“God made beautiful things”: Proper faith and religious authority in a Jordanian high school

Abstract

A B S T R A C TOutside the formal and intended curriculum in Jordanian schools, the efforts of students and instructors to teach about religion and living piously as Muslim women span a myriad of spaces and approaches. At the al-Khatwa Secondary School for Girls, tensions surrounding religious authority were enmeshed with struggles outside school, specifically with a local piety movement and with a politics of authenticity that has women at its center. Competing interpretations of Islamic orthodoxy, and contests for moral authority, come to the fore in schools in unique ways, and schools provide a space and tools for young women to negotiate these tensions. [women, education, Islam, schools, Jordan, religion]

We are the very model of a moderate Muslim state: The Amman Messages and Jordan’s foreign policy

“…However, as Adely notes, Jordanian society contains multiple competing social and political projects to define what counts as Islamic orthodoxy. 39 These multiple projects include those institutionalised groups who refuse to participate in democracy (Hizb al-Tahrir, the traditional Salafists, jihadist Salafists and da'wa groups) and those who do (Islamic Action Front, Du'a party, and the Wasat party) as well as looser, piety movements and practices. 40 The state vision (din al-dawla) is not all-encompassing and is entangled with, problematized and accommodated by actors representing myriad vernacular conceptions of Islam (din al-milla).…”

Inheritance, Heritage, and the Disinherited: Ambiguities of Religious Pedagogy in the Moroccan Public School

“…Anthropologists of Muslim societies have defined religious education as a complex socio‐political and cultural endeavor that evolves over time (Hefner and Zaman ). Whereas the spaces of the madrasa or the mosque have been given the most attention, I want to underline the significance of the relatively understudied public school as germane to the moral socialization of many young Muslims today (for a similar study in Jordan, see Adely ). The structural organization of the Moroccan public school has been based on the French model.…”

“…The confrontation between the public school and Islamic Revival leads Starrett to suggest that the state education's version of Islamic morality, centralized and pervasive as it may be, is not able to predict the “formation of new structures of interest and conflict” or control “the course of the debate” (:11). More recent studies of Egyptian Islamic schools (Herrera ) and Jordanian high schools (Adely ) demonstrate that moral cultivation, observed as process, cannot fail to see subjectivity as premised upon multifaceted and contradictory intentions. Enlarging his argument, Starrett has found modern schooling to be deeply ambivalent in its aspirations, with the paradoxical task to preserve official culture through the protection of a constructed past while preparing students as agents of technological and economic change (Doumato and Starrett ).…”

Introduction to Special Issue: Ethnographies of Religious Education

“…Younger community members are seen as particularly vulnerable to the sway and influence of such transformations; as such, they are frequently the object of these pedagogical efforts. Many pedagogical projects seek to protect youth from the moral corruption that some read into new social and cultural phenomena (Seale‐Collazo and Vicini, in this issue; Adely ). At the same time, some religious organizations and leaders (official or self‐appointed) have also worked to harness new technologies in their efforts to transmit religious knowledge and solidify religious commitments (e.g., Starrett ).…”

“…Attention to religious education, where this purpose is explicit, places this reality in stark relief. As schools around the globe become increasingly focused on seemingly value‐neutral technical skills for the “knowledge economy,” moral or ethical education becomes more narrowly associated with particular religious and moral teachings (Adely ). Although the emphasis on teaching for particular skill sets and for economic ends may appear as an abdication of teaching “values” in schools, or relegating such lessons to religion classes or religious institutions, seemingly secular pedagogical projects are equally concerned with the production of particular subjectivities and values (Mazawi , ).…”