Together with my colleagues Thijl Sunier and Jamal Ahajjaj, I have written a chapter “Activating Muslims: Citizenship in Dutch Islamic Schools” in the volume Difference and Sameness in Schools: Perspectives from the European Anthropology of Education. Thanks to Laura Gilliam and Christa Markom for their great work and bringing all these different perspectives together.

“In recent decades, all European states have reformulated ‘good’ citizenship in more explicit cultural terms. This is motivated by concerns about Islam and the assumed ‘distance’ or even ‘clash’ between Islamic and European values. Consequently, the teaching of citizenship values in European schools has become a policy priority.

In this article we move away from the assumption that citizenship education is to be analyzed as a rather static set of laws, rules, procedures, and values within a specific nation-state, which together make up specific models of citizenship through which ethnicity, sexuality, religion, race, and gender no longer determine one’s legal and social position. When we look at colonial and postcolonial contexts, we see that citizenship is not only about inclusion and the granting of rights to all citizens, but is at least as much about struggles over who counts as a citizen and what that may mean. The Islamic schools therefore present us with a puzzle: if Islam, and by extension, Islamic schools, are seen as a problem in terms of the ideal nation state and good citizenship, then how do they engage with the obligation to teach active citizenship? This partly builds upon another conundrum of the Dutch system: how do faith schools, which are state funded rather than private, but with a large degree of autonomy in their teaching approaches, deal with an obligation to teach citizenship as defined by the state?

Based upon ethnographic fieldwork conducted at four Dutch Islamic primary schools, we argue that the relation between pupils and teachers, the discussions in the classroom, and the way in which children with a Muslim background are made aware of their position in society, are crucial but often ignored constitutive factors in the making of citizens.”

Keywords: Resilience, Dutch school system, Pillarisation, Confessional school, Islamic school, Citizenship (education), Citizen outsiders, Integration, Discursive competence

Go to the book also for the other fascinating chapters:

Difference and Sameness in Schools

Perspectives from the European Anthropology of Education

Edited by Laura Gilliam & Christa Markom