From Protest to Praxis: A History of Islamic Schools In North America (original) (raw)
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Islamic Education in the United States
International Handbooks of Religion and Education, 2018
The history of Islamic schools in America is complex. There are varying definitions of what an Islamic school is, should be, or should produce. There distinct Muslim communities with unique historical trajectories of being in America that have shaped their conceptions on the purpose of Islamic schooling. And, as a result, there exist today many types of schools that aspire for some semblance of an Islamic ethos. This chapter attempts to unpack these diversities and distinctions through a brief historical timeline of some American Muslim communities. Through the experiences of the Indigenous Black American Muslim to the South Asian and Arab Muslim Immigrant experience and finally from the lens of second generation and convert Muslims, this chapter outlines how each commuity conceptualized the need for Islamic schools uniquely.
"Islamic Schools in America: Islam's Vehicle to the Future"
This paper explores the role of American Muslim schools in shaping and constructing the identity of Muslim children in the U.S., and shows how Muslim organizations and educators are using these schools to (re)Islamize Muslim children. America's Muslim immigrants believe that without teaching their children the Islamic culture and religion, they will be brought up as anything but Islamic. This paper argues that Islamic organizations and Muslim educators have capitalized on the ills of public schools to put pressure on Muslims to build Islamic schools, where (re)Islamizing Muslim children would be the goal. But, in the process, many of these children may end up alienated and isolated from the rest of the society, and, in some cases, exposed to anti-American, anti-secular, and anti-Western propaganda.
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
Book Review: A History of Islamic Schooling in North America
A History of Islamic Schooling in North America: Mapping Growth and Evolution, 2023
In this paper, I review Memon’s (2019) book, "A History of Islamic Schooling in North America: Mapping Growth and Evolution", which I recommend for religious school researchers, practitioners, and community members. Readers can acquire a historical understanding of adapting a religious worldview to the theoretical sphere that contributes to academic knowledge within K-12 education.
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.
Educational Philosophy and Theory, 2024
This paper presents a conceptual framework drawn from philosophies of education underpinned by an Islamic worldview. The framework offers an interconnecting network of Islamic educational concepts that can be used by contemporary educators in Muslim contexts think through how they might reconstruct preK-12 education in a more authentic and culturally coherent manner for their communities. This work of reconstruction and renewal is needed to decolonise schooling in Muslim contexts and offers scope for intercultural pedagogical discourse amongst philosophers of education.
Islamic Philosophy of Education and Western Islamic Schools: points of tension
Religion in Multicultural Education, 2006
In this chapter, I elaborate an idealized type of Islamic philosophy of education and epistemology. Next, I examine the crisis that Islamic schools face in Western societies. This will occur on two fronts: (1) an analysis of the relationship (if any) between the philosophy of education, the aspirations of school administration, and the actual character and practice of Islamic schools; and (2) an analysis concerning the meaning of an Islamic curriculum. To the first issue, I argue that there exists a disjuncture between Islamic educational ideals (as expressed by Muslim philosophers of education), the aspirations of school administrators, and the manner in which Islamic schools operate in practice. Concerning the second item, I argue that Islamic schools, notwithstanding their own insistent claims, must struggle to define what an Islamic education entails that is uniquely distinctive to Islamic schools. Finally, I argue that Islamic educators need to encourage open-minded discussions concerning issues on which there is no settled opinion. I illumine this discussion by drawing upon minority Muslim voices that encourage further dialogue and debate. Above all else, this chapter is an attempt to highlight the challenges that Muslim educators in the West face as they aim to reconcile an idealized caricature of Islamic philosophy of education with the on-the-ground needs of Muslim children socialized in a non-Islamic society.
Challenges to Islamic Education
This paper examines the challenges to Islamic education in Muslim majority societies with special reference to the institutionalization of Islamic education. Understanding these challenges requires a discussion of the concept of knowledge and education within the Islamic worldview, which will serve as the point of departure of this paper. Given the long historical background of Islamic education in the diverse Muslim societies around the globe, this essay will limit itself to a brief sketch of these developments.
Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 2020
A systemic challenge for K-12 Islamic schools in Western contexts is a disconnect between purpose and practice. This challenge underscores the urgency for empirical research to advance teaching and learning approaches distinct to education in the Islamic tradition. This qualitative study explores educator perspectives on Islamic pedagogy in practice after immersion in a teacher education programme designed for Islamic school educators. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 20 alumni of the Islamic Teacher Education Programme (ITEP). Islamically coherent research methodology honoured participant agency as expressions of a distinct pedagogical approach. The study contributes new knowledge to the underresearched area of Islamic pedagogy, highlighting that Islamic pedagogic renewal must privilege (a) faith-perspectives, as legitimate and credible ways of knowing; (b) local voices, perspectives, contexts, and lifeworlds of learners in shaping and reshaping classrooms and schools; and (c) educational values that influence praxis in light of the unique visions of Islamic schools. KEYWORDS 'The conquest is complete when you teach the conquered that their conquest was actually a liberation.' (Ogunnaike 2018) Considering faithful praxis in Islamic schools Ogunnaike (2018) argued that schools remain contested sites of power in a world characterised by ongoing coloniality. Ideas, wisdom, and ways of knowing have been dismantled and discarded over time and place. Ogunnaike identified, 'Different traditions also have different conceptions of knowledge and different epistemologies, and these necessarily imply different pedagogies. So not only must we teach different things, but we must teach them in different ways' (2018, n.p). Differing ways in which Muslim educators teach Muslim learners is the focus of this paper. The growth of independent K-12 Islamic schools in Western societies has been an attempt to protect Islamic identities, wisdom, and practices amongst young Muslim learners, aiming to find a balance between state-mandated curricula and religious worldviews. Most are founded