What might teaching diversity of opinion in Islam look like in KS2?

by Katie Gooch

It’s the end of term at last, and I should be switching off my brain (something I failed to do in the summer!), but I’ve just had a sneak preview of another fantastic blog on Teaching Diversity of Opinion in Islam by Zameer Hussain. While I teach primary Religion and Worldviews, I am always interested to read what my secondary colleagues are up to, we are, after all, building our learners ready to become yours.

Zameer’s blog got me thinking (again) about whether we challenge our primary learners’ thinking deeply enough when it comes to religions outside Christianity. I know we are legally obliged to teach more Christianity, but that’s not an excuse.

Zameer’s blog posits:

“This brings me to Ijtihad. This is a concept usually found in Islam components at A-Level RE but never before. However, I believe if this is taught earlier, it can ‘unlock’ a lot of Islamic thought. Ijtihad has roots in the word ‘jihad’ (to struggle) and can be defined as ‘independent reasoning using Islamic sources’ (which is a struggle). Ijtihad is, essentially, trying to find the answer to an issue when the Quran and Sunnah of Muhammad does not directly deal with it. For example, the Quran or Hadith do not directly tell Muslims whether IVF is allowed or not. Ijtihad must be done here to work out the answer…and people will come to different conclusions.”

He offers some excellent examples of how he approaches the issue of diversity of expression in Islam but suggests we should look beyond mere cultural reasoning for this. Sometimes it is “easier” to superficially account these differences to geography when the root cause might be much more nuanced.  In some cases, it is a matter of hermeneutical interpretation, of exploring where different interpretations come from, of Ijtihad.

So, what can a primary practitioner learn from Zameer’s approach?

Just because Islam might have a smaller proportion of curriculum time than Christianity, don’t be afraid to go deep. Use your Christianity curriculum content time to introduce deep thinking, of course, but then reflect on and build on that and go deep in Islam. We do our learners a disservice if we merely scratch the surface of worldviews outside the one dominant in our country and culture. We should be framing our learning around deeper questions of “why?” not “what?”. In LKS2, our learners are ready to consider why early Christian Theologians disagreed and the causes of the Great Schism. So why shouldn’t they consider the complexities of thinking that are the root of diversity in Islam? I don’t say this isn’t difficult, but there is so much intellectual joy in difficult ideas.

What I teach now:

In LKS2 we look at diversity of expression in Islam when we consider the question “What difference does being a Muslim make to everyday life?”. Maybe, you can already see this is a “what” question, but it’s a “what” question that provokes a whole lot of “why” questions. We discuss the concept that, like Christians, not all Muslims are the same. We learn in basic terms the difference of opinion between Sunni and Shia (in one class last year an Afghan Muslim child was very vocal about the differences between his family and other Muslims in school). After considering the commitment and daily influence of the 5 Pillars of (Sunni) Islam, we go through the keyhole and look at images of Muslim homes from around the world. We look for clues that this is a Muslim home and identify similarities and differences, we consider what might be a religious or cultural choice. We also think about how Iftar is experienced by 5 women in Syria, Tunisia, Indonesia, USA and India looking for similarities and differences.

In our planning, we have put a lot of thought into diversity of lived experience as well as representations of women in Islam in different geographical contexts, but Zameer’s suggestions about inclusion of Ijtihad have got me thinking even deeper. This is a way to unlock these lived experiences further, I need to consider how introducing this can enrich their understanding. Our curriculum should not be in a constant state of flux, but it should continually grow and evolve, we’re not “done”.

What am I going to do next?

It’s time to go deeper. We already look at a video showing female Muslim activism from around the world and the children notice very obvious differences in head coverings and dress, they also notice that some of the women are campaigning for the right to wear head coverings. Why is this issue controversial? Why do Muslim women choose to wear different head coverings or none at all? This is a good place to start. Using Zameer’s ideas at a very basic level, we will look at some different images, discuss the reason many Muslim women choose to wear a head covering, and discuss the interpretation of modesty. This is an opportunity to explore the “why” question more deeply.

One of the best things about reframing our curriculum with a worldviews approach is that is causes teachers to explicitly consider diversity within religious Worldviews and to keep learning. None of our teaching resources should ever be “done”. It’s half term, should I really be thinking about tinkering with a unit I won’t be teaching again for several months? Maybe not. But Zameer’s blog got me thinking, that thinking unlocked a new level of understanding and I spent an hour or so weaving it into our existing teaching materials because I know this will deepen our pupils thinking. This is my first attempt at inclusion of Ijtihad; I’ll have to see how it goes when I teach this unit in the summer term!