Abstract
Islamic tradition promotes a holistic approach of personality development in which, we argue, three educational concepts take the centre stage: tarbiyah, ta’leem and ta’deeb. Looking through the lens of these concepts, we analyse two Islamic religious education (IRE) curricula: the 2001 and 2012 curricula for Flemish public secondary education provided by the Representative Body for IRE. We conduct a systematic thematic document analysis of the 2001 and 2012 curricula to map curricula elements that potentially contribute to Islamic personality development through IRE classes. Crucially, this article seeks to investigate whether the 2001 and 2012 curricula for Flemish public secondary education are in line with these central IRE concepts. We observe that the 2012 curriculum does contain relevant anchor points to work on tarbiyah, ta’leem and ta’deeb and to strengthen an Islamic personality in Muslim pupils. Hence, we argue that there is an urgent need for a new, adequate and sufficiently comprehensive IRE curriculum for Flemish public secondary education, developed by an expert committee—which should include Belgian-educated educational experts—in order to meet the expectations of all the stakeholders. Since in our view, this is the first step for a qualitative update of Flemish IRE. Further reflections on both curricula and recommendations for a new IRE curriculum are outlined in the discussion and conclusion sections.
Highlights
Religious education is in the midst of heated international political debates since 9/11 (Comité I, Comité I 2001)
We compiled a list of the various elements and subjects discussed in the curricula that could be linked to the concepts, tarbiyah, ta’leem and ta’deeb (Appendix A)
We looked for sentences, descriptions and words that referred directly or indirectly to Islamic identity or personality development
Summary
Religious education is in the midst of heated international political debates since 9/11 (Comité I, Comité I 2001). In West-European countries, terrorist attacks such as London 7/7, Madrid 3/11, Amsterdam 11/2, Paris 2015 and Brussels 2016 have intensified these debates. On 22 March 2016, three coordinated suicide bombings occurred in the Brussels region, the Belgian population struggled with the question: ‘How can Belgian-educated young Muslims become terrorists, and commit such terrible acts in their own country, and home town Brussels?’ Heated debates in the public space and at the political level were widely reported and followed in the (social) media. One consequence of the attacks was that the Islamic religious education (IRE) provided by Flemish public schools was questioned and—surprisingly enough—simultaneously brought in as a positive lever against violent radicalisation (Radicalisation Commission 2015a, 2015b; Flemish Government 2015b, 2016, 2018; De Standaard 2017b; VRT NWS 2015)
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