“I must be a bad Muslim to be good for them”: teaching about civic issues in Islamic education in Israel

ABSTRACT

Many schools advocates for the integration of religious education (RE) and citizenship education (CE), especially in the context of multicultural societies. Yet, how this integration is to happen is contested, due to the politicized nature of religion and citizenship. To explore the potential intersections of these two subjects, we interviewed Palestinian Islam teachers in Israel, to gain further insights into how they integrate civic issues in their teaching. Our study highlighted both tensions and connection points between Islam education and civic issues in Israel. While the teachers were critical of their citizenship, they interpreted Islam education as a potential ‘remedy’ to repair CE. They presented examples from their teaching of how Islam can contribute to making CE more meaningful. The importance of the teachers’ living context for their interpretation of this intersection became evident. Our findings support the argument that the two subjects should be further integrated.

KEYWORDS:

• Islam education
• Muslim teachers
• citizenship education
• Palestinian citizens of israel
• Israeli-Palestinian conflict

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Introduction

Religion ‘has remained perhaps the strongest identity marker and an important source of values and norms for communities and individuals that act as a guide for a meaningful way of life’ (Wexler and Hotam 2015, p. XII). Therefore, in post-secular societies, religious and secular citizens should learn how to be engaged in a mutual learning process, in which religious citizens have to translate their beliefs into common language and based on reason and logic, whereas secular citizens have to acknowledge ‘religious presentations on relevant political issues [as] a serious candidate for possible truth contents’ (Habermas 2006, 8). This deliberated learning process is expected to take place in the public sphere and through school subjects like history, citizenship education (CE), and religious education (RE) in particular.

Yet, this process is challenging since religious students and teachers often act upon religious epistemologies and axiomatic facts that influence their engagement with what counts as legitimate knowledge, and what is not (Bekerman and Zembylas 2017). Gottlieb and Wineburg (2012) observed that individuals with religious convictions read history differently from their secular colleagues and are constantly engaged in a prioritizing process of epistemic switching in which they make choices based on the priority given to one identity over another, be it religious or professional. Reflecting on their capacity to shift positions in the classroom, Freathy et al. (2017) conceptualized RE teachers as ‘pedagogical bricoleurs’, who draw on an abundance of concepts, theories, and pedagogies in their teaching. Given their complex identities as both believers, educators, and citizens, religious teachers’ understanding of the role of civic issues in religious education may be complicated due to potential intersections and tensions. Researchers have argued for the mutual significance of both CE and RE for each other (Papastephanou 2008; Zembylas and Loukaidis 2018). However, it has been noted that further exploration of religious teachers’ responses regarding the civic purpose of RE is still missing (Saada 2020a).

To address this gap in research, this article seeks a more nuanced understanding of how religion teachers frame, rework, and mediate their citizenship and engage with politics and civic issues in their religion lesson. In particular, we examine how civic issues are framed and taught, how teachers perceive the relevance of these issues, and how religion teachers’ perceptions of their civic and religious identities influence their teaching. We focus on the case of teachers of confessional Islamic education (IE) in Israel and argue that their conflictual context in which their religious, national, and citizenship identities are likely to be in tension is particularly worthy of exploration. While gaining a better understanding of the relationship between religious and citizenship education is particularly critical in societies like Israel where the politicization of this relationship contributes to fuel violent conflict, it is also relevant for other societies, where increasing religious diversity requires a rethinking and remodelling of citizenship and CE.

The interfaces between religious and citizenship education

The interfaces between RE and CE and the importance of their mutual integration have been extensively discussed by various scholars (Liljestrand 2015; O’grady 2018; Papastephanou 2008; Skeie 2006; Watson 2004; Zembylas and Loukaidis 2018). In this debate, Zembylas and Loukaidis (2018) identified two approaches: the first approach assumes incommensurability between RE and CE, while the second approach acknowledges a multitude of possible connections between these subjects since not all religious visions are metaphysical or moral, and thus they can be educated for similar values – even if from different perspectives. Yet, taking into account the importance of context, Zembylas and Loukaidis (2018) advocated for a third approach that historicizes and politicizes this relationship between the two subjects and considers the potential significance of religious education for the development of security, political identity, and citizenship, especially in conflict-affected settings.

In conflict-affected societies, RE has a two-fold role: On the one hand, it can reproduce separate and exclusive communities through a curriculum designed to nurture children’s sense of belonging to a faith community (Fontana 2016). Nonetheless, on the other hand, Fontana argued that it can also be further reconciliation and peace among members of conflicting communities (Fontana 2016). In this context, the question arises of what happens when the two goals mentioned above coexist. Zembylas et al. (2018) warn that while teachers may contribute to achieving the political goals of peace and tolerance, at the same time, these may also limit their achievement by promoting essentialized conceptions of religion and RE. Therefore, they highlight the need to help the students in the historicization and contextualization of their religious and secular truth-claims, while approaching these from a multi-perspective and critical approach that acknowledges truth-claims as always partial and incomplete.

What is notable about the view that advocates for compatibility between RE and CE is that it draws on a maximal or active approach to citizenship education (McLaughlin 1992). This approach frames citizenship as more than a formal and legal status that is endowed with specific rights and duties, constituting it also an identity marker that signifies belonging to certain cultural, ethnic, and religious groups. Additionally, it stipulates a range of expected civic virtues and various forms of participation in the political system.

It has been argued that such a ”maximal” understanding of CE relies on the integration of morals and CE (Althof and Berkowitz 2006; Hoge 2002). These scholars propose a liberal-democratic approach that rests on the key principles of empowerment, open discourse, critical thinking as well as the development of moral communities and dispositions, such as social justice, honesty, social responsibility, and equality. However, others have argued that there are important differences between CE and character education; most importantly, that the first is focused on public morality and ‘civic’ action while being open to alternative views of the world, while the second is focused on private morality and personal action, premised on students adopting a common and fixed set of ideas about the world (Davies, Gorard, and McGuinn 2005). The important question of how both types of education intersect in practice at the school level and with IE in particular, has been insufficiently addressed and is a key consideration of this article.

Islamic education in Israel

Despite national policy differences, RE is often delivered through three main models: 1) no religious instruction in schools; 2) confessional religious instruction; and 3) non-confessional RE (Gearon 2014). Israel best fits into the second model in which countries authorize confessional teaching of religion (Agbaria 2012). As it allows education into Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Israel, has structured a model of separative confessional religious education, in which students are introduced to one specific religious tradition to promote their personal, moral, and spiritual development while building a religious identity (Berglund, Shanneik, and Bocking 2016).

In theory, there is a consensus on the holistic and normative nature of IE, as it seeks not only to transmit the knowledge of the Islamic credo (Ta`lim) but also to cultivate spirituality and ethics (Tarbiyya) along with inculcating of good character (Ta`dib) (Zaman and Memon 2016). In practice, however, the confessional teaching of Islam is often rendered through monolithic, idealized, apologetic, and literalist versions that are put in service of political regimes and groups (Agbaria 2012). As a result, Panjwani and Agbaria (2018, 21) advocated for a shift from studying Islam to studying Muslims:

New types of questions need to be asked: Not, “What does Islam say about other religions?” But, “How have Muslims understood Islam’s relation with other religions?” Not, “Is Islam compatible with democracy?” But, “How have Muslims understood democracy and its relation with Islam?” Not, “What is the Islamic concept of knowledge?” But, “How have Muslims understood the idea of knowledge in the light of their religious texts?

This is also relevant for IE in Israel. Since the years after the 1948 war, the religious groups within the Palestinian minority have been subject to differential treatment. In education, for example, while some of the private Christian schools continued to be operational after 1948 and were granted partial educational autonomy based on the Ottoman Millet regime, the existence of Islamic schools was not allowed. Preserving the Millet system suited Israel’s interests in maintaining the status of the Palestinian-Arab population not as a single unified national minority but as several divided minority groups (Karayanni 2006). In general, various scholars have demonstrated how the Arab education system in Israel has been controlled through policies and practices that result not only in the unequal allocation of state resources but also in the lack of recognition of the Palestinian identity and history (see, for example, Agbaria 2017).

As for IE in Arab schools in Israel specifically, this area received little scholarly attention (Agbaria 2012; Mahajna and Kfir 2013; Saada 2020a, 2020b). All in all, according to Mahajna and Kfir (2013), RE is a marginalized subject in the schools’ curricula. Although since 2014, all Muslim students are required to pass the matriculation examination (Bagrut) in IE, this subject is usually studied 1 hour per week starting from tenth until twelfth grade, compared to 3–5 units in other compulsory subjects.

Regarding the subject’s content, Israel has fashioned its own closely supervised school-based normative version of Islam. Specifically, the new Islam curriculum, which was developed in 1987 and is still taught today, focuses on the religious norms, civic virtues, and personal qualities needed to function as a loyal, reconciled, and disciplined citizen, while putting heavy emphasis on character education that seeks to elicit acceptance, cooperation, and compliance. As a result, IE has been reduced to teaching a generic, monolithic, decontextualized, and ahistorical faith, while denying it any particular relevance to the history of the Palestinians, their holy sites, or the communal nature of Islam (Agbaria 2012).

In general, research on the perspectives of IE teachers is scarce (Vince 2018). In Israel specifically, the only work in this under-researched area to the best of our knowledge is Saada’s pioneering work (Saada 2020a, 2020b). His study (Saada 2020a) showed that IE Muslim teachers tended to be more Salafi (conservative) than liberal in their understanding of IE, as they emphasize the transmission of religious knowledge (naql) over rational thinking (aql). He argued that these teachers often avoid dealing with the intellectual diversity within Islam and refrain from discussing contemporary and controversial issues. Saada (2020b) identified a variety of attitudes towards democracy, ranging from subjecting Western understandings of democracy to Islamic law and principles to integrating both approaches as a pragmatic way to deal with the political reality of Arab-Palestinians in Israel, and finally to positions that entirely reject democracy as a Western intellectual import to which Islam is superior.

Important as it is, Saada’s work (Saada 2020a, 2020b) remains restricted by adhering too closely to prior conceptions and dichotomies (e.g. conservative versus liberal, naql versus aql) in his analysis of teachers’ perception of IE and democracy. Building on this research, we propose that there is a clear need to go beyond the limitations imposed by this continuum to take into account the complexity of how Islam teachers negotiate concepts such as citizenship and democracy against the particular context of living in a conflictual reality. Existing literature on IE and CE point to these subjects’ important intersections in terms of identity-building and the creation of a sense of belonging (Aslan 2015; Tan 2007) as well as overlaps with aspects of character education related to preparing students to become active members of moral and civic communities by modeling Islamic and civic virtues to students (Memon, Chown, and Alkouatli 2021). These intersections raise questions to which extent the identities, values, and morals that these subjects and their educational policies promote can converge or diverge. In the context of IE in conflict-ridden Israel, the concern that tensions between religious and civic identities may arise is particularly pertinent. Therefore, we view it as vital to further explore how IE teachers frame and teach civic issues; how they perceive the relevance of these issues for IE, and how they perceive the influence of their civic and religious identities on their teaching,

Methodology

We used a case study design (Merriam 1998; Stake 1995) for our study that focused on how IE teachers interpret the role of civic issues for IE. Our methodology was guided by a constructivist and critical theory approach (Burr 2015; Kincheloe and McLaren 2011) that understands knowledge as socially constructed and takes into account that individual experiences are shaped by particular historical and political contexts, social structures, institutions, and ideologies.

For this purpose, we interviewed 8 IE teachers from Arab high schools in Israel, who were recruited through existing contacts. Ethical approval was granted by our university’s institutional review board. The interviews were conducted by research assistants from the Arab-Palestinian community in Israel, which facilitated trust through the shared background of the interviewee and interviewer and allowed us to interview the participants in their native language. Due to the COVID-19 restrictions that were in place at the time of data collection, the teachers were interviewed via the online video communication software Zoom. All interviews were audio-recorded.

Following Creswell and Poth (2007) model of spiral data analysis, we used a four-stage process to conduct content and thematic analysis. First, all data were transcribed and translated into English and organized in the data analysis software Atlas.ti. After we immersed ourselves in the data, we generated initial categories for coding, considering reflective notes and our literature review. We conducted multiple rounds of coding and recoding and probed for the theoretical themes, based on the literature review and theoretical frameworks. Then we analyzed our data based on the general themes or patterns that we identified during the coding process.

Since we understand research as an interactive process that is shaped not only by the participants’ biographies but also those of the researchers’ (Merriam 1998), we reflected on our positionality towards the research in terms of culture, race, gender, and other factors. The first author is a member of the Palestinian Muslim community in Israel and beyond his research engaged educational projects in his community; the second author is originally from Germany, of a secular background. We constantly reflected on how our various insider and outsider perspectives have influenced our interpretations and created a dynamic exchange of ideas that certainly have shaped our findings.

Findings

We identified two major themes in the IE teachers’ interpretations of the relationship between IE and civic issues: On the one hand, the teachers described IE’s connection to CE as ‘corrupted’ as it is limited by a wider culture of control and domination that Israel imposes on Palestinian citizens as well as by a neoliberal educational culture. On the other hand, the teachers described IE as a ‘remedy’ for CE by providing a deeper moral basis, educating for more responsible citizenship, and building a strong Muslim Palestinian identity. The names of the teachers presented below are pseudonyms.

Second-class citizenship for muslims in Israel

Israel’s culture of control and domination

An extensive body of literature has documented that and how Israeli authorities exercise a culture of control and domination over their Palestinian citizens, for example, through its citizenship policies and surveillance practices that are underpinned by colonial and neoliberal interests (Tatour 2019), Israel’s segregated education system and its unified civics curriculum (Agbaria 2018; Pinson 2020) as well as the curriculum and textbooks administered in the Arab education sector (Nasser and Nasser 2008).

The impact of these policies was also felt by the IE teachers that we interviewed, who questioned the meaningfulness of their citizenship in the face of this culture and control of domination. For example, teacher Elham questioned the status of their citizenship rights as merely ‘performative’, which creates an imbalance between rights and duties for Palestinian citizens in contrast to the citizenship granted to Jewish citizens in Israel:

We can all see that the rights that the Arab citizen gets are performative. In reality, there is a violation of our rights, we are not granted our rights as citizens of Israel. […] As for my duties, I always tell my students that we must respect others and give relief to those in need regardless of who they are or what they believe in. But we all know that as Muslims or Arabs in this state, we do not get the rights that we deserve. We pay taxes and we fulfill every duty that is required of any citizen, but we are not granted the same rights as the average Jewish citizen […].

Toward his state [the Muslim has a responsibility], to follow the rules and to accept that we are Israeli citizens who carry Israeli citizenship. […] It is very difficult for us, while knowing our history, to show loyalty that is 100% loyalty to this state. […] We know the truth. We know that this is Arab and Muslim land. We know the story of occupation. We know the way they try to distort history. […] I know about the Nakba¹ […].

Elham explained that resulting from the imbalance between rights and responsibilities as Palestinian Muslim citizens in Israel, it is difficult to be loyal to the state, even if she sees respecting the laws as a commandment of her faith. Another teacher, Salma, highlighted that she perceived her right to her religion as restricted in Israel:

[W]e see all these limits and prohibitions on us, how we do not get complete freedom to express our religious beliefs, how our freedom of religious speech is somewhat suppressed. Even in worship, there are certain spaces where one is suppressed. Some political events that happen nowadays make you feel trapped.

This perception that expression of their faith is limited was also raised by Malik, who referred to a prominent religious leader, Raed Fathi², who was recently arrested by the Israeli authorities:

I am a good Muslim, but according to the state, I am not a good person. I can be imprisoned because I am a good Muslim. […] [T]here are many leaders, even if we do not agree with them, in prisons. […] Raed Fathi was arrested a while ago in a hideous way. […] Why was he arrested? Because he was giving a lecture. […] He is a good Muslim, and he was arrested. I mean, I must be a bad Muslim to be good for them.

The teachers’ statements suggest that they question the meaningfulness of their citizenship as a result of the restrictions imposed on their freedom as both Muslims and Palestinians as well as the current and historical injustices perpetrated against them. For them, the Israeli state seeks to educate Muslim Palestinian citizens that are apolitical and submissive, as it was phrased by Elham:

In my opinion, this state wants to shape “Good Muslims” by keeping them away from politics and allowing them to perform their basic duties and needs while not getting involved in more serious matters. […] The Good Citizen serves the state, benefits the state, or adopts concepts that the state wants him to adopt.

The IE teachers’ views about the meaning of their citizenship in Israel reflect the findings of other studies of how Palestinian citizens perceive their citizenship in Israel (Pinson 2008). Importantly, however, they also stress how their excluded citizenship contributes to the depoliticization of IE, as it restricts the preservation of their Muslim identity and the right of freedom to their religion.

Neoliberalism and depoliticization of Islam education

It has been argued that through standardization, centralization, and accountability measures, neoliberal educational policies depoliticize curriculum content and classroom teaching (Apple 2011). An increasing body of research has argued that neoconservative and neoliberal ideologies have become a strong ideological pair that perpetuates already existing injustices in education (Apple 2000; Gillborn 2006) – a trend, which has been also identified in Israel that imposes another mechanism of control of the Arab-Palestinian citizens by seeking to educate them into passive and submissive citizens (Agbaria 2018; Pinson and Agbaria 2015).

Perhaps unsurprisingly, these effects were also felt by IE teachers. Time pressure to prepare the students for the matriculation examination and a depoliticized IE curriculum that focuses on character education (Agbaria 2012) constrict opportunities for teachers to address relevant political issues. This issue was raised by Elham:

The curriculum of Islamic education does not give me the space to explore themes of the [Palestinian] cause, politics, or identity. […] The curriculum is vast and compact. […] The Islamic religion, according to the curriculum, is more about the prophetic Sirah, the Islamic Aqidah, and the Adhab (etiquette).[…] So, even Adhab talk[s] about normative values and do[es] not provide the teacher with the opportunity to integrate the topics of rights and duties or citizenship in general.

Another venue that has contributed to advancing neoliberal ideologies in education that diminish democratic spaces in schools is an increasing prioritization of STEM subjects to the disadvantage of humanities and arts subjects, including religion (Sharma and Hudson 2021). Perhaps as a result of the increasing popularity of STEM in education in Israel (Kaptzon and Yemini 2018), another IE teacher, Yara, stated that at her school, the principals usually focus on strengthening STEM subjects instead of RE:

Every time that we had a new principal, I hoped for a principal who will strengthen religion education […] I observed how the principal who came with a background in mathematics strengthened mainly the mathematics classes and gave the mathematics teachers more power. The principal who came with a background in science did the same for science and science teachers.

For Yara, the lack of importance that is attached to RE is also manifested in the fact that her principal assigns the subject to teachers who are not trained in it and according to her do not teach it:

The paradox in the matter is that they let anyone teach religion. If there is a homeroom teacher whose job they want to increase to a full-time job, they [the principals] will just give him religion classes to teach. […] They give religion education classes for the homeroom teacher to teach, and he wastes them […] and doesn’t teach them religion. By the end of the year, the students have not received any religious education.

Previous research has highlighted the intersections of nationalistic and neoliberal ideologies and how they perpetuate educational injustice and exclusion among the Palestinian minority in Israel (Agbaria 2018; Agbaria and Muff in the press). The impact of these ideologies might be even more pronounced in subject areas, such as IE as Muslims in Israel are particularly targeted by security and depoliticization strategies that seek to disassociate them from their community and any political activism (Mansour 2018). The interviewed IE teachers described these limitations from their personal experiences that prevent them from integrating IE and civic issues in a meaningful way. However, in the following section, we discuss how IE still creates important connections between IE and CE and even interpret IE as a potential remedy for CE by making it more relevant to their student’s lives.

Islam education as a remedy for citizenship education?

Providing a moral dimension

During the interviews, the IE teachers reflected on the divergence and connecting points of IE and CE. In juxtaposing the good Muslim and the good citizen, some IE teachers pointed to flaws in CE, describing it as lacking a deeper moral dimension. As an example, Salma described the flaws of a citizen who, according to her, lacks the moral grounding of a Muslim:

The Good Citizen is missing something, he is under the influence of the spiritual diseases of the heart that tempt us nowadays. […] What I mean by a diseased spiritual heart is that, despite respecting others, they still follow their lusts […] It can be a material lust like money, they get drawn to money and material things, or for example status. […] Now, the Good Muslim is the Muslim that shows respect, treats others with respect while following the bases and principles that come from God. He delves into Islam to understand it. The Good Citizen lacks this source.

Her statement could be linked to the discussion of the need to integrate character education into CE (Wolfgang and Berkowitz 2006; Hoge 2002), as mentioned earlier. Another example of the difference between CE and IE was provided by Elham:

Civics, while also including rights and duties like respecting others and helping them, do[es] not provide the reason why one should fulfill his duties. Islam tells you why you must do certain religious duties, for example, because these things will come back to me in the future in the form [of] reward from God.

Both teachers refer to God as the ultimate guardian of morals, providing perhaps a remedy for the ‘diseased spiritual heart’ of the citizen. The notion of Islam as encompassing, as ‘a way of life’ (Mariam) was prevalent among the teachers that also guides their civic lives:

Islam is supposed to be involved in every political, social, and economic issue. In every aspect of life, Islam must be intertwined. […] Basically, when the Prophet came with this religion and this message, it was in order to reform society. (Yara)

This definition of Islam as ‘a way of life’ resembles maximal approaches to citizenship, providing a thick value and moral dimension.

As a specific example of how Islam can provide a moral basis for citizenship, many teachers referred to the value of good treatment of others as integral to citizenship and anchored in Islam as a religious commandment. Salma elaborated on this:

As a citizen, it is my duty, as God has ordered me, to treat everyone equally, with respect and kindness, not to harm them, whether they are Jews, Christians, or Muslims. […] I always tell and explain to my students that the most important aspect of the Islamic religion is that it is not only about praying and fasting. In my opinion as a teacher and Islamic educator, Islam is first and foremost about how you treat other people.

The IE teachers identified gaps in CE that provide a moral basis and justify why citizens should fulfill their rights and duties. The civic values of ‘good treatment of others’ or ‘tolerance’ may be perceived as meaningless by the IE teachers whose reality is shaped by discrimination and lack of rights. In this reality, many of them identify Islam as their moral compass that guides them in their morals – regardless of their political, economic, and social conditions and as based on religious commandments and redemption.

Educating responsible and right-assuming citizens

In addition to values or virtues, rights, and responsibilities are two other central concepts of citizenship and CE (McLaughlin 1992) to which the IE teachers felt Islam can contribute or even repair. Salma, for example, referred to democratic rights that she sees as anchored in both citizenship and Islam:

The rights themselves have democratic principles and values, like tolerance and equality, and these values are in a way related to our Islamic values. […] The freedom of speech, for example, to dignify others, to respect other’s opinions, as God has told us, from a religious perspective, that we must respect other people’s opinions even if they disagree with our own. We should respect them and listen to them.

The importance of citizenship rights (even if limited) has been identified as an influential discourse among Palestinian civics teachers and students in Israel (Agbaria and Pinson 2019; Muff 2019). The IE teacher also emphasized the importance of rights and advocated for them, expressing maximal notions of citizenship. Importantly, in the following excerpt, Ida interpreted claiming one’s rights in a non-violent way as an aspect of being a virtuous Muslim:

If he [the student] feels he is missing some of his rights, or if he feels that in some places, he is being treated differently for being an Arab, he should try wisely … if you want to prove that you are a virtuous Muslim [to] try not to give up [on your rights]. Not to avoid conflict at any cost and ask God for protection. No, you should be a strong Muslim that expresses his opinion in the right way and doesn’t give up his rights. […] Wisely and calmly, without violence, ask for your rights in the right way and do not let anyone step on your rights.

Like Ida, Yara’s interpretations of ‘good’ citizenship and CE resembled maximal approaches, by linking them to the need to express one’s opinion and not being submissive:

A good citizen does not mean a submissive citizen who is told how and when to walk. No, I give my student a practical example from his life that he should not be submissive, and that nothing can stop him from expressing his opinion.

Similar to the moral dimension of citizenship, the teachers identified a rupture as they view their citizenship rights as violated. Through their reinterpretation as claiming those rights and fulfilling their duties anyhow as part of being a ‘virtuous Muslim’, they ‘repair’ rights and responsibilities as meaningful concepts by drawing on Islam.

Building a strong Muslim Palestinian identity

As mentioned above, the omission and lack of recognition of a collective Palestinian identity in school curricula and the public sphere in Israel is perceived as a major injustice among Palestinians (Agbaria 2012; Cohen 2019; Mahamid 2017; Pinson 2007, 2020). Referring to CE, Elham lamented the fact that a discussion about Palestinian and Muslim identities is absent and therefore she sees the subject as apolitical:

When we come to politics even, does civic education really talk about politics? I do not think that it really does. Nowadays, in civic education, students are provided with cases and sentences. […] It doesn’t include the culture and identity that we learned about.

However, in the case of IE, some teachers described how they find ways to integrate political discussions about identity into their IE lesson:

My students and I have agreed that anything that has to do with religious events or the Muslims, whether news, any news, any note, we give five or six or seven minutes of each religion lesson, at the beginning of each religion lesson. So, for example, the Kafr Qassem massacre³, we speak of it a little bit, but I do not allow that we delve into it more than necessary. I give them space to express their feelings. [For example] the events of 9/11.

While Ida stated that she refers to these issues but admitted also that she does not do so extensively, other teachers emphasized the importance of addressing issues that concern the Palestinian Muslim community in Israel, such as Yara:

[W]e should be as socially involved as possible with the current issues. […] [T]here is currently a wave of violence⁴, so we must teach about and cover this matter and how to deal with it, how to change it. I mean, I must realize that the whole curriculum is built in a certain way and that I should change some things, build on it, or advance teaching certain chapters of it that are relevant now.

Yara explained not only the importance of addressing current issues but also the need to adjust the curriculum to make IE more relevant to her students. By teaching about civic issues that concern their community, but which are not part of the curriculum, these IE teachers not only connect CE and IE but also use this connection as a platform to make both subjects more relevant to their students.

Perhaps in the face of the lack of recognition of their Palestinian nationality by Israel and the experience of minimal citizenship, Islamic movements have become a refuge for many Muslims in Israel, providing an alternative source of a strong collective identity and a supportive community (Agbaria, Mustafa, and Jabareen 2015). Mariam and Ezra’s statements were exemplary of how their Muslim identity acts as an anchor, being transnational, extending beyond their national context in which they sense a lack of recognition and belonging:

The Muslim person must represent his religion, regardless of where he is, whether in the Israeli establishment, the Palestinian, the Jordanian, or the American one, regardless of where he is, what is important is that he reflects the correct version of Islam. This is the duty of every [Muslim] person. (Mariam)

I must consider myself a Muslim member [of the Islamic Ummah], and that the Ummah includes me, regardless of where I am. Regardless of whether I am in the Persian Gulf region or any other Arab land. All of us are under the umbrella of one religion. In the end, it is one homeland that I care for. It is my homeland as a Muslim and Arab. (Ezra)

Thus, while they describe their Israeli citizenship identity as problematic due to their conflictual reality as Palestinian citizens of Israel, many IE teachers seem to find refuge in their Muslim identity that provides a clearer and more stable sense of belonging.

Conclusion

The findings highlight both tensions and connection points between IE and civic issues in a conflict-affected society. The overall picture shows that the teachers’ perspectives on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict mould their pedagogical goals and practices (Agbaria 2012). On the one hand, Muslim Palestinian teachers and their students in Israel are subjected to ongoing oppression and discrimination and thus live under conditions of poverty and violence. For most of these teachers, the curriculum is put in service of the state’s agenda to control and marginalize the Arab citizens by dulling their sense of belonging to the general Islamic community, weakening their collective Palestinian identity, narrowing their intellectual horizons about the interfaces between Islam and politics, cultivating conformity and compliance, and disassociating their prospective of autonomous spirituality from the debated and conflated Islamic thought, especially modern Islamic thought.

On the other hand, the teachers were savvy in the history and politics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and demonstrated sophisticated civic awareness about their rights and duties. Most of the teachers approved and defended the study of civic issues in the classroom because they perceive them as assisting in increasing tolerance towards other religions and as a tool to demonstrate to their students the relevance of IE in dealing with contemporary politics and controversial issues. As in other conflict-affected societies, the teachers view their profession as having a political function, while developing a version of IE that is highly relevant to the historical and political aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (Fontana 2016; Zembylas et al. 2018).

Specifically, the study affirms Zembylas et al. (2018, 243) observation that the political function of RE ‘ranges from reproducing mutually exclusive communities to making contributions towards promoting peaceful coexistence … ’ In our case, it seems that the political function of IE is twofold, as the teachers simultaneously strengthen belonging to the Muslim community, yet while framing it, mostly indirectly, according to the particularities of the Israeli context. For example, while almost all the teachers were critical of how Israeli citizenship is materialized in their socio-political context, they advocated for using citizenship education to demand rights, especially rights that pertain to religious freedom.

In doing so, the teachers provide IE that is contextualized according to their specific living conditions, constrained by what the Israeli citizenship regime allows and limits in terms of rights and duties, yet still grounded in conservative interpretations of Islam (Saada and Gross 2017). In this regard, similar to Zembylas et al. (2018), the findings reflect teachers’ understanding of their political function, which ‘is not monolithic but rather includes several possibilities’ (p. 244). While some teachers reject the idea of citizenship and Israeli citizenship because they believe Islam denounces ethnic and civic belongings that are based on any other identity than being a Muslim, other teachers argue for an integration of the Muslim and citizen identities.

If religious literacy (Hannam et al. 2020) means ‘to help citizens participate fully in social, political and economic life in the nation and a world in which religion counts’ (Prothero 2007, 15), it seems that the teachers in this study contribute to this end. They do so by improving their students’ literacy to discern and explore how their religion intersects with their socio-political reality (Hannam et al. 2020), and how the study of Islam can potentially contribute to cultivating tolerance and democratic citizenship (Franken and Gent 2021). This type of religious literacy seems to be imperative in conflict-ridden societies, in which issues of social justice and tolerance are not less important than understanding sacred texts (Zembylas and Loukaidis 2018).

Through this type of literacy, we argue that the teachers are adopting a maximal approach of citizenship for IE, which challenges the curriculum’s normative political orientation to cultivate the deeds and values of the docile citizen. In our study, IE emerges not only as a site where national and religious identities are negotiated but it is also a site where domination and resistance intersect, as teachers are constantly challenging official curricula policies (de Ruyter, Doret, and Merry 2009). The teachers’ engagement with civic issues enriches the static textbook representations of religion (Agbaria 2012) and makes the subject more relevant to their students. Borrowing Holston’s (2009) concept of ‘insurgent citizenship’, the teachers provide their students with a version of ‘insurgent Islam’ that is more substantial and nuanced than the state’s unified and top-down version of Islam and is a site of resistance (Zine 2000, 2007), wherein IE teachers and their students deliberate on their citizenship rights and responsibilities rather than simply accepting or rejecting citizenship.

For the teachers, both IE and CE offer guidance into how to live a good life and how to live together peacefully. However, the teachers believed that IE provides a more solid base for moral and character education; and it connects the students better to their identities as both Muslims and Palestinians. When it comes to discussing civic issues in their lessons, these teachers argued that dealing with civic issues makes their classes more interesting and meaningful to their religious beliefs and identity, and more relevant to questions of social injustices, multicultural sensibilities, and historical conflicts. Similar to research from other contexts, Muslim teachers emerged as ‘actors and co-creators in their identification processes’ (p.150) instead of falling victim to the side-lining of their political identities in IE in Israel (Collet 2007).

RE teachers often experience tensions between private beliefs and professional requirements, and between religious and civic commitments (Vince 2018). In our case, the tensions are twofold: The first arises between being a Muslim believer who believes in the superiority of Islam and the priority of Islamic Ummah on the one hand and, on the other hand, being a citizen of Israel that defines itself as a Jewish state and is perceived as advancing oppression and racism against Palestinians. The second type of tension resides between being Muslim teachers, who should focus more on cultivating their students’ character and strengthening their faith in Islam, and being professional teachers who are expected to prepare their students to succeed in the matriculation exam.

Often the teachers resolved these tensions by creating an ‘Islamic bubble’ in the classroom (Everington 2014, 165) that risks fostering an ‘us versus them’ understanding and promotes a notion of Islam as superior and all-encompassing. They subordinated citizenship to Islam and constructed IE as more inclusive and meaningful than CE. While the teachers’ devout religious identity and ‘theological certainty’ (James et al. 2015) did not seem to stop them from engaging with controversial issues of democratic citizenship (Kunzman 2015), there is a risk that they base their theological certainty exclusively on a rigid and conservative understanding of Islam (Saada and Gross 2017).

In our study, however, the teachers seemed to address the tensions mentioned above by opening creative spaces in which they act as ‘pedagogical bricoleurs’ (Freathy et al. 2017) by reinterpreting the aims and goals of IE to meet the needs of their pupils. In this process, the teachers show a dynamic of compatibility and dissociation of their different identities and roles, not necessarily ‘epistemic switching’ (Gottlieb and Wineburg 2012), as they contextualize and politicize Islam through discussing the ‘lived’ Islam that their students understand and experience.

For example, teachers stated that they often discuss civic rights in the context of civic issues, such as religious freedom in Israel, violence within their community, the increasing Israeli threats to alter the Islamic character of the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, and the political persecution of Muslim public figures. They also discuss civic duties, mainly at the community level but not vis-a-vis the state, encouraging their students to struggle for their citizenship rights, for better living conditions, and solidarity. In doing so, the teachers perceive citizenship as a central component of one’s identity that requires certain civic virtues, and as a way of practicing these virtues (Wolfgang and Berkowitz 2006). For the teachers, IE can contribute to a meaningful civic life for Palestinian Muslim citizens of Israel and influence positively ‘the ecology of civic learning’ (Longo 2012) by linking the student’s national and religious identities to social injustices.

Had it been a normal situation, IE and CE could be completely compatible subjects. For the teachers, it is the context of oppression and marginalization that is creating the incompatibility between both; and according to them, it is IE’s mission to ‘correct’ the deficiencies created by Israeli citizenship: to correct the second-class and thin citizenship in the process of creating the ‘good Muslim’ that is, by all means, a superior ideal to the ‘good citizen’ ideal. It is the context that creates a divergence between IE and CE. The context of disempowerment, marginalization, and discrimination makes it very difficult for the teachers not to see the selectivity of the curriculum as it encourages and amplifies the values linked to good character while undermining values of social justice, political action, and belonging to the Palestinian community.

To conclude, our research presents an illustrative case study of teachers from a religious minority group, who are marginalized by official citizenship that tends to privilege the religion and culture of dominant majority groups. For these teachers, IE can be an important source of civic empowerment and meaning, at least in their local contexts, and a critical vehicle to encounter social segregation and exclusion (Franken and Gent 2021). However, there is the need to revise IE curricula to make them more meaningful and relevant to actual living contexts. There is also a concern that teachers may rely too much on traditional and uncritical interpretations and teaching methods in IE that do not reflect the needs of diverse modern democracies. While some teachers from our study promoted active forms of citizenship, it was evident that they require further support and the means to do so through progressive and critical curricula and teacher training.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the The Walter Lebach Institute for the Study of Jewish-Arab Coexistence at Tel-Aviv University [N/A].

Notes

1. The term Nakba (‘catastrophe’ in Arabic) refers to the events of 1947–1949 Palestine war when many Palestinians were expelled and fled their homes. These events led to the permanent displacement of most of the Palestinian population and the destruction of many villages in the territory that now constitutes the Israeli state.

2. Sheikh Raed Fathi is a Muslim religious leader and preacher.

3. On 29 October in 1956, the Israeli border police killed 48 civilians who returned to their village during a curfew of which they were unaware.

4. The teacher refers to the increased number of homicides in the Arab-Palestinian community over the last years. These killings constitute for about 70% of all homicides in Israel – even though Arab-Palestinians represent only over 20% of the population (Kershner 2021).