Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education Vol. 32, No.

4, October 2011, 531 545

Pedagogic discourses and imagined communities: knowing Islam and being Muslim
Shiraz Thobani*
Department of Curriculum Studies, Institute of Ismaili Studies, London, UK Academic disciplines in the school curriculum which engage explicitly with cultural identities pose a major dilemma for liberal, pluralist societies seeking to foster the dual imperatives of diversity education and social cohesion. This paper uses the case of Islam as school knowledge to analyse the relations between political stances and symbolic constructions in English religious education. For this purpose, the study applies an interdisciplinary theoretical framework, integrating diachronic concepts of the nation-state with cultural recontextualization 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 of Britain, 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: sthobani@iis.ac.uk
ISSN 0159-6306 print/ISSN 1469-3739 online # 2011 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/01596306.2011.601551 http://www.informaworld.com

532 S. Thobani 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 liberal conservative 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 multiculturalism 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 association made 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 in institutions 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 interdisciplinary 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 to expand 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 of the 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, the unthinkable) 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 overlooked the concept of the nation in its preoccupation with the state (Young, 1971). From the

534 S. Thobani 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 national imaginary in modern nation-states, especially in their formative phases. In highlighting 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 sociopolitical strategies for diversity management, from the exclusion or containment of alterity 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 postimmigration 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 its purposive 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 available mobilizing 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 deals specifically 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 in the essentializing of alterity. Identity management is thus pursued through the

536 S. Thobani 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 and essence, 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 pigeonholed, 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 through which 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 nonindigenous 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 of the 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 policymakers 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 the religious traditions. To institute this demarcation, model syllabuses promoting a

538 S. Thobani 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 communitarian emphasis 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 that the 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 extreme instances, 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-based version 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

540 S. Thobani 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 the post-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 construction of a homogeneous Islam, and reciprocally, the potentially solidifying influence of 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 consensual 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, resulting in 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 of cultural 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, nonstatutory 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 communitarian forms of religious education, enacted in the multicultural and neoconservative phases, contributed to the creation of a class of Muslims who have turned to a purist interpretation of Islam, divorced of historical, political and sociocultural underpinnings that have shaped the diverse expressions and manifestations of Islam in Muslim histories and across Muslim societies?

542 S. Thobani 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 some respect intricately connected with the passage of the state from multicultural to neonationalist 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 that approaches it from civilizational, historical, cultural and humanistic perspectives, in

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contrast to the reductionist portraiture of a codified and performative religion. Applying this wider lens does not imply marginalizing aspects which have conventionally been accorded a privileged status, such as theology, law, ritual and ethics, but situating them on a broader canvas to get a better vantage point on them. Approaches and perspectives that aim to promote an engaging cultural literacy may create opportunities for the emergence of a true civic multiculturalism, in which cultural plurality is seen as a positive social asset rather than a national threat. At a conceptual level, too, more attention needs to be paid to the relation between religious education and the political context, a line of enquiry which has received relatively scant attention until recently (see, for example, Bolton, 2007; Gearon, 2008; Leirvik, 2004). It is hoped that this paper elicits further interest in opening up this important area of investigation.4 Notes
1. These institutions include madrasas, dar al-ulums, Quranic and mosque schools, Muslim private schools and colleges, and other supplementary education provisions. 2. The binary notion draws attention to the dual role of the nation-state reected in its regulatory functions and cultural interventions, while the diachronic aspect traces the shifts that the nation-state undergoes over different periods as a result of changing policies. 3. The classroom ethnographic study I undertook in 1999 2000 was located in an English borough situated in the suburbs of a large urban centre, where the majority of the population was composed of multi-ethnic and multi-faith immigrant groups. The schools were located in the two major socio-economic zones, the afuent south-east and the disadvantaged north-west. Seven of the schools visited were state-maintained comprehensives, the other three being Muslim privately-funded schools. Islam in the state schools was presented according to the agreed syllabus of the borough, and in Muslim schools through the Islamic studies syllabus. The research was undertaken through semi-structured interviews with local policymakers, religious education heads in state schools, and with headteachers, imams and Islamic studies teachers in the Muslim schools (see Thobani, 2010b for more details). 4. This paper was presented at the AERA Conference, Denver, Colorado, on 30 April 2010.

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Copyright of Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.