New Directions in Islamic Education: Pedagogy and Identity Formation

INTRODUCTION

Rethinking Islamic Education in the Modern World

THIS BOOK BEGAN as a doctoral dissertation that explored the construction of religious identity among British Muslim youth. As a Muslim educator, my main motive behind conducting this case study was to ground my process of rethinking the theory and practice of Islamic education within the actual experiences of the learners. I have taught the subject within the minority Muslim context of Britain as well as in diverse majority Muslim contexts, including countries such as Turkey and Kuwait. As a practitioner in the field, I can observe that empirical research is equally crucial in both contexts when examining the complex challenges that inform the teaching and learning of Islam. There is a lack of rigorous empirical examination of what types of Islamic identities and Muslim religiosities are nurtured by this pedagogic process. This lack constitutes the heart of the challenges facing contemporary practice in Muslim education.

This book proposes a psychosocial model to investigate the formation of Muslim religiosity and faith development in the modern world. The model has a strong theological dimension. It was originally developed within the context of British Muslim communities, but has subsequently been applied in Kuwait; this application demonstrates the model’s applicability within majority-Muslim societies. Without grounding their research in such a model, Muslim educators cannot assess the impact of their teaching on the religious agency of the learners. Policymakers and frontline practitioners need practical models to better understand religious extremism, assess vulnerability to radicalisation within the context of contemporary Muslim culture and develop ‘intervention strategies’ to address the problem. Therefore, while this book primarily aims to offer theoretical and practical resources to make the practice of Muslim educators transformative in both minority- and majority-Muslim settings, it also aims to contribute to the work of a broader community of practitioners, such as religious educators, youth workers, chaplains and policymakers.

In order to become a truly transformative process, any theological reflection on Islamic education must include this empirical dimension. With empirical knowledge, a theologically-informed critical engagement with Muslim educational practice that I endeavour to develop in this book has the potential to facilitate intelligent and meaningful perspectives among practitioners. This book is based on a deeper conviction that the presence of a critical, dialogical and transformative educational self-understanding is the key to facilitating the emergence of a balanced and mature Islamic sense of belonging in the modern world. The lack of such an educational competence severely hinders contemporary Muslim efforts to engage meaningfully with their religious heritage and the challenging conditions of a rapidly-changing world.

The central aim of this book is to engage seriously with the following fundamental question: what does it mean to be educated Islamically in the modern world? This question requires a readiness to explore critically the theology as well as the pedagogy of educational practices in the Muslim educational institutions set up within the European Muslim diaspora and wider Muslim world. Such institutions appear to be no longer capable of producing creative minds or nurturing the skills necessary to solve the complex problems facing the worldwide Muslim community (also known as the ummah). Considering the highly charged political context in Europe and the West, Muslims as minority communities face dramatic challenges. Islamic religious and educational institutions are frequently accused of nurturing extremist religious identities. Therefore, it is urgent that we attend to this question within the context of European Islam. However, the majority of Muslim educators whose professional competence and sense of religious duty ought to make them engage critically with their own tarbiyah models of Islamic education have shown no serious interest in this question. In fact, they frequently dismiss the issue’s worthiness for consideration.

Historically, Muslim responses that have emerged out of the highly politically charged context of the last two centuries have been shaped by a defensive legal-political hermeneutics. As a result, renewal and reform attempts have failed to bring about a proper understanding of the Muslim faith and its complex historical legacy; they have not managed to create a dignified Muslim presence in the modern world. This book is an invitation to Muslim educators and anyone with an interest in Islamic education to think educationally about Islam. It proposes an Islamic educational hermeneutics within which to ground social, political, legal, spiritual and devotional interpretative acts that are necessary to articulate Islam meaningfully within our contemporary context.

Educational hermeneutics is essential because it can reveal the pedagogic vision that defines the prophetic mission of the Qur’ān, which is the sacred heart of Islamic imagination. The Qur’ānic perception of humanity is framed within this wider transformative pedagogic ethos, which aims to facilitate the actualisation of human potential and growth towards psychosocial and spiritual maturation. The transformative character of this pedagogic articulation of the human condition helps to guide and fulfil the art of being human. Inspired by this educational vision of the Qur’ān, Chapter Seven develops a critical, dialogic and transformative perspective on theology and pedagogy in Islamic education.

The book argues that the transformative educational vision that defines the Muslim religious imagination nurtured a critical and open attitude during the formative period of Islam, which, in turn, acted as a catalyst for the emergence of classical Muslim civilisation. The decline of this civilisation, on the other hand, can largely be attributed to the gradual loss of this dynamic Divine pedagogic vision and the stagnation of the educational institutions that were responsible for keeping it alive.

Today, it is unfortunate that the conception of ‘education’ within contemporary Muslim culture has become largely equated with an authoritarian process of knowledge transmission that is geared towards shaping the identity of the learner in a process akin to indoctrination. This rigid perception of Islamic education is not confined to some extreme examples, such as the recent and increasingly violent Boko Haram movement in north-eastern Nigeria, which declares all forms of Western education to be sacrilegious. The perception of Islamic education displayed within the traditional forms of Islamic schooling across the Muslim world, such as the madrasah of South Asia, the Pesantren system of Indonesia and the hawza of Shia Islam indicate features of an instruction-centred and rigid inculcation process that largely ignores the personal agency of the learner. Despite many decades of investment and the building of universities, explicit reform initiatives like the Islamization of Knowledge project have, by the admission of their own proponents, largely failed to bring about the desired change. It should be stressed, however, that the introduction of Western secular education in the Muslim world over many decades does not appear to have actually facilitated economic transformation or social mobility, even in the cases of oil-rich Arab countries. Instead, the two contrasting educational systems continue to run parallel to one another, and to produce conflicting ideological mindsets that deepen the crisis within contemporary Muslim societies.

Within the European Muslim diaspora, Islamic education and Muslim faith are assumed to be mechanisms that ensure that certain identity narratives, borrowed from the different parts of the Muslim world, are retained and presented in the lives of those Muslims who now call Europe home. Religion and education do have an important function of conserving values and cultural heritage within upcoming generations. Considering the serious intergenerational differences to be observed within the European Muslim communities, which are largely due to Muslim migration and settlement history, religious nurture and education have become essential processes of passing the community’s core values to its children. Within a democratic social context, it is of course a fundamental parental right to educate, as well as the child’s right to learn about her cultural and religious heritage.

However, this enculturation process cannot ignore the wider social reality that has become an integral part of a child’s upbringing and wider life experience. While connecting with their cultural heritage, young people should be enabled to interpret this legacy within the reality of their everyday lives. Just as with mainstream education, Islamic education needs to provide young people with the resources and skills to successfully interpret their cultural heritage in a modern context. The degree to which Muslim faith leaders, educators and parents are actually aware of this responsibility and possess the skills to nurture the interpretation process is still an open question. Moreover, if Islamic education is reduced to a technology that replicates certain identity categories among young people, this denies young people their rights to personal agency and faith development. The outcome of such denial can hardly be reconciled with the values of democratic education or the educational ethics of Islam, which emphasizes the importance of maintaining the dignity of all.

As a Muslim educator, I started to realize the limitations of the teacherand-text centred, transmission-orientated Islamic education taking place in the mosques, madrasahs and Muslim schools when I began to listen to the life stories of British Muslim youth in the late 1990s. The life-worlds of these young people were informed by a multiplicity of cultures: at home they were socialized into traditional Islamic values interpreted within parental cultural backgrounds and at school they were exposed to a wider secular culture. They used many mechanisms to manage the presence of cultural multiplicity around them in order to develop their senses of loyalty and senses of self in the face of demands made by different authorities in their lives.

The literature on minority youth studies, reviewed in detail in Chapter One, was largely confined to visible marks of identity, such as race, ethnicity and language. The possibility of religiosity as an important factor in the lives of Asian children and young people was rarely given consideration. The literature indicated the presence of ‘hybrid, hyphenated’ identities among black people in particular, and pointed to the curious phenomenon of ‘living between two cultures’. However, the specific role of faith appears to have been grossly overlooked. The overall anticipation in this literature was that, as new generations gained better educations and better jobs, they would move up the social ladder and gradually become secularized or assimilated into the norms of wider society. This focus indicates clear signs of secular bias within the social science research community, as well as in the discourse of educational and social policymakers.

However, the transnational identities observed among migrant Muslim communities contained a strong faith presence that was linked to political developments in the Middle East and the Indian Subcontinent. This reality of being part of a worldwide Muslim community has a tremendous impact on the identity formation of Muslim youth. A cursory look at the larger scene would have shown researchers that faith has been emerging as a dominant factor in the lives of these individuals. However, the real question for me was how, and in what direction, faith was channelling these young people. I became interested in exploring the construction of their religious subjectivities, where their loyalties to authority and desires for autonomy are negotiated.

I used a psychosocial identity research model that is based on a semi-structured interview schedule to explore religious identity. This was developed from Erik H. Erikson’s theoretical insights and James Marcia’s empirical research on identity statuses. The model assumes that identity is constructed within a commitment–exploration continuum. As such, there are several possible identity resolutions or modes: a diffused mode, where neither commitment nor exploration is present; a foreclosed mode, where there is a strong commitment that is not informed by the exploration process; an achieved mode, when commitment has undergone a process of exploration; and an exploratory mode, if there is strong exploration but no real commitment. The model is not fixed; while an individual’s personality could exhibit several aspects of these modes, it is possible that she could regress and progress along the continuum. As will be discussed in Chapter Three, in order to overcome the limitations of the structural–developmental approach that have strongly informed this description of identity, the model is contextualised within a wider phenomenological framework.

The empirical Muslim religiosity research model that I developed is called the Muslim Subjectivity Interview Schedule (MSIS) and includes a standardised and now widely-used scale that measures an individual’s attitude towards Islam (the Sahin–Francis Scale of Attitudes towards Islam) as well as a self-characterisation sketch based on personal construct psychology. Chapters Two and Three discuss key theoretical and methodological issues concerning the MSIS. The application of the model in both minority and majority Muslim contexts (Britain and Kuwait, respectively), is presented in Chapter Four to Six.

The findings of the original case study, carried out in the UK, showed the continuing relevance of Islam to the lives of many young British Muslims. However, male participants reflected a predominantly foreclosed mode of religious subjectivity, while female participants fell largely under the exploratory mode. There were also a significant number of young people in the diffused mode, who were losing interest in religious issues. On the whole, while Islam was perceived as a source of inspiration, a rigid appropriation of faith was also increasingly emerging. Most of the participants raised the concern that the Islam presented to them at home and in the mosque was mixed with the culture of their parents’ country of origin. They wanted ‘pure Islam’ instead. Male participants often mentioned that they wanted to take a year off to study Arabic in an Arab country. It was becoming clear that, as these young people grappled with a sense of whom they were (which is a process triggered most intensely in multicultural societies), faith was becoming an important centre of authority in their lives.

However, close investigation of the dominant characteristics of the religious authority acknowledged by the youths indicated a strong literal perception of Islamic sources: the Qur’ān and the Sunnah. A key source for this literalist religiosity has been the increasing impact of Muslim transnational revivalist movements that originated in different parts of the Muslim world. Most of the young people preferred to identify with the radical discourse of transnational Muslim movements than with the traditional religious discourses they found in their homes and mosques. I found that Muslim young people were also concerned about the danger of being assimilated into wider secular society and were seeking distinctive ways of expressing their identity. Playing upon this concern, radical groups were providing them with a sense of difference and confidence. As a result, a large intra-faith conversion was taking place towards the foreclosed end of the identity continuum. This is one of the least desirable modes of religiosity in a multicultural society, as it may include a strong vulnerability to extremism. It is significant that the empirical case study was originally undertaken before 9/11, when policymakers were showing no serious interest in the growing ‘Muslim question’ in multicultural British society. In fact, multiculturalism was an inclusive policy principle that had largely become an uncritical toleration of difference that simply ignored the ‘sensitive’ faith-related issues. Until recently, therefore, policymakers have been largely uninterested in finding out how diverse Muslim groups have been using the educational space created by wider secular democracy to re-inscribe Islamic identities within the context of Western Europe.

More recently, when I explored religious subjectivity and perceptions of loyalty among young people in Kuwait, the results showed more or less the same pattern: youth increasingly mistrusted official religious authorities and traditional revivalist Muslim groups had a growing impact on their understanding of Islam. In the Kuwaiti context, where society is based on broadly shared Arab and Islamic values, sources of religious authority showed much more diversity: family and lay preachers were taken to be much more authoritative within the religious subgroup relative to the UK context. However, even in such a traditional Arab and Muslim society, young people increasingly felt that they were being invaded by Western values in many ways and that their identities were under threat, due mainly to the impacts of economic globalization and modernization. More importantly, Kuwaiti young people agreed with the overall opinion of British Muslim youth that the strict instructional manner that characterized the provision of Islamic education in schools was simply boring. Most of the young people interviewed expressed a desire to turn to radical religious groups for guidance, as these groups represented a more authentic understanding and dedication to the cause of Islamic revival in the modern world.

It is important to note that the challenges facing the British and European Muslim diaspora largely reflect crises that have defined much older Muslim communities worldwide. In recent decades, a plethora of literature has been produced by both Muslim and non-Muslim scholars on the broad theme of the existence of an ‘identity crisis’ within contemporary Muslim communities across the globe. Most of the studies suggest that this identity crisis is an inevitable expression of a painful historical transition experienced globally by Muslim societies over the last two centuries. This historical process has largely been triggered by the encounter of enforced Western colonisation and modernisation projects that pushed the ummah (or global Muslim society) to define itself in the face of categorically opposing forces: an already-stagnant tradition and a rapidly-engulfing secular institution of Western modernity.

Most of these rigorous studies have adopted a broad historical and political analysis while engaging with aspects of this tragic story, which has unfolded in different parts of the Muslim world. The responses offered by Muslim intellectuals and activists to the crisis have mostly been reactionary and defensive. These responses have rarely employed an empirical research framework, although such a framework is invaluable to study the crisis contextually and provides an understanding of the dynamics that inform the construction of modern Muslim identities at both individual and collective levels. It appears that the energy of Muslim scholars has rather been devoted to criticising the positivist and reductionist Western social science of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and Western science’s wider philosophical framework of secular modernity.

This preoccupation appears to have diverted attention from the difficult task of developing a proper epistemological framework for an Islamic social science, a central focus within the above-mentioned Islamization of Knowledge project. The idea of Islamization of knowledge, like the conception of Islamic education itself, was formed within the volatile context of post-colonialism and reflected wider reactionary efforts against the Western secular educational system, particularly the Orientalist approach to the study of Islam. Therefore, researchers hold an implicit assumption that all understand what is meant by ‘Islamic’ in expressions like ‘Islamic social science’ and ‘Islamic education’. Engagement with the tradition itself was deemed unnecessary.

These similarly reactionary Muslim responses appear to have shown no serious interest in understanding the philosophical values underpinning Western social science and education. As a result, they have paid little attention to the internal critique that has already taken place within the Western social sciences. These disciplines have largely grown out of the Eurocentric and positivist intellectual legacy of modernity, especially those that have gradually adopted broadly reflexive methodologies that are more concerned with rigorous epistemology than simplistic observations about the ontology of an investigated phenomenon. Given this, one wonders whether it is still relevant or necessary to approach the social sciences or education within the reactionary mindset that was formed during the political context of the last two centuries.

Contemporary social science shows a strong awareness of the contextual character of human reality and its value-laden cultural dimension. Describing and understanding the different aspects of our complex human experience, including the religious experience that is culturally embedded and individually lived, can only be enriched by an empirical research design that is rigorous, methodical, evidence-based and aware of the ethical and political dimensions that inform the process of inquiry. A survey of the methodological thinking exhibited within the Qur’ān and classical Muslim scholarship, such as in the works of uṣūl (the systematic study of the foundational premises that underpin the Islamic intellectual disciplines), would be enough to find broad agreement on the necessity of observing these procedural features in order to ensure the production of evidence-based, reliable knowledge and understanding on a given topic. Unless one can operationally define religious identity and identity crisis by following a rigorous empirical design to investigate these as they are experienced by social actors, discussion on these topics will remain nothing more than an interesting intellectual abstraction. This abstraction will not help to properly identify relevant issues, let alone to devise a systematic intervention to address these challenges. Due to the empirical character of pedagogic research, these methodological issues will be discussed in detail in Chapter Two.

Upon embarking on my study, I carefully considered my main research problem: that of rethinking the theory and practice of Islamic education by exploring the formation of religious identity within the secular and plural context of British society. I focused on the case of British Muslim youth because their identities and religious agency appear to be formed through several dynamics that are not necessarily complementary. It seemed to me that they were structuring their sense of identity through the conflicting demands and expectations of the traditional culture of home, mosque, madrasah, secular multicultural life and peer group pressure. I realized the importance of conducting my inquiry through the actual experiences of Muslim youth by investigating their ways of interpreting, finding meaning in, and living out their religion within such a challenging social context.

Any attempt to rethink Islamic education needs to be grounded within the experience of young people who are the integral part of this pedagogic process; thus, the formation of their religious agency is the main task of this educational dynamic. The original empirical case may well be limited, but nevertheless it provides a systemic way of understanding complex aspects of religious identity; it also allows the creation of a proper educational response. My inquiry into religious subjectivity has gradually led me to re-examine the theological heart of religious identity and the role of pedagogy in bringing about a mature Muslim expression of faith in the modern world. Most significantly, engaging with the Qur’ān as an educator has helped me to discover the educational character and the pedagogic style that defines sacred discourse.

I experienced several set-backs and disappointments while trying to extend the scope of my empirical study and to integrate Islamic education within the British higher education system. I realized the seriousness of the challenges associated with community-level politics and vested interests. Most importantly, I, and several colleagues, were disappointed to discover the deep secular bias within the School of Education at the University of Birmingham, where this project was initially launched. Despite the growing relevance of the initiative within the post-9/11 context, the head of the school unilaterally decided to end the project.

I was fortunate to have had the opportunity to develop a practical model of Islamic education in light of my original study findings. The MEd in Islamic Education has become the first postgraduate-level course on the subject to be offered within British academia. The course has a strong community base, as it is housed within one of the first Muslim higher education institutions established in the UK. The programme aims to help Muslim educators become reflective practitioners, so that they can develop intelligent perspectives in their field of practice by assessing the impact of their teaching on the learners’ religious identities and development of faith. As such, the course contributes to the professional development of Muslim educators and creates a scholarly and academic space to address the issues essential to the emergence of Muslim teacher training, Muslim theological education and the training of faith leaders within the British and European context.

Without rethinking the meaning of education in Islam, we will not be able to revive classical Islamic sciences or improve the pedagogic method of the traditional teaching of Islam. Similarly, we will not be able to identify the strengths and weaknesses informing modern Western approaches to the teaching of religion in History of Religions, Religious Studies, Islamic Studies, and multi-faith Religious Education within British mainstream schooling. The learner-centred approach to teaching Islam – an approach that seriously considers the need to teach Islam critically by enabling students to engage with the tradition and its civilizational legacy with an open mind – will not emerge. By addressing these issues, the MEd course has attracted the interest of a substantial number of diverse groups of young male and female Muslim educators and religious leaders. With over 15 students in each academic year, the course is now entering its fourth year at the time of writing. Chapter Eight offers a critical reflection on this recent practical implementation of the critical and dialogic perspective on Islamic education within the academic framework of an MEd course designed to offer professional development pathways for a diverse group of Muslim educators from the mosques, community centres, schools and the dār al-ʿulūm.

Throughout the development and implementation of the course, I have managed to complete the last stage of my research, which has gradually turned into a longitudinal Action Research project. The project contains evidence-based identification and description of the set of problems facing contemporary Muslim educators, the development of an intervention strategy in the form of a new perspective on theological principles and pedagogic strategies of Muslim education and the implementation and assessment of this intervention, which aims to bring about a transformative Muslim educational culture. This book tells the story of this journey and this educational experiment.

There has been a worldwide renewed interest in the study of Islam and Muslims during the last decade, largely triggered by several unfortunate watershed events such as 9/11 and 7/7. These tragic events have reshaped the politics informing the relationship between the West and the Muslim world. From the perspective of the Western Muslim diaspora, these events have acted as catalysts that reinforced the distrust concerning their integration within wider society and, most crucially, raised concerns about the compatibility of Islam with the values of Western secular democracy.

These developments have also clearly indicated the continuing relevance of Muslim faith in the lives of many second and third generations of European Muslims, most of whose parents originally worked in manufacturing to help rebuild the ruined economies of Europe after the Second World War. Although social policymakers widely predicted that European Muslims would undergo gradual secularisation, or integration into secular society, Islam has continued to be a strong dynamic informing the personal and collective identities of European Muslims. Most of the Muslim immigrants came from the rural areas of their home countries and did not exhibit high levels of religiosity or religious literacy. However, they were part of the wider, conflict-ridden narrative that has been unfolding in different parts of the Muslim world. This metanarrative, largely constructed around the strong attitudes of either defence or rejection of Islam, has increasingly been forging oppositional identities that are expressed as ‘reactionary–authoritarian traditionalism’ or ‘authoritarian–militarist imitations of the Western secular modernity’. The historical antagonism between the Muslim world and the medieval Christian West and the traumatic experiences of more recent Western colonialism are among the other obvious, religion-based factors informing the politics of a new Muslim presence in the modern world. Despite this alarming picture, European social policy models (e.g. British multiculturalism or French assimilation) have failed to recognise the significance of how faith informs the way in which ethnically and culturally-diverse Muslim communities position themselves within secular polities.

In liberal secular democracies, the principle of equality aims to preserve individual rights, promote the agency of diverse communities, and facilitate social integration within the wider society. These diverse communities’ capacities for exercising strong agency remain a crucial factor in the achievement of social cohesion. However, the interests of diverse communities can be reconciled to foster the well-being of all. Facilitating active civic participation can further enable citizens to respect each other’s rights and show a deep awareness that they have to be responsible and accountable to one another. More crucially, individual communities should be able offer a rationale for living together by drawing upon their distinct cultural heritage, so that integration does not become a deceptive language of political correctness. A logic of togetherness that finds meaning within a community’s distinct value system both transforms the agency of the community and the identity category shared by the wider society. Facilitating this social reciprocity will allow communities to engage with the process of both defining and being defined by wider society, and to nurture a genuine sense of belonging without fear of assimilation or isolation. In Muslim communities, religion constitutes an important element of their individual, collective agency and cultural heritage. Unfortunately, it has taken a long time for the secular character of modern European social policy systems to recognize this crucial faith element within the ethnically and culturally diverse European Muslim diaspora.

Therefore, it is not surprising in the post-9/11 context that the central issues regarding the role of religion within the overall management of Muslim minorities in Europe and the West have been addressed within the framework of national security and the war on terror. The discourse of policymakers, social scientists and legislators is largely informed by political concerns, and has devised a rich repertoire of expressions like extremism, radicalisation, terrorism, jihadism and Islamism to navigate those complex issues that have serious implications for Muslim communities and faith. Politicians have been quick to note that the violent extremism of some individuals or groups should not be generalised to the community and its faith. However, it appears that the European secular imagination has found it difficult to appreciate how strongly Islamic institutions guide the private and public aspects of their adherents’ lives. The challenges regarding the meaningful accommodation of a Muslim public presence within a secular polity have not been thoroughly recognised, and have therefore been addressed ineffectively.

The absence of clarity regarding the discourse on religious extremism within the Muslim community, as well as among the secular policymakers, primarily reflects failure and, to some extent, reluctance to make an important demarcation between religion, the totality of a received faith tradition and its diverse human articulations, and religiosity, the religious life-world expressed as the personal, cultural and political appropriations, interpretations and practices of a faith tradition. The criteria for determining mature and immature Muslim religiosity should be sought within the framework of Islamic theological self-understandings that are constructed out of the foundational sources of Islam and its collective expressions within the Muslim community. There will always be competing sectarian interpretations regarding what constitutes the correct theological criteria. However, in the Muslim tradition, the central salvific criterion is that one’s conduct observes the ethical values and teachings of the faith. The central issue facing Muslims here is not to determine orthodoxy or heterodoxy as such, but to facilitate an orthopraxy that embodies the devotional–spiritual and critical–reflective dimensions of the human condition. The wider Qur’ānic educational and pedagogic hermeneutics aims to bring about the mature formation and articulation of this balanced orthopraxy within the individual and collective lives of diverse historical communities. This religious commitment should exhibit a strong awareness of how personal context informs one’s sense of religious belonging and the theological, cultural and political dimensions of this belonging. In other words, the maturity of one’s religious identity primarily hinges on how individual and collective identities re-enact, handle, interpret and express a received faith tradition and its culturally-embedded emotional and behavioural patterns. This process requires hermeneutic competence to facilitate engagement with the theological content (the cognitive domain) as well as the mental and emotional maturity to recognise the inevitable presence of intersubjectivity in the emergence of one’s sense of self. The capacity for self-contextualisation, or putting one’s identity in its immediate personal and cultural context, strongly indicates the need for one to be open and tolerant to the diversity within her faith community, and within wider religious and cultural contexts. Given this, extremist attitudes or behaviours are located within the levels of human psychosocial development (religious personality) and socio-political and economic contexts (culture), rather than directly associated with the faith itself.

There are some who consider religion as an illusion that arises out of the complex deceptive processes of psychological projection. According to this view, religion is responsible for many human pathologies, including fanaticism, extremism and authoritarianism. In fact, some will go so far as to equate particular religious