Manhaj, or curriculum, broadly defined

I come from a language whose word for curriculum, manhaj, is used far more richly than is common in English. Lexically and etymologically, manhaj demonstrates to us an episteme from which the point of departure for curriculum is broadly defined. Almost all Arabic words have a triconsonantal root from which families of words are built according to set patterns, and for manhaj, that root is na-ha-ja, pronounced nahaja¹ (Al-Ma'any, n.d.-a; Ba’albaki, 1995, p. 1193). A root like nahaja defines the heart of all nouns and verbs built on its forms and extensions, carrying connotative shades of meaning beyond the word and denotative shared uses of the basic meaning. The root nahaja نَهج is a verb that means “to follow, pursue, take, enter upon; to proceed, act,” “to clarify, make clear,” as well as to become vivid, and “to pant, gasp, be out of breath” (Al-Ma'any, n.d.-a; Ba’albaki, 1995, p. 1193). Its expression as the noun nahj نَهج means “open way; plain road” and “method, procedure, way; and course, manner, approach” (Ba’albaki, 1995, p. 1193). Common phrases that are based on the root nahaja in education and research include manhaju al-ta'alīm or al-dirasa, the manhaj of learning or of study, which is used to refer to school curriculum (Ba’albaki, 1995, p. 1130); ‘ilmu al-manhaj, the knowledge of manhaj, which means “methodology” (Ba’albaki, 1995, p. 1130); as well as manhaju al-baḥth, which means “the methodology of research, research methods, research procedures” (Ba’albaki, 1995, p. 1130); or, colloquially in educational contexts, manhaj or minhāj (Al-Ma’any, n.d.-a). Nahaja is often used in conjunction with nahaja al-mas'alah, which means to make the issue clear (Al-Ma'any, n.d.-a), or when referring to a person who embodies considerable knowledge and ethics such that they are now an expert, role model, or manhaj ḥaq (Hawramani, n.d.). It shows up every day as manhaj ḥayah, and in the Quran as minhāj, to mean a way of life (such as faith is a way of life, reading is a way of life, this is my way of life, etc.), in addition to many other uses.

Thus, nahaja conveys not only to follow a path, similar to the Latin root currere, but also to clarify, to be intentional, to know, embody, and pursue; literally and linguistically nahaja involves a strenuous breathing that clings to an essential function of life. Using the root nahaja in any one of the forms links to its use in any of the other forms, pointing to how embodiment, intentionality, action, and attaining clarity are all interwoven. Its Arabic usage underscores how knowing and being are not easily categorized into separate realms, as they are in humanistic onto-epistemology, and how non-western worldviews have historically recognized curriculum as broadly defined. Thinking about curriculum through nahaja and its many forms demonstrates how nimbly other languages foreground and make natural expansive understandings of curriculum, an approach I have always centered in my own work (El-Sherif, 2016, 2019; El-Sherif & Sinke, 2018).

Since its beginnings, Curriculum Inquiry (CI) has frequently published articles that explore what curriculum, broadly defined, means and looks like, uncoupling curriculum from a Cartesian worldview that frames what counts as a valid relationship between knowledge and being. Recently, an article by Abdul-Jabbar (2020) excavated how the ninth-century Arab polymath Abu-Yaqub Al-Kindi widened traditional majlis spaces, multi-faceted places of learning for men and women in the mosque, to incorporate intercultural, interdisciplinary Greek philosophy (as well as Indian mathematics). Abdul-Jabbar named this curricular theorizing approach Al-Kindism. Yet, as he also pointed out, as recently as the mid-twentieth century, white, western scholars characterized medieval Arab scholars interdisciplinarity as infantile and immature, and subsequently limited in their actual development of knowledge. CI's recent special issue, “Sylvia Wynter, the Human, and Curriculum Studies” (Snaza & Tarc, 2019), also expanded relationships between knowledge and being. Black Studies scholar Wynter (2003) drew on Fanon's (1952/2008) principle of sociogeny (the relationship between cultural and social spheres and human biology) to demonstrate how eurocentric articulations of knowing and being violently split Black people from conceptions of the human. Snaza and Tarc—and the authors in the special issue—extend Wynter's work to specify how “curriculum as the study, design, and enactment of world knowledge, regulates, organizes and sets the course of something called human beings” (p. 1). Where Al-Kindi (a non-Black Arab scholar, though there have always been millions of Black Arabs too) articulated an interdisciplinary, intercultural notion of curriculum, Wynter (2003) articulated a cross-disciplinary, anti-colonial notion of the relationship between being and knowing. Where Abdul-Jabbar articulated how Al-Kindi expanded curriculum in syncretic and pluralistic ways, Snaza and Tarc (and the authors in that issue) articulated how Wynter expanded knowing as sometimes located in, but not bound by, schooling—an approach that fundamentally opposes racial capitalism’s notions of what it means to be human. Al-Kindi and Wynter challenged what knowledge is of most worth and questioned why that knowledge is more highly valued. They articulated Arab and Black onto-epistemologies, respectively, by excavating different historical narratives. Abdul-Jabbar, Snaza, Tarc, and the special issue’s authors, traced how such thinkers critically reshaped curriculum as power relations of knowledge production.

While I am mindful of how categories like “Arab” and “Black” are themselves white colonial divisions that erase Black Arabs, what is striking about thinkers like Al-Kindi, Wynter, and curriculum scholars who use their work is how Arab and Black worldviews have consistently recognized curriculum broadly. Yet, such views have often been foreclosed and minimized by white, western scholars.

In CI articles and special issues such as these, the journal purposely centers relationships between the self and knowledge from Indigenous (e.g., Leadership Institute at the Santa Fe Indian School, & Sumida Huaman, 2018; López López, 2020; Sabzalian, 2018), Black (e.g., Ohito & Coles, 2021), Arab (e.g., Abu El-Haj et al., 2017; Bonet & Taylor, 2020; Desai, 2015), queer (e.g., Brockenbrough & McCready, 2013), crip (e.g., Erevelles et al., 2019), and other worldviews. Such work retorts hegemonic whiteness and creates spaces that foster growth outside of the white, heteronormative, colonial, and ableist gaze. We can say this curation of a scholarly space for broad understandings of curriculum is itself nahaja in multiple senses of the verb: entering upon a different path, making these issues vivid and clear, and even struggling to breathe.

At CI, we remain interested in the critical examination of curriculum in its traditional schooling purviews: subject matter as curriculum, teachers as curriculum, and students as curriculum, to use the neat parsing out of The Sage Guide to Curriculum in Education (He et al., 2015). We welcome critical examinations of teachers, students, and subject matter as curriculum that contextualize teachers' practices, challenge white researcher saviorhood of racialized students, or critique the normalization of existing power relations in subject matter. Any critical research on teachers must also historicize, politicize, and contextualize the macro and meso levels within which teachers work in this runaway capitalist and neoliberal era. Any critical research on students must attend to how the researcher's social location and privilege shape their work because these contexts determine who has the right to research whom and in what ways. Any critical research on subject matter must challenge the multiple axes of epistemic injustices embedded in mandated subject matter, such as the blinding whiteness of schooling curricula and the “whiteness of hidden curriculum” (Thomas, 2019, p. 573), heteropatriarchy, the “tyranny of ability” (Parekh, 2017, p. 337), and anthropocentrism, to name but a few. While these approaches to challenging social reproduction may seem elementary, they do not always show up in submitted papers.

As an editor with CI for close to four years, I am surprised at how often I see senior scholars take up revolutionary theorizing in an additive way, rather than permitting profound theoretical shifts to reconceptualize their work meaningfully. Gaztambide-Fernández (2015) characterized deep engagement with radical theorizing as a browning of curriculum, as a process that fundamentally mutates that which it is brought to, “to change by making explicit what is otherwise supposed to remain hidden…the undoing [emphasis added] of curriculum” (pp. 415—416). Critical examinations of curriculum must transform systems of domination instead of overanalyzing marginalized groups and authors should certainly not limit the analysis of their privilege to a positionality paragraph and then move on with curriculum as usual.

I conceive of curriculum through the Arabic root nahaja, as it harmonizes a rich etymology of knowing, being, clarifying, and gasping for breath with a radically different onto-epistemology than English, eurocentric conceptions of curriculum. The articles in this issue of CI are notable examples of both a broader understanding of curriculum and Indigenous, Palestinian Muslim, working-class, and trans onto-epistemologies. The authors show how critical curriculum scholarship can stem from beyond schooling (incidentally beyond eurocentricity) as well as curriculum in its schooling senses. They challenge how seemingly progressive practices and words dissolve into mainstream society to formulate the same power relations between colonizers and colonized, western and eastern, literate and illiterate, and cis and trans folx. As a collection of articles, they make vivid and clear how colonization, orientalism, economic development, and genderism appropriate language and ideas meant to disrupt and transform their meanings in ways that sustain the forms of marginalization they were designed to challenge. Such appropriations require tracing, naming, challenging, and learning beyond a superficial incorporation of a trendy theory.

The issue opens with Joe Wark's fierce challenge to the academy in his article, “Land Acknowledgements in the Academy: Refusing the Settler Myth.” Wark identifies the current prevalence of land acknowledgments by academic institutions as a curricular project that uses Indigenous knowledge for the self-making of supposedly innocent settlers, progressive institutions, and a repentant settler state. These settler notions depend on using Indigenous land acknowledgments situated within a discursive, symbolic, and relational colonial logic, the ultimate expression of colonial domination. Wark points to how land acknowledgments are curricular devices that regurgitate “mythical fabrication[s]” (p. 192) of Indigeneity, colonial utterances of a settler project that reproduces existing power relations.

Wark describes how his first time hearing a land acknowledgment in a university context powerfully shaped his expectations that the university would play a significant role in land restitution. His expectations were quickly dashed when he realized that the university had no such actions in mind behind the words, and saw instead land acknowledgments' role as part and parcel of a colonizing Canadian national curriculum. Wark historicizes land acknowledgment use by Indigenous people outside of colonization and traces how land acknowledgments came to Canada by the work of Indigenous women here due to Indigenous resurgences in Australia. Wark interrogates a Canadian context where everyone from the Prime Minister to public school boards to housing developments parrots land acknowledgments. He brings together Indigenous voices inside and outside the academy, as well as empirical studies done with grade seven and eight students, to map out how land acknowledgments are empty and deceptive. Such appropriative use of land acknowledgments, Wark explains, paradoxically works to erase Indigenous rights, nationhood, and presence through a grammar of colonial logic. The box-ticking exercise transforms what is supposed to be a first step in historical accuracy and honesty into a limited symbolic nod. Land acknowledgments become “settler moves to innocence” (Tuck & Yang, 2012, p. 1) that serve as a national curriculum of Indigenizing in a highly regulated discursive space, fixing Indigenous people in the regrettable past, pretending settlers are “guests,” and whitewashing historical narratives to suit settlers. Wark's Indigenous worldview, positionality, and experiences as an Indigenous person situate him to quickly recognize university land acknowledgements as just another curricular colonial deflection from land restitution. He has nahaja al-mas'alah, clarifying to us how land acknowledgements are misused.

Fittingly, Wark refuses to tell the reader how to use land acknowledgments properly. However, his Indigenous historicization provides ample guidance for settlers. Indigenous uses of land acknowledgements set a respectful tone for the responsibilities and relationships between stewards of the land and guests on the land; they express a non-hierarchical relationship between Indigenous nations; and most importantly land acknowledgments function as a political recognition of nationhood. Reminiscent of Morrison's (1975) famous quote, “the function, the very serious function of racism…is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining over and over again, your reason for being” (p. 7), Wark’s counterattack to those who would dispute his argument is to not be distracted by explaining himself over and over. He is firm that any distraction from the core issue of land restitution has only one dignified Indigenous response: to simply not engage. Wark's analysis unpacks how land acknowledgements are used as curricular devices for systemizing, or manhajat, tokenistic understandings of Indigenous rights. By bringing his Indigenous experiential reflections on the practice, we learn how Indigenous refusal to participate in this appropriated ceremony is refusal on multiple levels. Wark's compelling analysis unpacks the manhajat of land acknowledgements as tools and techniques to entrench colonialism and continue to hold onto land rather than give it back.

Muna Saleh’s article, “‘We Need a New Story to Guide Us’: Towards a Curriculum of Rahma,” continues the line of inquiry around performative allyship, but rather than revealing how a colonial grammar hijacks institutional Indigenizing practices, it instead unmasks how a racializing grammar underpins demonstrations of individual and cultural solidarity. Saleh thoughtfully analyzes four experiences in which she was Othered, often by people who saw themselves as well-intentioned. She illustrates how such experiences shortchange what she describes as “relational selves in the making” (p. 212). She unpacks her visceral reactions to other people's pity and sometimes aggression towards her as a visible Muslimah who wears hijab. While Saleh does respond in the moment when these incidents happen, in her article, she brings them side by side and connects them as an endless repetition of similar incidents that are all iterations of the same basic story. By unpacking her experiences of being the Other in need of humanizing in myriad settings, she demonstrates how the perpetrators' burning need to “humanize the Other” is, in fact, deeply racist. As we live in a time when anti-Muslim racism is explicit, unchecked, normalized, and global, it is important to note that Saleh's reactions are not against explicitly racist people, but rather against people who often see themselves as being supportive of Muslims.

Saleh draws on Wynter's (2003) challenges to Enlightenment conceptions of being human to elucidate the connections between her experiences as a visible Muslimah and circumscribed notions of knowing and being. She takes up Wynter's call to move beyond a cartesian, capitalist, and racialized definition of being human instigated in 1492 by the west to build and perpetuate European power. Instead, Saleh centers Wynter’s imperative on how humans are made up of an intersection of biology and story-telling, a move from “homo oeconomicus” to “homo narrans” (Wynter & McKittrick, 2015, p. 44). She hears resonances of Wynter's call in Donald's (2013) charge for teacher education, and Indigenous-settler relations at large, to engage ethical relationality that honors differences based on Cree and Blackfoot onto-epistemologies as “a new story to guide us” (p. 28). She connects Wynter's and Donald's calls (as well as other scholars of color and Muslim mothers' theorizing) with her grandmother's curriculum of raḥma.

Saleh describes this curriculum of rahma as a Muslim, embodied curriculum taught to her by her Palestinian Sitti (grandmother), based on her grandmother's intergenerational trauma and resilience following the occupation of Palestine in 1948. The Arabic word raḥma is from the root ra-ḥi-ma, literally the uterus, and the noun raḥma means mercy and kindness (Al-Ma’any, n.d.-b). It is used to describe kinship in general, and relatives on the mother's side in particular, in the word arḥām (Ba’albaki, 1995, p. 580). As a verb, raḥima means “to have mercy upon, be merciful toward,” to show kindness, and to “have compassion or pity for” (Ba’albaki, 1995, p. 580). Such a curriculum of raḥma guides Saleh as she theorizes her experiences through Wynter’s conceptualizations of Man to describe how she saw the over-representation of a western story of the human. Ultimately, Saleh's profound argument directs our attention to her intentionality in sharing her stories and knowledges as her way that she follows. Taken together, both Saleh’s and Wark’s articles take up a manhaj ḥayah, or way of life, that rejects racist and settler guilt strategies that obfuscate complicity and evade changes in the self.

The next article, “‘More Person, and, Therefore, More Satisfied and Happy’: The Affective Economy of Reading Promotion in Chile,” shifts to critical understandings of subject matter as curriculum. Authors Valentina Errázuriz and Macarena García-González question what kind of inclusion and ideal citizenry are shaped by affective economies of pleasurable reading in literacy programs in Chile. Following the Chilean coup of 1973, the Pinochet dictatorship dismantled collective orientations and promoted individualized, atomized visions of ideal citizens in market societies. Reforms after Pinochet's long and brutal regime merely tinkered with, rather than overhauled, the neoliberal ideology underpinning the education system. Errázuriz and García-González examine the intersection of education, neoliberal economies, and citizenship by examining discourses of affect in literacy programs.

Using Ahmed's (2004, 2010) affective economies of happiness, they trace how happiness transverses through discourses of literacy by examining texts and photographs for cultural meanings, signifiers, and symbols of reading in promotion documents put out by the government. They find that the state orchestrates an economy of happiness that reproduces and reiterates social inequalities and argue that such discourses are neoliberal regimes of truth that in effect shut down other paths of possibility and neutralize reading's potentially radical effects. At stake in these affective economies of literacy are the shaping of desire itself as an impetus for self-improvement rather than a state of being. The authors clarify how situating reading as a skill that is necessary for future economic success crowds out other onto-epistemologies of knowing/being such as Indigenous story-telling, working-class narratives of exploitation by capitalism, and existence outside of neoliberal structured thought. Their work examines curriculum in its schooling sense and challenges the relations of power embedded in such curriculum, engaging Indigenous, Afro-Chilean, and working-class standpoints.

Errázuriz and García-González’s close attention to happiness as an affective, discursive, and transverse force through which children pass, rather than an individual feeling, interrogates the relations of power driving the curricular subject matter. Their scholarship lays bare the workings of literacy as hegemonically upper-class, white, heteronormative, and patriarchal knowledge. Such power relations embedded in literacy create a regime of truth wherein Indigenous, working-class, Brown and Afro-Chilean, and gender non-conforming people’s knowledges are erased and marginalized groups are pushed out of Chilean society. The literacy documents they examine incessantly repeat a repertoire of emotions associated with reading: happiness, pleasure, individual personal success, wholesomeness, and community respect. Such “sticky associations also carry a certain normativity” (p. 234), one that overdetermines what kinds of emotions should be associated with reading, discursively excluding other emotions that reading may evoke. In analyzing the literacy curriculum in this way, the authors are describing what Gaztambide-Fernández (2013) characterized as a “rhetoric of effects” (p. 213). A rhetoric of effects can be seen when activities such as arts education or reading, activities imbued with an almost sacred social respect as tools of equitable change, are discursively shaped by prevailing power relations to narrow the potential for social transformation.

The authors' analysis of the affective economies of reading in the photos shows complementary findings. The images accompanying the literature depict upper-class, patriarchal “wholesomeness” (p. #) in which women always do the work and reveal an imaginary obsessed with paler skin color, the absence of Afro-, Brown, and immigrant Chileans, and stereotypical gender roles. The images' portrayal of diversity is especially striking, with depictions of white people who are costumed in Indigenous clothing reading books in the mountains. The authors argue that these visions of supposed Indigenous reading in supposed Indigenous clothing are, in fact, erasing orally transmitted knowledges and communitarian reading, privileging solitary print stories. The depictions discard Indigenous knowledges and relationalities that speak back to structural inequality and challenge colonization. Such an affective economy of reading purposely excludes angry emotions. In the end, the affective economies of reading are part and parcel of how the state foists personal responsibility onto its citizens in the face of state exploitation. The authors conclude with a call for researchers to affectively engage with “the possibilities excluded from the official documents, such as the repertories of conflict, rage, and feeling others’ pain” (p. 257). By unpacking ‘ilmu al-manhaj, Errázuriz and García-González make clear the methodological stakes of such a literacy curriculum.

In the closing article of this issue, Eli Kean's rich encyclopedic article, “Advancing a Critical Trans Framework for Education,” returns us to the indivisibility of being and knowing. Kean develops a practice-oriented theoretical framework for educators that centers trans knowledges and experiences within teaching, learning, and researching. Their framework works to dismantle genderism, a system of oppression based on gender and sex that discriminates against trans people. Their nahj is intentional, showing how we cannot pretend to work against genderism by splitting trans embodiment from knowing trans. They develop three principles to outline what a trans-critical framework entails: 1) Gender operates on individual, institutional, and cultural levels; 2) Genderism is a system of oppression that interacts with all other systems of oppression; 3) Trans experiential knowledge must be at the heart of efforts to end epistemic injustice against trans people. Through these principles, Kean unpacks the complexity of gender in ways that are open to fluidity. They characterize gender justice as “holding space for the infinite possibilities of how we understand ourselves” (p. 264), rather than imposing a trans/cis binary, because people have a multiplicity of experiences. Reminiscent of Saleh's experiences wearing hijab, Kean reminds us that trans people are hypervisible as flag-bearers for being trans, but invisible as individuals with their unique circumstances, opinions, and interests. This regime of visibility and difference also makes them a target onto whom people can foist their assumptions. Kean reminds us that there is no set preference for trans people to be visible, and as such, gender needs to be understood as multi-dimensional.

Kean highlights how genderism is intertwined with white, heteropatriarchal ableism and setter colonial systems of oppression that target non-conforming bodies for capitalist exploitation and elimination. Throughout education, policy, and research, the epistemic injustice of binary gender renders “transgender identities invisible, our experiences immaterial, and our knowledge illegible” (p. 272). Because of this, trans and non-binary people are "unseen, left uncounted, and their potential contributions to advancing knowledge are left unrealized" (p. 274). Kean puts their conceptual framework forward to support people marginalized through knowledge production, centering these voices to challenge dominant narratives of gender for education scholars, practitioners, and policymakers. Throughout, Kean’s article calls to mind the embodied and intentional meanings of nahaja, even its exhausted breathing, as they describe their own experiences as a trans person to vivify how non-binary genders are mostly illegible.

Kean argues that trans experiential knowledge is the only way to capture diverse trans experiences that continue to exceed labels attached to them and push them into epistemically violent boxes of one gender or the other. They highlight ways to pay attention to trans realities, experiences, and knowledges, and argue that educators and researchers need to be alert to bifurcations of gender and conflations of gender and sexuality. Kean suggests professional training on transgender issues from an intersectional perspective to support trans students, parents, teachers, and staff. Kean points out that while youth today are vastly more aware of gender diversity than before due to social media, institutional politics have yet to catch up. Ultimately, Kean's work calls our attention to question our own assumptions and practices of gender essentialism.

Together, the authors in this issue of CI push us to expand how we typically see curriculum in its limited and broader senses. They bring nahaja's intentional, clarifying, and embodied meanings to life as they pursue paths of knowledge. Wark holds us accountable for land acknowledgments that are really about settler guilt, and Saleh reveals white savior actions whose intentions come through as an orientalist need to feel noble by saving the Other. Errázuriz and García-González clarify neoliberal workings to obfuscate working-class, Black, and Indigenous standpoints, and Kean makes vivid how education's claim to support gender diversity cannot make sense without relying on what trans people determine their gender to be. These authors articulate relationships between knowing/being from epistemes, histories, and embodied experiences that are Indigenous, Palestinian Muslim, Afro- and Indigenous Chilean working-class, and trans. Wark's embodiment as an Indigenous person cannot be split from his worldview. He cannot exile his recognition that land acknowledgements in letter should lead to particular protocols in action, protocols that the academy does not execute. Saleh's Sitti embodies knowledge of deep pain and loss that do not eclipse her clarity at distinguishing between her Jewish cousins, friends, and neighbors—people she broke bread with—from the Israeli army that terrorized and dispossessed her and her people. This is not the way, Saleh's Sitti teaches her; there is a difference between them and we need to engage raḥma alongside our struggles for equity and justice. In unpacking the rhetoric of effects that a neoliberal drive for reading unfolds in Chile, Errázuriz and García-González critically examine a practice ingrained with an almost holy reverence, reading, and challenge how its discursive deployment reproduces and extends oppressive relations of power. Kean clarifies that trans embodiment cannot be split from trans knowing/being. Trans onto-epistemology cannot be shortcut, approximated, or guessed at by people who are not trans. Power over defining gender exists in oppressive ways across all levels of social life and to challenge and redefine this requires informed intent, or manhaj. Together, these scholars demonstrate how curriculum, broadly defined, is not a catchall phrase for just anything, but is specific to being and knowing and how they shape our place in the world, or as we might say in Arabic, these authors have nhaju al-manhaj.

LucyEl-Sherif
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
[email protected]

Acknowledgments

Heartful thanks to Atiqa Hachimi for giving me a crash course in Arabic transliteration and to Wael El-Dakhakhni for his painstaking Arabic support. Thanks also to Diana Barrero, Fiona Purton, Neil Ramjewan, and Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández for their thoughtful comments that helped clarify and sharpen the piece.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 For a graphic and profound understanding on Arabic triconsonantal roots, particularly of the body, see the illustrated book: White (2020).