of a backward-looking medievalism (see e.g. Haqqani 2002). Against this troubled backdrop, the contributors to this volume seek to shed light on the culture, practices, and politics of madrasas and Islamic higher education. The authors were participants in a ten-month Working Group on Madrasas and Muslim Education that, with the generous sup port of the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs (CURA) at Boston University, came together in Octo ber 2004 and May 2005 to examine the past, present, and likely future of Islamic education. Our concern was not with general or secular educa tion, but with institutions charged with transmitting Islamic knowledge and disciplines. The approach we adopted was comparative and theoreti cally eclectic, on the assumption that Islamic education is a total social phenomenon, in which knowledge, politics, and social networks interact in a complex and "generative" (Barth 1993, 5, 341) manner. The Working Group was organized with an eye toward interdisciplinary collaboration and included scholars from history, political science, anthropology, reli gious studies, and education. Although the story told by each author in this book is as different as the case study in question, the contributors share two points of view. The first is the conviction that Islamic education is characterized, not by lock-step uniformity, but by a teaming plurality of actors, institutions, and ideas. Islamic schooling is today carried out by government and nongovernment organizations, and its purpose and organization are matters of great de bate. At the heart of the dispute lie two important questions: just what is required to live as an observant Muslim in the modern world? And who is qualified to provide instruction in this matter? Disputation of this sort, in which different groups argue publicly about who they are and what their institutions should do, is a clear sign that the madrasa is anything but unchanging or medieval. On the contrary, Islamic education has been drawn squarely into the reflexive questioning and public-cultural debate so characteristic of modern plural societies. Indeed, if there is a struggle for the hearts and minds of Muslims taking place around the world, which there certainly is, madrasas and religious education are on its front line. This first point leads to a second. The members of the Working Group felt it important not to allow the sound and fury of recent political events to obscure the fact that this contest for Muslim hearts and minds began
Pedagogy, Colonialism, and the Possibilities of Belonging: Twenty Years on
South Asian Review
Two decades after the 9/11 attacks, I continue my journey on the two fundamental quests I had embarked upon in the aftermath of the attacks. My first quest was pedagogical: how might I adequately capture within my literature courses the complex dynamics between the Muslim world and the West and between various Muslim identities and cultures, dynamics shaped by legacies of colonialism, decolonial struggles, and neocolonialism. My second quest was personal-intellectual: how might I locate and situate myself as a progressive secular Muslim woman within America's long history with Muslims. In September 2001, I was a couple of weeks into my first year as an assistant professor in English at a small liberal arts college on the outskirts of Boise, Idaho. Many of my students came from rural Republican backgrounds with military ties. The predominant Mideast engagement in the curriculum or faculty body on campus came from an aggressively pro-Israel stance. I had been in the U.S. for more than a decade by that point, and thus was familiar with the Orientalist Islamophobia that permeated the West's 1 framing of and long history with the Muslim World (Nasr 1999; Smith 1999). Observant Muslims were absent from media, entertainment, education, and politics. None of my undergraduate or graduate courses in either literature or creative writing was taught by a Muslim-identifying professor. I was never assigned a story, poem, novel, or nonfiction essay by a Muslim(/-American) writer or works that examined a Muslim or Muslim-American (postcolonial) experience. Muslims appeared on American popular and intellectual cultures as caricatures: backward, irrational, and misogynistic. They were anti-Semitic suicide bombers and honor killers. They were not artists, poets, or mathematicians. There were no Muslim ghazal singers, mountain climbers, eco-farmers, or Sufi poets, except Rumi, who in the West had been stripped of his devout Muslim faith and slotted into New Age gurudom (Gamard 2012). Shock and Awe: Reverberations through Muslim Lives A few days after the 9/11 attacks, Arundhati Roy (2001) presciently framed G.W. Bush's cobbling together of a coalition to invade Afghanistan as a search for war, and if the U.S. did not find a war, it would manufacture one that would "develop a momentum, a logic and a justification of its own" (paragraph 3). And it did manufacture one,