Introduction

In January and November 2015, Paris was shaken by a series of coordinated bombing attacks. In 2016, Brussels experienced a similar fate. In the aftermath of these terrible events, new collaborations and partnerships were forged. On 17 March 2015, the ‘Paris Declaration’ was launched: a call for action, at all levels, to strengthen the role of education in ‘promoting citizenship and the common values of freedom, tolerance and non-discrimination, strengthening social cohesion, and helping young people become responsible, open-minded and active members of our diverse and inclusive society’. In 2015, the Council of Europe described radicalisation as ‘an individual or collective recruitment into violent extremism or terrorism’. In a similar vein, the Council of Europe also launched a new initiative titled ‘Democratic Schools: Safe Spaces for All’, which aims to assist education professionals and school communities as a whole. The main idea of both initiatives is to contribute to an open, inclusive and safe environment in education across member states. In 2018, a Council of Europe report posed the following questions regarding education policy: do counter-terrorism policies give rise to contradictory demands on educators, asking them to build social cohesion and resilience while at the same time requiring them to employ a logic of suspicion in spotting potential radicals, i.e. towards their Muslim pupils? Could national policies designed to identify and prevent radicalisation inadvertently undermine the very social cohesion they aim to preserve (Ragazzi 2018)? Ragazzi reports that counter-radicalisation policies might come into conflict with some key principles promoted by the Council of Europe including: education is a transformative process; schools should be safe and free learning environments; education should be based on diversity; and teachers are seen as role models (Ragazzi 2018: 11).

In Belgium an Action Plan for the Prevention of Radicalisation Leading to Extremism and Terrorism (hereafter ‘Action Plan Radicalisation’) was launched on 3 April 2015 by the Flemish government (Vlaamse Regering (hereafter Vl. Reg.) 2015). This Action Plan Radicalisation set out a strategic framework which included eleven domains of action. The document did not include a definition of the concepts of radicalisation, extremism or terrorism.

The research that has been brought together in this volume was intended to be presented at the 4th Birmingham Spring Islam Conference in April 2020. Individually, we have both had a longstanding interest in the ways European Islamic studies is being reformed in response to demographic changes in European states, concerns over security and integration, higher education policy reforms, and social and political conflict over university curricula. We wanted to bring together experts from across Europe with the aim of creating a volume that can provide insight into the extent of these changes across Europe and the varied ways states have responded to a broadly similar set of issues.

In the event, this conference had to be held virtually due to the lockdowns brought about by the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic earlier in the year. This meant, of course, that it was not possible to have the in-depth discussions of the draft papers which can normally take place face to face. However, meeting on Zoom meant that we could have participants from further afield who would not have been able to take part in a conventional event – meaning that this collection has a wider range of contributions. Despite the unfavourable circumstances we held some good critical evaluations of the draft papers on Zoom in a meeting spread over two days. Responses to those discussions and further written comments from participants led to the present volume.

We are grateful to Emma House and Isobel Birks at Edinburgh University Press and to the two anonymous reviewers whose comments were very helpful to us in producing the final versions of the papers. We also want to thank colleagues at the Muslims in Britain Research Network for supporting and promoting the conference. We owe a particular debt of gratitude to Dr Sariya Cheruvallil-Contractor for agreeing to provide a concluding chapter reflecting on the contents of the volume.

Introduction

In many European countries, forms of knowledge related to Islam from an ‘inside’ perspective are currently being incorporated into educational systems (cf. Johansen 2006; Ferreiro Galguera 2011; Aslan and Windisch 2012; Vinding 2013). In higher education, various efforts are being made to introduce courses in Islamic theology or Islamic studies, imam and clergy training, and Muslim welfare work. Higher education programmes also seek to meet the need for religious education in schools, mosques, hospitals, prisons and the military (Pattison et al. 2013). In Muslim-minority countries in Europe, this development started about forty years ago (Aslan 2012: 59). The specific forms of Islamic studies or Islamic theology courses vary according to the national or regional educational system. In France, for example, imam training is offered at a private Islamic university, although there was one short-lived effort to teach Islamic theology at a public university in Strasbourg. This differs from the situation in Austria and Germany, where Islamic theology courses are offered at state universities (cf. Ferreiro Galguera 2011; Aslan 2012; Nielsen 2012). European countries also have differing state–religion conceptions (cf. Fetzer and Soper 2005; Nielsen 2012), and differing conceptions of the secular–religious distinction. In the countries that have established some form of Islamic higher education (e.g., the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy and Bulgaria), this has mostly been done through cooperation with religious representatives or organisations, in what are clearly top-down state initiatives. This is also true of the renowned Islamic theology programme in Bosnia (cf. Karić 2012). None of these countries have established Islamic higher education solely at the initiative of religious communities, in the sense of formally recognising private initiatives. Many do, however, have bottom-up initiatives in the form of private, traditional seminaries (cf. Haroon Sidat, Chapter 7, this volume). In France for example, degrees from the Institut Européen des Sciences Humaines (IESH), a private Muslim teaching institution, are not recognised within the state's educational system. Overall, there are many private initiatives and schools in Europe, while public and state initiatives are rare (cf. Aslan 2012: 59).

Introduction

Islam is not limited to one particular region or centre, grounded by its ‘intrinsic universality’ which Islam shares with Judaism and Christianity (Hirschkind 2001: 3). Consequently, there is an acceptance that it can be ‘entirely re-territorialised’ (Kahani-Hopkins and Hopkins 2002: 288), and thus the practice of faith becomes fundamentally imperative to discussions around Muslim identities in Europe. Over the last seven decades or so Europe has experienced a significant influx of migrants and refugees, huge numbers of whom are predominately from the Middle East and Africa who identify themselves as Muslims. In fact, according to the PEW Research Center, the Muslim share of the European Unions’ total population as of mid-2016, was estimated at 25.8 million (4.9 per cent of the total population), up from 19.5 million (3.8 per cent) in 2010. With the high migration rates continuing, this figure is expected to increase to 14 per cent of Europe's population by 2050 (PEW Forum 2010, 2017). Changes in religious profiling and the recording and analysis of their religious behavioural characteristics are different across various countries in Europe, and the levels of religious commitment or religiousness among the Muslim population also differ. Other factors such as differences in fertility rates, the size of youth populations and people changing their faith also need to be taken into account (PEW Forum 2015). Nonetheless, there is a growing body of research noting an increase in the prominence of religion as a key marker of identity, particularly when religious groups are positioning themselves within a secular environment (Hashemi 2009: 2). Although this sense of religious identity can influence Muslims both ‘positively and negatively’, it has raised anxiety in Europe. There is now an increase in discourse around the ‘Muslim question’ (Norton 2020: ix), and the term ‘Muslimness’ is often used in research literature. This comprises three categories: a person's own understanding of their Muslim identity; their association with the larger Muslim community – ummah; and the ‘visible display’ or ‘practice of commitments’ to their faith within society (Shah 2019: 344).

Despite religious identity profoundly shaping the daily lives of some Muslims residing in Europe, for whom it is a crucial link to their ‘sense of belonging and self-worth’ (Modood 2005: 31), for other Muslims regarded as ‘secular Muslims’ (Panjwani 2017: 601), it may not be so salient.

Representation is a fraught concept and practice in contemporary political life. Man – that is, the liberal humanist ‘average’ adult-white-heterosexual-able-bodied-male citizen who speaks standard English (Deleuze and Guattari 1980/1987: 105) – has been, and continues to be – decidedly over-represented. As Sylvia Wynter puts it, this Western bourgeois conception of Man ‘overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself’ (2003: 260). For Wynter, the ‘struggle of our times’ is ‘the struggle against this overrepresentation’ (Wynter 2003: 262). Samaa, the young woman of colour quoted above (by Issa 2021) – exemplifies the frustration at this over-representation of Man in politics. On 15 March 2021, tens of thousands of people across Australia rallied against gender-based violence, following a wave of allegations of historical and recent sexual assault by Members of Australia's Parliament and their staffers. This emerging national outrage was fuelled by the statements of Brittany Higgins, an ex-political adviser who alleged in February 2021 that she was raped in a minister's office in 2019. This outcry and these protests are evanescent expressions of dissent at work – people refusing those who claim to represent them, speaking and acting beyond sanitised forums in which they are invited by those in power to ‘have a voice’.

In Australia, it is well documented that the majority of elected political representatives come from white, middle-class backgrounds and are male. A report by independent think tank Per Capita sum-marises the ‘way’ to the Australian Parliament based on demographic data of federal Members of Parliament (MPs): ‘to be born male in Australia to a white family, attend a private school, get a university degree and then practise as a lawyer (if conservative) or work in a union (if progressive) before entering politics’ (Lewis 2019: 14). Even when more ‘diverse’ representatives are elected to formal political structures, these structures do not necessarily become more ‘inclusive’, nor produce better political outcomes for all constituents.

There are ‘many politics’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2006/1977: 190) in any dialogical exchange – tangled lines of speech, silence, ambivalent desire, impasses, refusal, opacity. In this chapter, I consider the politics and ambivalences of attempts to support students and teachers in schools to ‘express’ themselves and come to ‘understand’ each other through dialogue. The opportunity for dialogue between students and teachers has been posited as enabling students and teachers to reach an understanding across diverging positions and perspectives – to see things from each other's view, to understand each other's pressures and desires, to reach an understanding (see Habermas 1984: 44; see also Chapter 1). At times, student voice initiatives jumble school hierarchies and roles: for example, where students conduct interviews or participant observational research with teachers, such initiatives unsettle established assumptions about who asks and who answers questions, and who understands and who needs to understand. When premised on liberal humanist concepts of agency, rationality and the possibility of equality, promises of reaching understanding through dialogue risk eliding the specificities of when, where and under what conditions the dialogical encounter is staged, and the differential experiences of these dialogical encounters.

My attention, in this chapter, is on how institutional policies and everyday practices invite students’ voices to speak, or to conduct interviews with teachers, but then turn around and interpret some students’ voices, bodies, thoughts and desires to be the problem. Returning to Spivak's (1987) critique of Deleuze and Foucault discussed in the previous chapter, this is to question the conditions for listening when voices speak.

When students speak in classrooms, why is this speech sometimes interpreted as ‘disruptive’, as in the puppet scenario that opens this chapter? The scene played out in this puppet scenario is familiar to me and was familiar to the students who analysed this puppet scenario: some bodies, no matter what they say, are habitually apprehended and interpreted as too ‘disruptive’. In 2010, during a student voice research day run by a group of Year 9 students in the public secondary school where I worked, a Year 9 boy wrote on a black and white photo of the school's office area: ‘This school is shit’. This student used to be in the ‘students as co-researchers group’ – the Steering Committee – that was facilitating a student voice morning with all of Year 9. The Steering Committee had designed five arts-based research stations for students to rotate through during class time, facilitated by the student researchers; teachers of these classes were there to supervise the morning. One of these stations was a graffiti station – students were invited to tag black and white photos of various areas of the school in terms of how they felt about their ‘learning environment’. At this station, a supervising teacher observed this student writing the words ‘this school is shit’. The teacher sent him to a deputy principal. He was stood down from classes and later had a parent interview. While this student wrote ‘this school is shit’ during a so-called ‘student voice’ activity, this ‘expression’ of voice in this place and time was interpreted as a behaviour issue by supervising adults. There are some voices that educators ‘don't want to hear’ – bodies habitually known to be ‘incomprehensible [or] recalcitrant’ (Bragg 2001: 70) or interpreted to be ‘aggressive, rude or obnoxious’ (Pearce and Wood 2019: 21).

This chapter considers the ordering of voices and bodies in the history of education: that is, what happens when words are spoken (or written), and what words do to bodies. To invoke Paolo Freire's (1996) pedagogical entanglement of ‘reading the world’ and ‘reading the word’, this chapter explores the relationship between ‘speaking the word’ and ‘speaking the world’ in and through schooling. The chapter begins an exploration of the politics and materiality of voice in schools – the felt force of sounds issued forth from human bodies, viscerally apprehended by bodies.

Ten years ago, I regularly sat at a small table in a meeting room in a school library with small groups of secondary students who had been part of student voice initiatives at their school, for formalised research focus groups. Students and I sat with seven puppets and one marionette (borrowed from my university's library), as well as sheets of paper, coloured markers, postcards, an iPad and my university laptop. After a conversation about how they defined ‘student voice’ and their recollections of being a researcher as part of the school's student voice group, I invited students to speak, draw or compose a scenario relating to student voice, using any of the materials in the room. I told students that the scenarios could build on their personal experiences, or that they could compose a fictionalised story or explore an issue that they felt to be important surrounding student voice. Scenarios could be composed in written, visual or audio-visual form (e.g., write a narrative, draw a picture, video a puppet scenario, record a radio interview). Many groups elected to use the puppets and marionette for their scenario-creation, performing scenes that seemed to parody teachers’ responses to students’ speech in classrooms. During one conversation when I asked students whether the puppet scenarios were a form of data, one student said that they ‘show what happens daily in our school’ (see Figure 2.1).

Before, during and after these conversations, I questioned the ethics and politics of writing about what students said and produced in such research encounters. There are many uses that have been made of the voice of the child, and many theories to account for what voice does in and through research. I did not want to treat students’ words as extractible resources, objectified and abstracted from the specific material circumstances of their embodied formation. As I explain further below, I hoped to position students as theorists of their own lives and experiences; later that year, students viewed and analysed each other's scenarios (see below). Yet, I also was wary of making claims that positioning students as theorists of their own lives was necessarily liberating, or that co-theorising would necessarily change their school (Mayes 2016b).

Introduction

The complexity of the task of teaching about Islam in Poland is exacerbated by the Polish socio-political context that comprises an ethnically and culturally homogeneous society, a right-wing government since 2015, the growing influence of far-right movements and the unmitigated dominance of the Roman Catholic Church (henceforth RCC) in the public sphere. All these factors not only create an environment in which Islamophobia thrives; they actively fuel it. For the purpose of this chapter, we ask: how can teaching against Islamophobia (involving transformation of attitudes and fact-checking) be delivered hand in hand with teaching about Islam in Polish educational contexts?

Given the lack of any religious education beyond Catholic instruction in 95 per cent of Polish schools (Balsamska et al. 2012), any sporadic references to Islam are made in the course of general education where it is framed in terms of conflict rather than dialogue between faiths (Górak-Sosnowska 2006). Post-secondary education is the first opportunity for Polish students to receive more detailed and systematic education about Islam and Muslims. Despite the hostile climate for Muslims (both indigenous and immigrant) and refugees, in Poland there is a marked interest in university humanities and social science courses and programmes that may have a partial focus on Islam, such as political science, sociology, anthropology and security studies. However, these disciplines (as taught in Poland) do not traditionally have a focus on the MENA region or south Asia (which might facilitate some familiarity with Islam as a cognate topic). In addition, post-colonial, ethnic, critical race or indigenous studies are fairly marginal in Poland in terms of theoretical influence. This set of intersecting issues may prevent advisers from being able to successfully teach against Islamophobia in the classroom while advising on Islam-related projects.

While we recognise that ‘Islamophobia’ is a highly contested term (Cesari 2011), it is, nevertheless, useful in providing a coherent descriptor for ‘experiences of discrimination, dehumanization, and misrepresentation of Muslims, those of Muslim heritage, and a systemic miseducation about Islam itself’ (Kincheloe et al. 2010: x, emphasis added). There is a growing body of literature pertaining to Islamophobia recently exploring, notably, the process of racialisation of Islam as a part of the Islamophobic logic (Selod and Embrick 2013; Garner and Selod 2015; Selod 2015; Husain 2019).

I start in the middle of a recurring dream. There is a viscous substance stuck on my tongue and the roof of my mouth. Perhaps it is the soft mixture of stone, sand and water that hardens into concrete. Perhaps it is the sticky contents of two chewed packets of chewing gum. I am trying to grasp and grab and pull the viscous substance out. Sometimes, it is unmoveable. Other times, it loosens and surges and doesn't stop – like some endless handkerchief pulled from a magician's coat sleeve. When this happens, it feels like my intestines are evacuating through my open mouth.

To speak – to ‘give voice’ – involves muscles and guts of the speaker: air flowing through larynx, vocal cords shaping and tensing, vibration, cartilage, stomach muscles, tongue, lips. Voices are physical and material, issuing from bodies and felt by bodies. Lines of breath rendered resonant by the vibrations of vocal cords become speech in material and social configurations. To speak implies (though not always) a listener – a living, breathing interlocutor – whose facial expressions, raised eyebrow, encouraging nod, whisper, laugh, groan can spur the speaker on or somehow move the speaker to close their mouth. Voices respond and intermingle with their sonic and social environments: pitch levels of speakers may align when the speakers are in agreement, or escalate in volume in situations of conflict, or mimic the contours of other voices when power relations are asymmetrical. Sometimes, in the moment of speech, something else surges forth, breaking the boundaries of bodies and skin and guts: a blush springs to the surface, tears spill out, rage burns up, laughter escapes. The spoken voice is also inextricably bound up with silence – not the opposite of speech but entangled with it. The physicality of a voice can alter the material environment – the force of a cry can enliven an object to vibrate, or combine with other proximate frequencies to compose a soundscape.

The term ‘voice’ is also used for the written, authorial voice – the I that writes what they have thought-felt and are thinking-feeling. Crafting an authorial voice is fraught, particularly when the authorial I is preoccupied with the problem of how to think-feel-relate-act with the voices-bodies of (human and more-than-human) others that are inextricable from themselves.

It has become common sense that educational reform interventions (such as student voice) must be evaluated to know if they have worked or not. The data-driven school sets (or is given) targets to meet through reform interventions; for example, to reduce suspension rates by a certain percentage, or improve attendance rates by a certain percentage, or improve the percentage of students attaining a particular standard of academic performance. As I foregrounded in Chapter 3, Stephen Ball (2003) has written about how data come to ‘stand for, encapsulate or represent the worth, quality or value of an individual or organisation within a field of judgement’ (216). It is taken for granted that reducing suspension rates is right, because a reduction in suspension is supposed to signify that bodies are speaking, feeling and behaving in a manner that is morally agreeable to others and that is right according to the principles of morality. It is taken for granted, in reporting the outcomes of particular reform interventions, that these outcomes are true – that reported outcomes correspond with the intervention. It is taken for granted that reported outcomes stick to bodies and sediment and congeal in schools: that a reduction in suspensions manifests an improved school, and that the school can continue to progress and build on these outcomes in future reform efforts. According to this common sense, collecting data as evidence of whether or not an intervention has worked enables the school to be accountable and transparent to funding bodies. Data thus become desired (Thompson and Sellar 2018) – particularly data that will demonstrate positive growth over linear time, as judged against predetermined normative standards of what particular reform interventions were intended to achieve.

These straight lines between problem, intervention, data and evaluation begin to crack when a reform produces perplexing affects and effects. Things don't always turn out the way we would prefer them to turn out. Voices may say things that some may not like to hear; the experience of ‘having a voice’ may not feel ‘empowering’; students having a voice may not engender the changes that are desired, and different changes may be desired by differentially positioned bodies.

Introduction

Just over ten years ago in 2010, the first institutes for Islamic theological studies at public German universities opened their doors to students. In the background, a whole society was awaiting something between complete failure and absolute fulfilment of prevailing high expectations. Scholars of Oriental and Islamic studies both welcomed the establishment of a theological neighbouring discipline and warned against a confessionalisation of research on Islam. The state had high expectations of successfully integrating migrant Muslims into German society, and addressing complex issues such as de-radicalisation. Muslim organisations saw the emerging academic field as an opportunity to make progress on their way to official recognition by the state, on the one hand, while fearing state influence on their religion, on the other. Muslim students had vast expectations and projections about a new academic discipline that teaches their religion. Ten years on, where do Islamic theological studies in Germany stand against these expectations? How did it establish itself as an academic discipline, and what future challenges and prospects await it?

In this chapter, we will first present the backdrop of the establishment and the ideas that led to the science policy decision to introduce departments of Islamic theological studies at public universities. We will argue that this process did not take place in a linear form, but was determined by different actors, different expectations and fears. We will give an insight into the first decade of experience and we will present discussions around and within the discipline, its academic staff, the students, the impact of and on the Muslim community and the relationship to Islamic studies. We will also sketch out how the departments are integrated within the larger university setting vis-à-vis other disciplines that take Islam as an object of study, and how far the assumption of a confessional perspective on Islam is valid in this context. Here, we will argue that a closer look at the practices of knowledge-production at universities shows that boundaries between confessional and non-confessional studies are clearer to define in theory than to find in practice. It is worth looking at the epistemic challenges the canon of an Islamic theological tradition receives from being engaged with an interdisciplinary setting and practical demands.