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Introduction: Young Muslims Caught in a Paradigm Clash

Classical sociology does not have a good track record in taking religious faith and communities of religious faith seriously. The founding father of contemporary sociology Auguste Comte (1798–1857) was so set against the metaphysical claims of traditional religions that he founded his own humanist religion called Religion de l’Humanité with its own Postitivist Church (Église Positiviste) which would expound humanistic principles in a God-free world. The pioneering social scientist, Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), famously reduced the sacred to ‘collective effervescence’ which, although regarded as an important and necessary component of a healthy human group, was in and of itself merely the product of human needs rather than representative of any transcendent reality.

Sociology, as a child of the Enlightenment (Hallaq 2012), is usually premised on the nature of the world as fundamentally observable and measureable and the ability of human reason to explain both the nature and dynamics of the human experience, whilst dispensing with the ‘crutches’ both of metaphysics – including the Divine – and of religious scripture.

Religious faith and its academic cognate – theology – are often premised on the relative inability of human reason to give a fully adequate explanatory account of human and social life without understanding it as in some way indicative of the Presence and Acts of God (or equivalent(s)) and His (her/their) relationship with humanity through representatives, scripture and mediated by acts (not just thoughts) of human worship.

Given some apparently incommensurable assumptions underpinning the contemporary disciplines of academic sociology and academic theology, it is hardly surprising that contemporary accounts of young Muslims (Archer 2003; Alexander 2000; Hopkins 2004; Ipgrave forthcoming; Shain 2011; Wilkinson 2015), a social group(s) that self-defines theologically, have tended to occupy two apparently incommensurable and dichotomised epistemological positions in the academic and, particularly, policy literature.

Accounts from the Right of the political spectrum have tended to emphasise the presence of faulty Islamic theology and the faith-saturation of Muslim identity as an obstacle to the healthy attachment of young British Muslims to Britain and ‘British values’ and as the significant causal factor in the failure of young British Muslims to integrate successfully into British life and take full advantage of educational opportunities (Cameron 2011; May 2015).

The Left has tended to identify the absences of socio-economic opportunity (unemployment, poor housing and poor maternal English language skills) (Hussain 2008) and the toxic impact of the absence of solutions to festering geopolitical problems involving Muslims such as Israel–Palestine (1947–present), Afghanistan (2001–present), Iraq (2003–present) and Syria (2011–present) as obstacles to Muslim educational and civic engagement, whilst minimising the causative impact of the Muslim faith or related Islamic/-ist ideologies (Hassan 2013).

In the shadow of this often dichotomised and highly politicised intellectual context, this chapter aims to do two related things:

  1. 1.

    To propose a robust and flexible ontological framework for thinking systematically and coherently about young Muslims in education derived from the philosophy of critical realism, in a way that includes inter alia the spiritual dimension.

  2. 2.

    Using this robust theoretical framework, to provide an account of young Muslims in education as existing on laminated, articulated levels and to suggest by reference to some recent empirical research around Muslims in history education in the UK that the spiritual dimension of Muslim young people in education cannot be ignored if we are to represent young Muslims accurately in research and cater for their educational needs.

This theoretical framework and accompanying illustrative account is intended to enable researchers to factor both the effects of the presence of faith and, crucially, the effects of the absence of considerations of faith into their research on young Muslims.

The Suitability of Critical Realist Theory to Frame Muslims-in-Education

Factoring-in the Presence and Absence of Faith: Original and Dialectical Critical Realism

Original critical realism (OCR) (e.g. Bhaskar 1975/2008), which emerged as a philosophy of natural and then social science in the 1970s, asserts as its theoretical fulcrum (Wilkinson 2015) the relationship of three necessarily inter-related principles: ontological realism, epistemological relativism and judgemental rationality. This fulcrum states that both natural and social phenomena exist either independently (in natural science) or relatively independently (in social science) of the knower/researcher (ontological realism), and that the multiplicity of ways in which existent things can come to be known (epistemological relativism) must be subject to rigorous critical analysis and assessment according to criteria of truth, accuracy and plausibility (judgemental rationality) if the nature of phenomena is to be made apparent in an accurate and useful way (Little 1993).

Within this fulcrum, central to the critical realist science of being (ontology) in OCR are two ideas: (1) that reality is ‘stratified’ and (2) that most events (outside the laboratory) occur in ‘open systems’. To say that reality is ‘stratified’ is to say that phenomena at one level of reality are scientifically to be explained in terms of structures or mechanisms located at a deeper level that generate or produce these phenomena from which they are ‘emergent’ (Bhaskar 1975/2008: 119) but to which they are irreducible (Bhaskar 2002).

To say that most events occur in ‘open systems’ is to say that they are determined by and, therefore, require explanation in terms of a multiplicity of such structures and mechanisms. For example, the learning of a child at school or the rehabilitation of an offender in prison will be determined by a multiplicity of personal(-ity), inter-personal, natural/physical, institutional and socio-cultural factors that are operating simultaneously and are in interaction with each other, both directly and with ‘feedback-loops’.

Emergence

To give a simple example of the principle of emergence in the natural world, water (H2O) is dependent on the ‘lower order’ existence of hydrogen and oxygen atoms and yet has causal properties and a relationship to the rest of living things that are irreducible to hydrogen and oxygen (Smith 2010). Emergence in the human and social worlds typically comprises stratified, laminated, articulated layers of being that are closely connected but also differentiated one from another (Bhaskar 2002).

To put this more concretely, the mind at the psychological level is dependent on the chemistry of the body at the level of biology; it could not operate without it. But the mind as cause or category is not reducible to chemical reactions and the physical activity of neurons at the chemical level. To couch this in legal terms, ‘intent’ as existential cause and a legal category cannot be reduced either causally or taxonomically to chemical reactions in the brain – the law would be a nonsense if this were the case – nevertheless, ‘intent’ is dependent on those chemical reactions.

This idea of emergence has also been applied by Brown (2009) to education. Slightly expanding Brown’s schema (to include socio-economic mechanisms), this emergence in education entails and comprises a formation, including:

  • physical mechanisms, e.g. size and quality of classrooms;

  • biological mechanisms, e.g. adequate nutrition;

  • psychological mechanisms, e.g. student motivation and parental expectation;

  • socio-economic mechanisms, e.g. class and wealth;

  • socio-cultural (including moral and political) mechanisms, e.g. language and peer-group attitudes;

  • normative mechanisms, e.g. as determined by curricula and ‘official’ bodies of authorised knowledge (Apple 1993).

With reference to the above schema, the metaphor of ‘articulation’ is also useful. It suggests that changes at one level may have either intended or unintended ‘knock-on’ effects at a different level or levels of being. To give a concrete example of the system above applied to a Muslim child in education, an overheated classroom at the physical level may have a ‘knock-on’, articulated effect at the psychological level on a child’s concentration and at a cognitive level in his/her ability to remember ‘the facts’; poverty at the level of class as well as a lack of socio-cultural resonance of Muslim parents with aspects of Britain may reduce a child’s ability to engage with the normative level of the history curriculum by diminishing inter alia his/her chances of travel to places of historical interest.

Laminated Systems in Humanities Education

As well as this useful non-reductive heuristic of emergence, Bhaskar (1979/2008) has provided the ontological metaphor of the ‘laminated system’ of four-planar social being, which can be applied neatly to frame meta-theoretically the Muslim child in an educational setting. The education of the Muslim child in History education, for example, can be theorised to exist in at least four social planes and involves simultaneously:

  1. 1.

    material transactions with nature or artefacts ultimately derived from nature – textbooks, PCs, school buildings, food, transport, heating, electricity, etc.;

  2. 2.

    formative inter-personal relations with peers, teachers, family members and community figures by which formal and informal learning will be transmitted to the child;

  3. 3.

    indirect involvement via, for example, the level of school management with other institutions and policy-making organisations – the government, local authority, museums, historical sites, publishers, etc. – which will produce powerful regimes of knowledge (Foucault 1980); e.g. school subjects, into which the child’s learning will, at least to a certain extent, be bound;

  4. 4.

    all of which will be brought to bear on the emergent stratified personality of the child.

Critically for an adequate ontological model of the Muslim child/young person, in such ‘stratified, articulated, laminated’ accounts, faith and the dimension of the spirit can be plausibly said to be ‘emergent’ from the dimension of the mind as described by psychology, and yet, neither taxonomically nor causally reducible to it. Moreover, according to the critical realist idea of ‘demi-reality’, whereby even false ideas can be admitted to have real effects in the world,Footnote 1 faith and the dimension of the spirit can be allowed to have real causative effects in the transitive world even if the researcher does not believe that the realities of faith have alethic intransitive (Bhaskar 1975/2008) existence.

Factoring-In Absence

Finally, it is also axiomatic to critical realist theory in its dialectical phase (Bhaskar 2008) that ‘absence’ and what is missing from being is understood as ‘real determinate absence’ (Norrie 2010). Absence is not indeterminate nothingness; it is causally efficacious, effecting real, natural, social and transcendental outcomes. According to this theoretical position, one would expect curricular elements that were missing in the spiritual dimension, theorised by me elsewhere as the absent curriculum (Wilkinson 2014a), also to affect the learning outcomes of the Muslim young person.

In other words, the philosophy of critical realism can provide the types of multi-dimensional, non-reductive theoretical framework that account for both the presence and absence of faith in young Muslims’ lives and learning relatively independently of the beliefs (or lack of them) of the researcher.

An Empirical Application of Critical Realism to Framing Muslims in History Education

Theoretical considerations such as those described earlier made in conversation with the multi-dimensional situation of Muslim young people in Britain as described empirically by previous research, which typically showed the significance of their faith for 90 % of young Muslims both as a praxis and as the performance of identity (Archer 2003; Alexander 2000; Hopkins 2004; Ipgrave forthcoming; Shain 2011; Wilkinson 2015), led me to develop a laminated ontology of the educational success of young Muslims in a variety of different dimensions for my own educational research.

This research focused on the impact of the National Curriculum for History (NCH) on the holistic development of 307 representative Muslim young people (Year 9; i.e. 13–14-year-olds) in education in four English state secondary schools: one in Birmingham, one in Leicester, one in North London and one in East London (Wilkinson 2011, 2015).

All these schools had a high proportion of Muslim students. Out of the students at each school:

  • Technology School – (n) 52 – was 63.4 % Muslim.

  • Faith School – (n) 67 – was 100 % Muslim.

  • Community School – (n) 49 – was 63.6 % Muslim.

  • Specialist School – (n) 139 – was 98.6 % Muslim.

From the total sample of Muslim young people who completed a quantitative attitudinal survey about their history provision, 23 young people were sampled for interview using a sampling strategy that took into account the history class/set that they were in, their interest in the subject of history and their measured NCH level. These factors had been shown by the statistical data of a pilot study to be significant predictors of success with the subject (Wilkinson 2007).

History was selected as the subject focus due to the documented power of school History as a crucible of both national (Barton and McCully 2005; Wegner 1990) and personal identity (Cronon 2000) and for the exploration of citizenship and the power of school History both to include and exclude national groups (Ahonen 2001).

My Theoretical Model

The dimensions of my theoretical model were multiple, and ‘articulated’ and loosely emergent from/with each other. Empirically, these dimensions were to be substantiated extensionally (Scott 2010), i.e. in national breadth, through the Muslim young peoples’ responses to attitudinal surveys about the effects of NCH and ‘filled in’ intensively with an understanding of the causal relationships between these ‘articulated’ dimensions through analysis of the interview data, non-participant observations and the interviewees’ diaries.

Thus, I conceived of the dimensions of the success and potential success of the Muslim learner as constituted by:

  • The intellectual dimension of success (IDS). This was success understood both as ‘objective’ academic attainment as assessed by the sample of Muslim boys’ teachers according to NCH levels and interpretatively in terms of pupils’ own assessment of their basic historical understanding of the history of England, Britain and the rest of the world. It was also the dimension of success delineated by the ability of the Muslim young people to understand and articulate the understandings of the history that they had learnt in relation to their own lived experiences.Footnote 2

  • The spiritual dimension of success (SDS) – the focus of this chapter. This was the dimension of success at which the Muslim young people reflected on changing historical values and apprehended ethical, moral and religious significance. This was a vital level given the importance of religiosity and strong religious identifications for Muslim boys recorded in all the literature and exemplified in the sample, 89 % of whom strongly agreed that ‘my religion is very important’.Footnote 3

Using the ‘laminated’ categorisations outlined above, both the intellectual and spiritual success related primarily, although not exclusively, at the level of biography to the emergent embodied personality of the individual child (4, above in four social planes).

  • The affective-cultural dimension of success (ADS). This was an emotional, identity-related and motivational dimension of success that was connected to the level at which NCH helped/did not help the pupils reflect upon and understand their home cultures and their relationships with majority British culture. It was also related to the types of negotiations of masculinity and femininity within the peer-group identified by researchers into Muslim-in-education through the prism of gender (Archer 2001; Shain 2003). The dimension of affective-cultural success related to the embodied personality of the child and formative inter-personal relations with peers (2 and 3 in the laminated four-planar model cited earlier).Footnote 4

  • The instrumental dimension of success (InDS). This was the dimension at which NCH did/did not provide life skills that Muslim young people recognised would be useful in post-school contexts of work. This was also a vital dimension given the heightened instrumentalised attitudes to schooling of Muslim boys, in particular, identified in previous research and the general perception noted in the literature that Muslim male pupils, in particular, tend not to regard the humanities subjects as useful for their chances of gaining employment (Adey and Biddulph 2001). It was also related to levels of uptake of General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) history.Footnote 5 This dimension of instrumental success is related to all the levels in the laminated four-planar model cited earlier.

  • The civic dimension of success (CDS). This was the dimension at which NCH nurtured/did not nurture Muslim pupils’ desire and ability to participate socio-politically and belong emotionally to British society and to relate to the international community, including the Muslim-majority world. This was important given the significance of the political context of history education and its connection with the Britishness agenda that was established by former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown and continued by the recent Conservative–Liberal Democrat Coalition Government (2010–2015) during the period of research.Footnote 6

  • The overall holistic dimension of success (OHDS). This corresponded to pupils’ overall assessment of the impact of history on their complete development as a human being which was measured as a factor called awareness of myself and my world. The OHDS took into account the successful emergence of the embodied personality of each individual child (4, above in four social planes) considered as a whole. It was the most important facet of success which was used as a dependent variable in statistical regressions. It was meant to correspond to feelings of deepening integration, both internally related to self and externally related to society, for each child through the process of history education.Footnote 7

This model enabled me to investigate the impact of history education on Muslim young people holistically and at multiple, discrete ontological levels and it helped me to avoid reducing success to measurable academic attainment, which was nonetheless accounted for as an important component of the intellectual dimension of success.

The Significance of Spiritual Success

While all the dimensions of success identified earlier were significant explanatory factors of the overall holistic dimension of success (see Table 5.1) and have been considered by me in detail elsewhere (Wilkinson 2014b, 2015), it is germane to this chapter that the dimension of spiritual success was a surprisingly significant predictor of both the intellectual success (ß = 0.270***; R 2 = 0.410) and of the overall holistic success of the sample (ß = 0.345***; R 2 = 0.431) (Table 5.1)

Table 5.1 Significant factors in different types of Muslim success with National Curriculum History (Ordinal Logistic Regression)
Full size table

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Interviews and observations confirmed that the spiritual and moral domain (Hallaq 2012) was, to varying degrees, intrinsic to the development of the historical understanding of the majority of my sample. These made it clear that the more the NCH had challenged the boys to examine ethical or moral issues, the more historical facts and information they remembered. This was particularly the case with lower-achieving pupils. For example, for one lower-achieving boy from the Technology College, who by his own admission had very little taste for history, a process of ethical reflection about the Holocaust – ‘How could a civilised nation have done this?’ – was complemented by a surprisingly detailed recollection of Nazi racial policy and the grisly technology of the Holocaust.

The ethical and moral benefits in the spiritual dimension of success that the Muslim young people consistently said that they enjoyed deriving from the study of history included:

  • Gratitude for the social, medical and technological privileges of the present through acknowledgement of the achievements and the sacrifices of people in the past.

  • For Ahmad (Technology School, middle-achieving, Afghan-British) this feeling of gratitude was connected to awareness that the technological and medical progress of the past 100 years meant people lived longer, which he had found ‘inspirational’.

  • Samir (Specialist School, middle-achieving, Bengali-British) compared and contrasted the hardships endured by child labourers in the past with his own privileged situation of receiving an education compared to some children in the world who still do not.

  • Amir (Community School, high-achieving, Pakistani-British) reflected on the necessity of not taking things for granted due to the fragility of present gains and the often unexpected nature of war.

AMIR::

…[history] made me a bit grateful that it (war) doesn’t happen anymore but in some situations it might come up […] Might repeat itself if things get out of hand.

  • Challenging stereotypes and countering discrimination, including challenging anti-Semitic and anti-Western/Christian prejudice amongst their Muslim peers.

  • Five of the Muslim young people interviewed thought that history in school had a significant role to play in the spiritual dimension of success by challenging the Manichean ‘Us’ vs. ‘Them’, Muslim (good)/non-Muslim (bad) (or vice versa) world views:

  • Ahmad cited a critical role for history in combating Islamophobia if the achievements of Islamic civilisation and the Muslim contribution were a feature of classroom learning. He also recognised the value to Muslims of acknowledging the achievements of notable Westerners/Christians to the general patrimony of humankind.

MATTHEW::

And how about the other way round? Do you think if Muslims knew more of the History of Western countries they might show more respect for Western countries as well?

AHMAD::

Yeah, it would be like some Muslims, yeah, the extremism and the terrorism they would, it’s more like good, but if they know about Western people like [Isambard] Kingdom Brunel, they wouldn’t do that stuff [terrorism].

  • Providing lessons in teamwork and serving others.

  • For Waleed (Community School, middle-achieving, Pakistani-British), the pre-eminent lesson that he had taken from his study of the English Civil War and the mistakes of Charles I was the need ‘to listen to advice’ and to work with other people.

  • Uthman (Faith School, middle-achieving, British-Indian) thought that NCH in general could contribute to people wanting to work together as part of ‘Team England’. In a related way, the life of William Wilberforce had impressed on Amir (Community School, high-achieving, Pakistani-British) the value of having empathy for other people’s situations and the importance of looking beyond the trappings of wealth and status to observe and respect people’s true character.

MATTHEW::

You said something very nice here [in your diary]: ‘I think he was a good man because he had feelings for others rather than for himself.…’

AMIR::

Yeah, because I seen…in the film that we watched it gave me a decent opinion of why, how he felt, because he was just looking at the slave being sold to rich people and he wanted to buy it, buy the slave, to free him from his sadness […]He was different. He was unique to others because people that have money think about themselves only. It’s better to be poor and look at other people.

  • Making more sophisticated, autonomous, moral decisions.

  • Three of the interview sample cited the role of NCH for stimulating autonomous moral decision-making. For example, Benyamin (Technology School, middle-achieving, British-Algerian) eloquently cited the crucial general role of history in developing the ability to make autonomous moral judgements eloquently using the specific example of the Treaty of Versailles (1919):

MATTHEW::

So do you think […]history does have a…purpose for helping young people to make their mind up about things, decide, and make moral judgements?

BENYAMIN::

Yeah, I think it is. […] you have to make moral judgements; you can’t just make judgements like what you hear or like you can’t just follow other people; you have to be yourself and you have to think about what you’re going to do, what’s your decision, what’s your conscience telling you to do […] when there was the Treaty (of Versailles) between the French, the British and the Germans and the French […] wanted revenge but the British wanted peace and the Americans wanted them to be punished but not too harshly and I decided that peace was like, would be the best option…

  • Becoming a better, more reflective person.

  • In short, nearly half the sample of boys reckoned that the study of history in general and their NCH provision in particular had the power in some way to help them and others become better people and lead ‘better’ lives at the level of SDS.

AHMAD::

It’s like […] it can actually help…‘cause if you’re learning, if you’re learning about the history, what’s good, what happened in the world, you might change the way you live or help like how the way you treat people around you […] if you think of that, it actually helps you like live as a better person.

The Significance of the Absence of Spiritual Success

Conversely, if spiritual success was not achieved and the spiritual dimension was not adequately addressed by teachers, the intellectual success and the absorption of core historical knowledge as well as the affective-cultural and civic dimensions of success of some pupils also suffered in a ‘knock-on’ way. These negative ‘knock-on’ effects led to both a decreased engagement with the history curriculum and to a decrease in reflection on citizenship and their status as both Muslims and young British citizens.

For Pervez (Faith School, high-achieving, British-Pakistani), for example, the absence of the history of the formation of Pakistan as an Islamic Republic from the curricular account of Indian Independence and the exclusive curricular focus on the role of Gandhi was a source of disappointment and confusion.

PERVEZ::

To learn about Gandhi is not exactly something that’s very exciting. If it was more like how the Pakistan started then it would be exciting but Gandhi…I don’t mind learning it but it would be better about…I’m not exactly excited about it.

MATTHEW::

So would I be right in saying that if, let’s say, Gandhi…you were learning about Gandhi and Mohammed Jinnah and the whole sort of movement to start Pakistan…as sort of together…then that might be more interesting?

PERVEZ::

Yeah […]‘cause I wasn’t even aware of that, you know, because we haven’t learn it, I haven’t even heard of that, so yeah, that’s quite new to me so it would be better if we can learn things like that.

The Absent Curriculum

In fact, none of the schools, despite their high intake of Muslim pupils, taught any of the modules of the history of Islam that were available on NCH at the time of research. The history of the Muslim contribution constituted an absent, unenacted curriculum (Wilkinson 2014a) that had detrimental effects across the sample. Out of the sample of 23 students (48 %), 11 noted unprompted the absence of the history of the Muslim contribution from their curricular learning. All 11 boys alluded in some way to the real determinate, negative impact of this absent curriculum (Wilkinson 2014a), which ranged from its generating ‘boredom’ and frustration to more keenly felt feelings of alienation and rejection.

For Haider (Faith School, Pakistani-British, low-achieving), for example, the absence of history of the Muslim contribution at school contributed to his ‘boredom’ with the subject, to his finding it unimportant and to the feeling that he was ‘not learning the right stuff’.

Pervez (Faith School, Pakistani-British, high-achieving) said that without the history of the Muslim contribution, history at school was ‘a complete waste of time’. Notwithstanding the adolescent hyperbole of this statement, Pervez’s testimony suggested that something that would have been seminal to Pervez’s potential engagement with the subject was missing. This was reinforced by the fact that both Pervez and Haider said that the inclusion of some element of the history of the Muslim contribution in their learning would have rendered other topics, such as the compulsory study of the changing relationship between the British Monarchy and Parliament, more interesting. Even, said Haider, ‘…all those Henries!’

This absence of the engagement of Haider’s and Pervez’s faith-based identities in the spiritual and affective-cultural dimensions of success had prompted negative ‘knock-on’ effects on both the intellectual and civic dimensions of their development.

Conclusion: Factoring-in Faith Fairly

My data about the impact of the history curriculum on British Muslim young people’s holistic development would have made much less sense had I not factored-in both the presence and the absence of the spiritual dimension in their educational experience and being.

Success in the spiritual dimension was a significant predictor, both of intellectual success (ß = 0.270***; R 2 = 0.410) and of overall holistic success (ß = 0.345***; R 2 = 0.431), and interviews corroborated the fact that the more that the Muslim young people were engaged to reflect ethically, morally and religiously about the past, the more historical facts they remembered and the more engaged they were with the subject of History as a whole. Conversely, when the Muslim young people were not engaged to reflect ethically, morally and religiously about the past, they learnt less and were less engaged with the subject of History as a whole, sometimes to the point of boredom and even alienation.

This research strongly suggests that contemporary theoretical models used to frame research on Muslims-in-education need to be multi-dimensional, non-reductive models that factor in the faith and faith-based identities of young Muslims as at least partially determinate of their life choices and chances.

These models need to factor-in faith fairly in articulation with other ‘laminated’ dimensions, without swamping research with faith-based explanatory accounts or naïvely obliterating other explanatory elements such as class, ‘ethnicity’ and gender and the way that young people tend to form and perform identity in innovative and hybrid ways.