Teaching Islam: Islamic Religious Education at Three Muslim Schools in Sweden

Teaching Islam: Islamic Religious Education at Three Muslim Schools in Sweden

This study concerns the formulation of Islamic religious education (IRE) at three Swedish Muslim schools which offered IRE as an extra curricular subject, one to three hours per week. The study contributes to the understanding of how IRE is formed as a confessional school subject within the framework and under the jurisdiction of the Swedish school system. The meaning of the studied IRE was construed as a way of building connectedness between pupils to both the common Islamic tradition and the Swedish society, but also highlighting and establishing connections between these two entities. The primary finding is that it is inaccurate to speak about IRE in homogeneous terms since the content varies distinctively between different schools. In addition, it has been found that the educational questions considered by the involved teachers are similar to those considered by many other types of teachers. Although classroom observations and teacher interviews showed that the general content of all three IRE classrooms included the teaching of the Quran, Islamic history through religious narratives and song, specific content variations were evident. Differences concerned approaches to the teaching of the Quran, ways of using religious narratives and genre of songs. Therefore pupils in each school received somewhat different answers to local and global questions that were raised in the classrooms, indicating somewhat different interpretations of Islam. These differences suggest that the depiction of IRE as a transmission of Islam to the younger generation is not accurate since it leads to the impression that religions are insulated entities that are capable of being passed from one generation to the next without any change taking place. Instead this study shows that the teachers translate the content of IRE according to their perception of what is vital for their pupils to know and suitable for them to comprehend since they constantly choose content and negote its meaning.