An exploration of the viability of partnership between dar al-ulum and Higher Education Institutions in North West England focusing upon pedagogy and relevance Final Report Ron Geaves, Liverpool Hope University Introduction and Background Religious education in faith schools has been subject of contestation for several decades and is arguably most acutely experienced in the Muslim faith school sector. The debates are framed within ongoing and continuous educational theorization of the role of religious education in the school curriculum; the role of faith schools and in the case of Muslim faith schools, political concerns over integration. Muslim faith schools were likely to find themselves at the forefront of government identification of schools ‘as a tool for tackling extremist opinion and ideology’ in the 2008 Prevent Strategy, whose primary focus was the prevention of militant Islamic terrorism.1 In the case of the Deobandi dar al-ulum (Muslim seminary),2 a sector with approximately thirty institutions in Britain, primarily concerned with delivering a seventeenth century religious curriculum formulated in India, known as the Dars-i Nizami,3 these debates become focused around relevance with regard to both pedagogical styles of delivery and the content of the curriculum. Although the project that provided the field research for this article was primarily concerned with the practical obstacles that might stand in the way of possible partnerships between the dar al-ulum and HE/FE sector institutions with regard to the accreditation of the final two years of the curriculum (post ‘A’ Level), it was able throw light on the concerns with regard to relevance and pedagogy. The project was funded by the Islamic Studies Network in 2010 and explores possibilities of collaboration between Muslim providers of traditional Islamic education 1 and HE/FE institutions in close geographical proximity in North West England. Possible participants for collaboration had been identified prior to the commencement of the project and two prominent dar al-ulums (Islamic seminaries) located in Lancashire and Greater Manchester affiliated with the Deobandi network were identified as possible partners, along with two Christian foundation FE colleges involved in the delivery of undergraduate degrees validated by major North West England universities. The Christian foundations were initially selected as they already recruited substantial numbers of Muslim students from their local catchment areas; they were in proximity to several major dar al-ulums including the two identified for the project. It was surmised they would be interested in collaboration as a result of interest in faith education, interfaith dialogue and issues of local/national integration. Deobandi dar al-ulums were selected as they are the principal providers of Islamic traditional education in Britain and provide the greatest challenges with regard to assumed strategies of isolation. The Muslim institutions identified provide a split curriculum consisting of primary and secondary school National Curriculum syllabi, subject to OFSTED inspection as well as an eight year South Asian traditional Islamic education leading to a two year advanced level study which is the sole access to alim (Islamic legal scholar, pl. ulama) status in Britain. The schools therefore function both as educators of Muslim children in Britain and as religious training sites to produce the new generations of British ulama. As such they are ideally placed to ascertain cross-fertilization of pedagogy from traditional Islamic education and the teaching of GCSE at both levels. The project had a dual intention to (1) see through to completion a partnership in which a BA in Islamic Education would be created for advanced dar-al-ulum students and (2) to focus on the relevance and pedagogical styles of the Dars-i Nizami curriculum taught in the dar al-ulums and thereby add to scholarly and political debates on the 2 madrasa/dar al-ulum education which has already generated a body of literature by academics and media. At the commencement of the project there were considerable challenges to overcome with regard to access to the Deobandi dar al-ulum network in Britain and the willingness of educators with strong faith commitments to either Christianity or Islam to work with each other. In formulating the project the researcher was informed by the ideal of ‘engaged religious studies’ or ‘engaged research’ in which scholars of religion are required to squarely address the issue of advocacy. In such research academics work with those outside academia to resolve questions of public significance.4 As stated by Geaves (2010) ‘joining with Muslim partners, forming collaborative links, helping to establish training programmes and to professionalize their various institutions and bodies, working as equals in a spirit of friendship’.5 Alison Scott-Baumann has been instrumental in developing such partnerships working on collaboration between Ebrahim Community College in the East End of London and the University of Gloucestershire in addition to a failed pilot project for educating Muslim women to be teachers.6 Currently successful collaborations exist between The Islamic Foundation and the University of Gloucestershire, The Islamic College and the University of Middlesex and the Khoja Shi’a and the University of Winchester. In all these pioneering partnerships, it is university Education departments that are taking the lead, perceiving a synergy to be forged between Islamic and Western approaches to education. Phil Klein (et al.) also affirm that university–community partnerships provide ‘synergistic spaces for communities to address difficulties and universities to meet their missions’, reflecting critically on the benefits and barriers to such collaborations.7 Scott- Baumann draws upon the philosopher Paul Ricoeur to provide a theoretical construct for such collaborations, citing Little Ethics (1992) in which he argues that ‘we may need 3 to modify our ideals in certain contexts’, and a ‘dialectic of hope’8 in which we need to free ourselves from the hegemony of any one belief paradigm for interpreting the world and seek a ‘multiplicity of different interpretive frameworks.9 Another useful theoretical paradigm is provided by Robert Jackson’s reminder of Gerd Baumann’s distinction between ‘dominant discourses’ and ‘demotic discourse’ in which the former refers to the language used to describe reified or ‘homogeneous’ communities and the latter to the language of cultural interchange on the ground, that is, ‘culture in the making’.10 The first stage of the project involved initiating conversations with the dar al- ulums and the respective FE/HE colleges. The researcher was aware that in initiating such dialogue, suspicions existed on both sides and to date no partnerships had been forged with the Deobandi dar al-ulums in Britain. Deobandi reticence to engage with outsiders has been variously analysed as due to defensive strategies of isolation developed to protect Islam in the crisis caused by the loss of Muslim power to the British in India in the second half of the nineteenth century11 and, alternatively the protection of Muslim piety. Whatever the reasons for their reticence, Deobandi educational institutions were never easy to access for researchers nor was there traditionally a will or need to co-operate with partners in the Muslim educational domain, let alone non-Muslim agencies, except where required by British legal frameworks. As pointed out by Birt in an informative article, Deoband’s seminaries were created as ‘oppositional in character’, and were a ‘form of moral rearmament’ at the end of Muslim rule in India.12 Birt reminds us that although some divisions of Deoband were more political, the branch that became dominant in Britain was the ‘pietist and anti-political trend’, often working in tandem with Tablighi Jama’at, that was marked by an attitude to the ‘West’ that deemed British society as a source of 4 corruption to individual Muslim religiosity.13 Geaves was to find this protective enclave of traditional piety in Deobandi/Tablighi Jama’at institutions difficult to penetrate in 1995 and Sophie Gillat-Ray found it no more penetrable in 2005.14 She describes her encounter in insightful detail and concludes that any such research falls into the category of ‘sensitive’. She writes, ‘In the case of Deobandi dar al-uloom, a researcher will be ‘placed’ or ‘situated’ in a meaningful pre-existing ‘Deobandi’ world-view and role category and it is very unlikely that such a categorization will correspond with the self- perception or identity of the researcher’.15 To overcome such obstacles, the researcher was able to draw upon contacts made in previous projects and to utilise the same human resources that successfully gained access to Indian Deobandi dar al-ulums in 2008.16 In that year, the researcher had visited 26 major dar al-ulums in Northern India, including both the historic foundational institutions in Deoband, Saharanpur and Lucknow and their respective transplants in Gujarat that have so much influenced the creation of Deobandi schools in Britain. A number of prominent Deobandi religious educators were interviewed in Northern India, well-known as preachers, spiritual guides and teachers to the Gujarati Deobandi ulama who held positions of educational leadership in North West England. The project was influenced by the findings of the Makadam/Scott-Baumann report in 2010, in which it was stated that cross fertilisation