Introduction

After completing the darsi-i nizami, a classical form of Islamic education at a dar al-ulum in modern Britain, I enrolled at a university to complete a BA in Economics and Social studies. A few years later, an opportunity arose to pioneer a partnership with a university in offering the first two years of a BA in Islamic studies at the dar al-ulum. At the time, I saw the partnership as the beginning of a broader project to address the educational needs of future Muslim scholars, or the ulama, in Britain. I wanted to be part of the discourse that improved the understanding of dar al-ulums, and Islam more generally. As a young British-born Muslim, I was a student, or taalib, when 9/11 happened. I went on to complete a doctoral thesis, which was the first-ever ethnographic account of a Deobandi dar al-ulum in Britain.

As we will see, the ulama were not only ‘religious’ but were open to and engaged with various epistemologies. With colonial modernity, this horizon became narrow. Deoband, as it emerged in 1866, was in response to and with modernity (Ingram 2018: 33). However, what we are observing in modern Britain is the early signs of an epistemic openness. This presents an opportunity for dar al-ulums and some of their taalibs to work with(in) British universities. The universities can also benefit from this rich tradition, though the challenge will be whether they are open to such overtures in advancing the quest of providing a public good and exploring alternative paradigms of knowledge-production.

Over the past thirty years, student voice has become a popular educational reform strategy, particularly across education systems in Western liberal democracies. The term ‘student voice’ is frequently used to describe a range of initiatives where students contribute to decision making about matters affecting them, including on classroom- or school-wide practices, curricula and pedagogies, educational governance and policy and educational research. Student voice is argued to play a pivotal role in crafting relations of respect, understanding, empowerment and trust in educational institutions.

Proponents of student voice draw on international rights to advocate for the active participation of students in school decision making. Article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC; United Nations 1989) declared the ‘right’ for children and young people to ‘express’ their views ‘in all matters affecting them’. The UNCRC became ‘the most ratified human rights treaty in history’ (UNICEF 2021), though it is still not ratified by the USA. Following the UNCRC, the term ‘voice’ has been used to describe ‘the enactment of the child's participatory rights to express an opinion, remain silent, access information and be included in the decision-making processes on matters affecting them’ (Gillett-Swan and Sargeant 2019: 400). In multi-medial worlds, voice also takes many more-than-linguistic and more-than verbal forms – including gaze, facial expressions, silence, stance, gestures, touch, adornment, body art, clothes, drawings, emojis and digital/arts creation in spatial-material arrangements of power (Mannion 2007; McGregor 2004; Thomson 2011: 23). An expansive definition of voice is ‘any expression of any student, anywhere, anytime about anything related to learning, schools or education’ (SoundOut 2021: para. 1).

Student voice can take myriad forms, with multiple political trajectories and consequences. From the early years of student voice research, Michael Fielding (1999a) has advocated for ‘radical collegiality’ between students and teachers as a ‘rupture of the ordinary’ in schools (Fielding 2004: 296). Yet, as Fielding maps, there are many ways in which students can be positioned in student voice endeavours – from ‘data sources’, ‘active respondents’, ‘co-inquirers’, ‘knowledge creators’, ‘joint authors’, to being part of collective processes of ‘intergenerational learning as lived democracy’ (Fielding 2011: 12).

One of the challenges facing the attempts at establishing public higher education in Islamic theology in Europe has been the forging of Islamic religious authority. Creating viable cooperation between universities and Muslim stakeholders (including potential students as well as subsequent employers for graduates) and finding the right teachers who can meet the requirements for academic positions at a European public university as well as present a convincing religious habitus, have not always been easy. One of the available frameworks for understanding and debating these challenges has been the insider–outsider distinction. In the context of Islamic theology this distinction seems to indicate both a distinction between confessional and non-confessional teaching, between Islamic and non-Islamic, and between inside and outside the epistemic domain of the public university. Across the board, insider–outsider discussions here largely draw upon what we could call a secular discursive repertoire, for example, assumptions about the category religion and its position vis-à-vis domains of publicly sanctioned knowledge. In neighbouring areas of European academia, a different conversation has intensified during the last decade, legitimising certain forms of insider positionality as more insightful, knowing and authentic. This conversation has been launched mainly by students in the humanities and the social sciences, it focuses on the role of power in knowledge production, and it is driven by a critique of claims to universality and the exclusion of non-Western knowledge traditions from university curricula. In many respects, this mobilisation continues debates from the 1970–90s about black history, feminist epistemology, post-colonialism and Eurocentrism, and it is articulated not through a distinction between confessional and non-confessional, but rather through the binary of oppressor– oppressed, lodging the discussion within a struggle for justice and equality.

Both Islamic theology and what I in the remainder of this chapter will call newer social justice mobilisation in the academy represent attempts to open up the public European universities to new and potentially challenging forms of knowledge. As such, they elicit various forms of boundary work (Gieryn 1983; McCutcheon 2003; Johansen 2006; also Dreier, Chapter 6, this volume) that in different ways contribute to the conflictual reproduction of a European academic field. My aim in this chapter is to unpack and compare these two forms of boundary work in order to discuss their different ramifications and consider what they tell us about the epistemic underpinnings of European (secular) universities.

Introduction

Debates about the relationship between Islamic seminaries and institutions of higher education often distinguish these two sectors by reference to their pedagogical and epistemological approaches as being either ‘confessional’ or ‘non-confessional’. This is likely to reflect a discourse and vocabulary that has shaped the world of religious education in schools for many years (Thompson 2004), and to some extent the respective approaches of ‘theology’ and ‘religious studies’ in the academy. Over the last decade or so, this vocabulary seems to have grafted itself onto discussions about the relationship between Islamic seminaries and universities as well, but often with little critique.

Given the changed landscape of advanced teaching and learning about Islam and Muslims in Britain over the last twenty-five years (Scott-Baumann and Cheruvallil-Contractor 2015), this chapter questions whether the terminology ‘confessional’ and ‘non-confessional’ remains helpful (at all – to anyone). Influenced by the way in which the binaries of ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ have come to be regarded as problematic in relation to ethnographic social scientific fieldwork (for an example in British Muslim studies, see Abbas 2010), I propose that the assumed binary of confessional/non-confessional presents similar difficulties, and is arguably outdated. Influenced by social scientific perspectives which argue that identities and positionalities (in relation to more or less anything) are contextually dependent, negotiated, socially constructed and performed, I suggest that it may be helpful to move beyond the assumptions that seem to be inherent in the terms ‘confessional’ and ‘non-confessional’.

But this exploration is necessarily interdisciplinary, as well as being informed by social scientific perspectives. It will involve reference to developments in religious studies, philosophy of religion and religious education. Traversing through these various disciplines, I hope to argue that concepts and vocabulary, and people and institutions, are far more complex, untidy and confused than any simplistic notions of ‘confessional’ and ‘non-confessional’ seem to suggest. In the last part of this chapter, I want to present some ideas about enabling criteria and opportunities for supporting partnership between Islamic seminaries and universities in the teaching of the Islamic tradition.

Breathing – absorbing oxygen, releasing carbon dioxide – can be dangerous, for some more than others. In Australia, the ‘unprecedented’ Black Summer bushfires in southeastern Australia in late 2019 and early 2020 burned up to 24 to 40 million hectares across multiple states and territories (Commonwealth of Australia 2020a: 1.12, 1.14). Smoke infiltrated borders of the skin, of fur, of steel and brick and mortar, killing nearly 3 billion vertebrates by incineration, asphyxiation and starvation (World Wildlife Fund 2020). The fires were the direct cause of thirty-three human deaths; their respiratory effects contributed to over 400 other human deaths (Borchers Arriagada et al. 2020). Blanche Verlie (2022a) writes about these fires: ‘In breathing the smoke, we inhaled incinerated ecosystems, and the tiny particles of charred multispecies bodies made their way into our lungs, our blood, our organs, our brains’ (297). These fires, and their effects on breath, fuelled further mass climate justice activism that had already been happening in Australia and across the world.

Before climate justice activism amidst the Black Summer fires in Australia, there had already been other protests against climate inaction in the midst of poor air quality and pollution, and other protests met with respiratory assault; asphyxiation and suffocation were no new phenomena. In Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, a protester at the September 2019 global strike for climate held a cardboard placard declaring, ‘We can't breathe money’ (Tee 2019). On the same day, in Delhi, India, a young protester said:

Aman Sharma's eloquent words reverberated later, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, when philosopher Achille Mbembe (2020) proposed a ‘universal right to breathe’ for ‘all life’, including and exceeding humans (61–2).

Introduction: Power, Intersectional Identity and the Study of Islam

This important volume explores the tensions and opportunities that emerge from the intellectual encounter in Europe between what are perceived as ‘confessional’ and ‘academic’ approaches to the study of Islam and Muslims. As indicated in a number of chapters in this volume, this dichotomy positions as ‘confessional’ the study of Islam by believing Muslims (e.g., Jones, Chapter 1; Johansen, Chapter 3; Gilliat-Ray, Chapter 4; Dreier, Chapter 6). Islamic studies as undertaken in European universities is usually positioned or labelled as ‘academic’. A dichotomy on its own would be unproblematic. However, key to this dichotomy in approaches to the study of Islam is a power dynamic that, at least in Western intellectual contexts, posits ‘academic approaches’ to Islamic studies as more critical, more rigorous, more desirable and somehow as being superior to what are termed as ‘confessional approaches’. This can be contrasted to preferences within diverse Muslim communities that continue to valorise traditional forms of Islamic learning, especially in relation to positions of religious authority and leadership within Muslim communities. However, as a young alimah (traditionally trained female Muslim scholar) stated to me in a discussion about Islamic scholars in Britain, ‘Alims and alimahs need jobs and for these we need university degrees’. And so even in Muslim contexts, traditional forms of Islamic studies are devalued in liberal and marketised contexts that privilege employability. It is these power dynamics that determine how we produce knowledge, and why and how new knowledge is disseminated and shared.

These power dynamics are gendered. In wider Western/European society female Muslim scholars suffer multiple penalties in relation to their minority-ness (visible or not), Muslim-ness and their woman-ness. Enduring patriarchies in Muslim and wider Western contexts can devalue their scholarship and their societal authority. These power dynamics are also racialised and/or ethnicised with particular ethnic voices being allocated more authority (Nurein and Iqbal 2021). They are determined by intra-Muslim relations – for example, a Shia scholar who participated in the ‘Islam on Campus’ research project, underlined the criticality of the course he taught by emphasising the fact that he did not include books that were published in Saudi Arabia (Scott-Baumann et al. 2020).

Introduction

Over a decade ago, the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research attracted headline attention when it announced that it was going to spend around €18 million over five years on the establishment of programmes of Islamic theology in five universities. Albrecht Fuess optimistically suggested that:

The academic and research posts being funded in this manner have been filled (see Agai and Engelhardt and Dreier, Chapters 5 and 6, respectively, this volume), but it is still much too early to judge whether Prof. Fuess’ dreams are likely to become anything approaching reality.

In this chapter I provide an overview of the development of Islamic studies in Europe till the end of the twentieth century, and then look at recent developments in the subject in universities and in interaction with Muslim students and organisations. First, I shall briefly indicate some of the heritage of the Islamic studies which have been opened to question in the latter half of the twentieth century. Britain was one of the countries where change first took place, so a closer look at the process in the field over recent decades follows. Given that a major driver of change has been the settlement of Muslim communities, a survey of responses to pressures for training imams and teachers comes next. Finally, I shall sketch some reflections on the implications of all this for Islamic studies as a European university subject.

It makes sense at this stage to briefly sketch where we have come from, in other words, how Islamic studies entered European universities and what it meant in practice. There is an extensive history of European intellectual responses to Islam virtually as old as Islam itself (Daniel 1960; Rodinson 1988; Irwin 2006; Thomas 2009–13).

Introduction

Religion in education, from religious classes in primary and secondary schools to theology faculties in universities and even to religious symbols in classrooms, has always been a controversial issue in Turkey, a laïc (secular) state with a Muslim-majority population. This chapter seeks to map the development of theology faculties in Turkey. It argues that theology faculties have navigated between the confessional and the non-confessional since their establishment, and this has been closely related to the context of Turkish state policy, particularly the politics of religion. The development of the theology faculties will be explored through their history, their core purpose and curriculum, the employment areas to which their graduates progress and their distance-learning programmes. However, first, the religious landscape and politics of religion in Turkey will be provided as a background to the discussion, followed by a brief section on the key terms used in this discussion, namely, ‘confessional’ and ‘non-confessional’.

The Politics of Religion in Turkey

A frequently cited estimate suggests that about 99 per cent of the Turkish population follows Islamic teachings (Minority Rights Group International 2018). Even though Islam, like any other religion, has different denominations, sects and interpretations, the majority of Muslims in Turkey are believed to observe Sunni Islam. There are also Alevis, who are recognised as followers of Islam, and it is estimated that between 10 and 15 per cent of the population follows Alevism (Minority Rights Group International 2018). It is estimated that non-Muslim religious minorities comprise less than 1 per cent of the population (Minority Rights Group International 2018). Moreover, Turkey has never experienced any significant waves of non-Muslim immigration, nor has it experienced a secularisation of society as some Western countries have. In other words, the vast majority of the population has historically remained Muslim. It is likely that because of this, theology faculties have historically been seen and imagined as Islam-centric institutions. However, the issue has always been a question of ‘whose’ or ‘which’ Islam, which has been inextricably linked with the politics of religion.

Muslims and Higher Education in Europe

Surveying the vast body of scholarship on Muslims in Europe published over the last two decades, a small group of interrelated questions reappears again and again. What steps, if any, should states take to incorporate Muslim minorities into European societies and public institutions (Vertovec 1996; Koenig 2007; Modood 2009)? How do such steps, when made in response to the emergence of public Muslim identities, challenge existing settlements between religious organisations and the state (Joppke 2000; Cesari and McLoughlin 2005; Meer 2010)? Who speaks for Muslim communities and for the Islamic tradition in Europe (Jones et al. 2015)? As a European Muslim presence becomes increasingly established across the continent, what forms of Islamic knowledge are being produced and popularised (Bruinessen and Allievi 2007)? Do European states need new centres of Islamic authority to address the distinctive challenges that European Muslims face and to counterbalance the influence of overseas patronage (Lewis 2007)? What space is there, if any, in centres of Islamic authority for the voices of Muslim women, and how should the availability of this space influence the way the state engages with Islamic institutions (Brown 2006; Scott-Baumann and Cheruvallil-Contractor, 2015; Rashid 2016)? How should European states address the challenge of Islamist extremism, and how have policies designed to prevent extremism impacted on social integration, public institutions and Muslim communities (Cesari 2009; Sunier 2014; O’Toole et al. 2016)? Have such policies contributed to Islamophobia in Europe, and how have Muslims resisted this and other forms of Islamophobia (Brown 2010; Pantazis and Pemberton 2013)? How has this resistance connected with other anti-racist and de- or post-colonial writers and movements (Sayyid and Vakil 2010; Rizvi 2020)?

There is, I want to suggest, no institutional setting that brings all these questions together in quite the way that Islamic studies in European higher education does. For this reason, discussion of contemporary Islamic studies in European states is of far greater significance than the modest numbers of students taking the subject might initially suggest. In a number of countries across Europe, governments have taken steps to expand and formalise Islamic studies at higher level, with these steps ranging from the full creation of Islamic theological faculties (Agai and Engelhardt, Chapter 5, this volume) to the facilitation of links between universities and private Islamic seminaries (Geaves 2012; Scott-Baumann and Cheruvallil-Contractor 2015; Nielsen, Chapter 2, this volume).

Like the subtitle of Scott Hartley's (2017) recent book, The Fuzzy and the Techie: Why the Liberal Arts Will Rule the Digital World, the quotation in this chapter's epigraph encapsulates some of the promises that are made for a liberal arts education at the more hyperbolic end. In some quarters, the liberal arts are taken to be the key to solving all manner of apparently wicked problems, from rising sea levels to knife crime. In particular, the ‘real-world’ character of such degrees is often connected to their interdisciplinary nature: the approach is able to solve problems in the real world because it is not held back by the artificial divisions (and therefore restrictions) of the disciplines.

In this chapter, I argue that a tendency towards hyper-interdisciplinarity (Moore, 2011) contributes to this sense of the liberal arts as the solution to the future's problems. Hyper-interdisciplinarity is the belief that disciplines create problematic siloes for knowledge and must be broken down in order to facilitate access to the world as it really is. Such hyper-interdisciplinarity takes for granted the idea that disciplines are regressive because they take us away from ‘real’ knowledge, which is thought to be situated unproblematically in the ‘real’ world. Here, looking at specific, concrete problems in an interdisciplinary way is thought to give access to this real world and, in turn, to bypass the fustiness and unreality of the old-fashioned disciplines.

In this chapter, I show that, as opposed to this hyper-interdisciplinary register coming from both promotional websites and some senior managers, students, in different ways and often very subtly, launched critique. They questioned the idea that disciplines are inherently progressive or regressive, offering a less positivist and more pragmatic account of the real world and its relationship to disciplines. Certainly, as we will see, some students expressed hyper-interdisciplinary ideas, but they tended to do so less often and less simplistically.

New liberal arts degrees are particularly sold on the generic skills they impart (as we saw in Chapter 3) and, in particular, the idea that through them, one ‘learns to learn’. The idea is that, as opposed to the specific content imparted through disciplinary degrees, what is needed today is the ability to move quickly between projects and apply existing knowledge in new settings: adaptability, flexibility and a capacity for lateral thinking. Liberal arts are, then, thought of as an especially good training for the current job market, and liberal arts graduates are thought of as particularly employable.

It is difficult to amass meaningful evidence to show that liberal arts graduates have strong employment outcomes because so few students take them in any one national system, exacerbating the problems of controlling for institution and class effects, among other factors (Godwin, 2015a). In the English context, liberal arts degrees tend to be grouped under ‘combined honours’ for national statistical purposes. This is a very broad umbrella category that includes most degrees taken at the Open University, the largest higher education provider in the UK by number of students, with a strong remit for widening participation. As such, it is difficult to get a picture of graduate outcomes for the liberal arts at a national level, though the introduction of a ‘liberal arts’ code under the new Higher Education Classification of Subjects should make these easier to track, as well as indicating the term's increasing recognisability. While it is possible to compare outcomes for each individual degree against the average for that institution, the small numbers as well as the lack of demographic data at that level would make such comparisons unhelpful.

Therefore, instead of focusing on whether liberal arts graduates ‘are’ particularly employable, here, I explore narratives of employability as they are told on universities’ promotional webpages, as well as how such stories are complicated by some students and staff – especially those at modern universities, or who are in some ways less privileged than others. They are critical of attempts to present just one sort of educational value (for instance, an industrial one about skills or a market one about visibility on the job market) as the truth of the liberal arts. Nor do they conflate them; rather, they seek to interrogate the appropriateness of this or that value in specific educational settings.

In this chapter, we will examine three different ways that liberal arts students’ identities are constructed on institutions’ promotional websites, by academics of different stripes and by students themselves. The first is as good citizens: the idea that the liberal arts approach to education creates politically engaged and critical (but respectful) individuals with a concern for social justice. The second, connected student identity is the cosmopolitan: the well-travelled, and therefore open-minded, citizen of the world. Finally, we turn to the idea of the consumer student. This refrain, which can often be heard in relation to England's fee regime, suggests that modern students consider themselves to have bought a degree and that they appeal to their consumer rights whenever they are dissatisfied with their product.

You might notice that these are quite different sorts of student identity, for while citizenship and cosmopolitanism are generally thought of as positive attributes, a consumerist mentality is not. The purpose of bringing them together in this way is to show how a hierarchy of ambivalence operates differently in different contexts.

I have argued throughout the book that there is an inverse relationship between power and insight, so that, for instance, modern institutions’ promotional websites tend to seek to disentangle complex value systems in ways that the websites of old and post-war universities do not. Similarly, students in interviews offer insights about what is the most appropriate educational value to bring to bear in particular contexts, which academics may instead glide over. Even further than this, those students who are at some remove from the supposedly traditional higher education student (by virtue of class, ethnicity or nationality, for instance) work harder to pull apart different values in order to make claims about what is important in a particular context and what is not, in comparison to more privileged students; the same can be said for junior academics as opposed to those who are more senior. The three aspects of liberal arts students’ identities discussed in turn in this chapter (citizenship, cosmopolitanism and consumerism) build from one another in such a way that we are able to see these processes of disentanglement move from the gentler to the more significant.

This chapter offers some further context on the liberal arts in England and, in particular, foregrounds how senior academics describe their efforts to get a liberal arts degree on the books (and, in some cases, off the books). The broader context of English higher education's marketisation is important here: clearly, with a national funding model where the money follows the student, curricular innovators must make a business case to their institutions. This will generally hang on the twin hooks of student recruitment and cost effectiveness. These academic-to-institution justifications are important, including to those academics doing the justifying, and are generally not experienced as only hoops through which one must jump. The responsibility to recruit and to contribute to a sustainable institution is taken seriously by academics.

Yet, it is clear that this is not all that's going on. Mantras of either efficiency or giving students what they want do not account for the fact that at many institutions, student recruitment is not actually expected to be particularly high (though poor student recruitment is certainly the main reason given for the closure of liberal arts degrees). At some institutions, relatively small student intakes are positively desired (though this remains in tension with the need to recruit), and both the introduction of new core modules for small cohorts and the increased need for academic advising are hardly efficiencies. Instead, we should think about market concerns as entangled with a plurality of further values, including: a conservative domestic register of trust in the past; ideas about fame, repute and likeness with competitors; and an inspirational mode that prizes innovation and change. A complete picture of higher education today must contend with all this.

Therefore, just as the market for students should not be understood as the fundamental truth of the liberal arts, nor should we treat the proclaimed innovation of these degrees as a mere cover for elitism. It would be easy, for instance, to understand the turn to the liberal arts in English higher education as a mere re-traditionalising impulse: a longing look backward to some gilded past before application, vocationalism or even disciplinary specialisation contaminated the hallowed halls of higher education. The aristocratic undertones of liberal arts advocacy are a central concern of this book and should not be discounted as coincidental. Nonetheless, to stop at this observation is to simplify a much knottier picture.

On the one hand, and as its advocates often claim, there seems to be a particular timeliness to the liberal arts approach that would explain its increasing popularity, both in England and globally. On the other hand, we might just as well expect to see a move towards more technical and specialist education (Boyle, 2019), and indeed we do see that move at the same time; for instance, in the long-touted T level technical qualifications. I have tried to argue that the liberal arts do not present some inevitable direction of travel for English higher education, but rather constitute a much more complex mess of values that, by virtue of its very messiness, is able to appear as an inevitability and thus as the best imaginable form of education, rather than one among others.

Since the liberal arts approach is advocated as simultaneously the best preparation for modern work, as the most prized sort of education for the intellectual, as a personally curated degree for the world's individuals, as training in character, mind and soul – that is, because it is presented as the best preparation for work, leisure and life in general – it is the entanglement of these values that makes it possible to make hyperbolic yet vague claims for this as the best form of education in every context. It is also a brief hop from the idea that this is the best imaginable sort of education to the belief that it attracts the best sort of applicants and produces the best sort of graduates.

This conclusion begins with a discussion of plural values as at the heart of higher education today. Seeking to move beyond notions of unveiling within the critical sociology of education, which posit a fundamental truth (the reproduction of inequality) at the centre of educational encounters, masked by a cloak of legitimacy, this account stresses instead the idea of opening and closing one's eyes to different sorts of values, depending on what one is trying to do. Importantly, the students and academics I interviewed were themselves in the business of trying to unpack, and critique, what was happening in different educational contexts. This is a very significant difference between what individuals think about the liberal arts and how they are presented on institutions’ promotional websites.