Muslim diversity, religious formation and Islamic religious education. Everyday practical insights into Muslim parents’ concepts of religious education in Austria

ABSTRACT

Since its establishment, Islamic religious pedagogy at German-speaking universities has primarily faced basic questions like: What kind of methodological and didactic approaches can be employed in Islamic Religious Education (IRE) and how should the structural framework be designed? Analyses concerning these questions are often drafted via top-down approaches, which neither hypothesise from practice nor consider the perspectives of Muslim populations and parents. This paper gives a hearing to those voices from a practice-theoretical research perspective, which is built upon an evidence-based empirical analysis of everyday practical realities. The study of these realities was conducted in Austria, where IRE has been taught within the public education system nationwide since 1982/1983. This article evaluates the importance Muslim parents assign to religious questions among different concepts of education, and also deals with the question of which pedagogical approach they favour. Furthermore, the paper analyses the parents’ position concerning religious formation in mosques and schools, and points out their related expectations, aspirations and worries. Consequently, the paper breaks new ground by profoundly illuminating the realms of experience of Muslim students and by providing the basis for pupils to be systematically taken into account in religious pedagogical and religious didactic approaches.

KEYWORDS:

• Islamic religious education (IRE)
• Muslim parents
• religious formation
• Muslim diversity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Regarding the distinction, Behr uses the term ‘education’ (in German: ‘Erziehung’). To emphasise the principle of autonomy and maturity, in this article the objective is referred to as ‘formation’ (in German: ‘Bildung’).

2. The research project with the title ‘Muslimische Milieus in Österreich’ (Muslim Milieus in Austria) headed by Ednan Aslan and Erol Yildiz has been carried out between 2012 and 2016.

3. To measure religiosity, the centrality scale (Huber 2003) was used. The scale ranges from a minimum value of 0 to a maximum value of 5. Those faithful whose religiosity has a value between 4 and 5 can be described as highly religious.

4. It should be pointed out that memorisation is not an outmoded didactic method per se. Especially within Islamic religious formation, the method is important, since the faithful have to know the preparation, procedure, bodily movements and recitation parts of prayers by heart to practice religious rituals such as obligatory prayers (five times a day, salat). Likewise, the memorisation of suras of the Qur’an is seen as a basic competence of Islamic formation within IRE in schools (Dafir 2015).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jonas Kolb

Dr. Jonas Kolb is an assistant professor at the Department of Islamic Theology and Religious Education at the University of Innsbruck.