"Asking why the quality of education in so many Arab countries remains low, the authors find answers in the authoritarian political economies that shape the architecture of national governance across the region"

Sociologist Jeffrey Guhin spent a year and a half embedded in four high schools in the New York City area - two of them Sunni Muslim and two Evangelical Christian. At first pass, these communities do not seem to have much in common. But under closer inspection Guhin finds several commonthreads: each school community holds to a conservative approach to gender and sexuality, a hostility towards the theory of evolution, and a deep suspicion of secularism.

Since the late twentieth century, new institutions of Islamic learning for South Asian women and girls have emerged rapidly, particularly in urban areas and in the diaspora. This book reflects upon the increased access of Muslim girls and women to religious education and the purposes to which they seek to put their learning.

In The Struggle for a Multilingual Future, Christina Davis examines the tension between ethnic conflict and multilingual education policy in the linguistic and social practices of Sri Lankan minority youth. By engaging with the actual experiences of Tamil and Muslim youth, Davis demonstrates the difficulties of using language policy to ameliorate ethnic conflict if it does not also address how that conflict is produced and reproduced in everyday talk.

In Islamic education, the development of teaching and learning for the physical and spiritual training of humanity places equal importance on revealed and acquired knowledge. This book provides a greater understanding of Islamic pedagogy from a spiritual perspective, which requires empathy with the Islamic premise of the inseparable nature of knowledge and the sacred.

As European Muslims and Muslims in the Middle East diverge, imams in Europe have emerged as major agents of religious authority who shape Islam's presence in Western societies. This volume examines the theoretical and practical questions concerning the evolving role of imams in Europe.

This in-depth ethnography looks at the everyday lives of Muslim students in a girls' madrasa in India. Highlighting the ambiguities between the students' espousal of madrasa norms and everyday practice, Borker illustrates how young Muslim girls tactically invoke the virtues of safety, modesty,and piety learnt in the madrasa to reconfigure normative social expectations around marriage, education, and employment.

Taking Jewish and Islamic education as its objects of inquiry, Mandatory Separation sheds light on the contours of this debate in Palestine during the formative period of British rule, detailing how colonial, Zionist, and Palestinian-Muslim leaders developed competing views of the form and function of religious education in an age of mass politics.

Political rhetoric and popular concern about the presence in the United States, Canada, and Western Europe of immigrants from predominantly-Muslim societies has remained largely detached from the actual reality of the lives and the contributions of these immigrants and their children. The studies presented here seek to correct this ignorant reaction by presenting objective information from schools that such immigrants have created and sustained.

Circuits of Faith offers the first examination of the Islamic University and considers the efforts undertaken by Saudi actors and institutions to exert religious influence far beyond the kingdom's borders. Michael Farquhar draws on Arabic sources, including biographical materials, memoirs, syllabi, and back issues of the Islamic University journal, as well as interviews with former staff and students, to explore the institution's history and faculty, the content and style of instruction, and the trajectories and experiences of its students.

Since the 1970s, movements aimed at giving Muslim women access to the serious study of Islamic texts have emerged across the world. In this book, Masooda Bano argues that the creative spirit that marked the rise and consolidation of Islam, whereby Islam inspired serious intellectual engagement to create optimal societal institutions, can be found within these education movements.

Coercive Concern explores how stereotypes of Muslim immigrants in Western liberal societies flow through public schools into everyday interactions, informing how Muslim youth are perceived by teachers and peers. Beyond simply identifying the presence of racialized speech in schools, this book uncovers how coercive assimilation is cloaked in benevolent narratives of care and concern.

This book draws upon ethical dimensions of Muslim education as a means through which to address contemporary issues, such as social and societal conflicts, exclusion and marginalisation, and violence. It argues that an ethical Muslim education is underscored by the practice of autonomous, critical and deliberative engagement that can engender reflective judgement, compassionate recognition and a responsible ethical (Muslim) community.

Writing boards and blackboards are emblematic of two radically different styles of education in Islam. The essays in this lively volume address various aspects of the expanding and evolving range of educational choices available to Muslims in sub-Saharan Africa.

Muslim Institutions of Higher Education in Postcolonial Africa examines the colonial discriminatory practices against Muslim education through control and dismissal and discusses the education reform movement of the post-colonial experience.

This unique empirical study focuses on the different quality dimensions of the Madrasa education system in Kerala, southwestern India. Madrasa education is one of the largest networks of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in the world.

Education and Curricular Perspectives in the Qur'an focuses on different perspectives of education curriculum in the Qur'an. Sarah Risha explains how Allah Almighty, as the great teacher, communicated His divine message, the Qur'an, which may be considered as the textbook, to His students, the prophets.

The scholarly contributors to this volume investigate various means to stimulate and facilitate reflection on new social relations while clarifying the contradictions between religious and social affiliation from different perspectives and experiences. They explore hindrances whose removal could enable Muslim children and youth to pursue equal participation in political and social life, and the ways that education could facilitate this process.

Taking us inside the world of the madrasa--the most common type of school for religious instruction in the Islamic world--Ebrahim Moosa provides an indispensable resource for anyone seeking to understand orthodox Islam in global affairs. Focusing on postsecondary-level religious institutions in the Indo-Pakistan heartlands, Moosa explains how a madrasa can simultaneously be a place of learning revered by many and an institution feared by many others, especially in a post-9/11 world.