What Knowledge for Understanding?

Abstract

This chapter addresses three central concerns. This first is of an ethical nature: ‘Should schools teach about Islam and Muslims to a greater extent than they do now, and should they do so with the objective of displacing particular harmful views with other views?’ This question must be answered with regard to the roles of school in society in transmitting social norms and creating citizens, but also with regard to the growth of anti-Muslim sentiment that has come to be called ‘Islamophobia’.1 The second concern is both theoretical and practical: ‘Can the problem of Islamophobia be addressed by confronting ignorance about Islam, or rather particular kinds of knowledge about Islam, with other kinds of knowledge about Islam and Muslims?’ While prejudice against Muslims and ignorance of Islam have been connected in empirical work,2 the nature of the connection between attitudes and knowledge is far from clear. This chapter will therefore seek to offer some clarification on this relationship with reference to the social foundations of anti-Muslim sentiment. Such clarification is essential for my final concern, which is to identify what educational strategies schools might best adopt in order to promote tolerance and understanding. I divide these strategies broadly into universalising strategies, which emphasise shared experiences across religions and cultures, and particularising strategies, which emphasise the distinctive characteristics of Islam and Muslim populations and the distinctive history of their reception in the west.