Doumato, Eleanor and Abdella and Gregory Starrett (Eds). Teaching Islam: Textbooks and Religion in the Middle East.

• Position: BOOKS IN BRIEF--SUMMER/FALL 2007 - Book review

Doumato, Eleanor and Abdella and Gregory Starrett (Eds). Teaching Islam: Textbooks and Religion in the Middle East. Boulder, CO: Lynn Rienner Publishers, 2006. Hardcover $ 55.00.

Much has been made about the role played by Saudi Arabia's education system in fostering hatred that fueled the September 11 terror attacks, but do Saudi textbooks deserve to be faulted for fostering violence? And have Wahhabi ideas infiltrated the Islamic textbooks used in public schools throughout the Middle East? Confronting these questions, and others, Teaching Islam explores the political and social priorities behind religious education in nine Middle Eastern countries (Egypt, Iran, Kuwait, Oman, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Turkey), as well as analyze the type of the Islamic doctrine being disseminated and used for schoolchildren socialization. The authors reveal dramatic differences in the way that Islam is presented in textbooks across the range of countries reflecting local histories and the policy interests of the state. They also illustrate the perhaps surprising adaptability of Islam as leaders strive to reconcile Muslim identity with Arab nationalism, state citizenship, and modem reality of an interdependent, globalized world.

A thorough review of religion textbook in Middle Eastern schools does not yield a picture of mindless fanaticism but that each government has used them as part of its effort to create a tailor-made Islam suitable for domestic consumption, the editors explain. School textbooks are not teaching militant ideology, nor are they instructing violence against nonbelievers. Jihad is an obligation in the cause of defending Islam. However, in each curriculum there are differing emphases on the nature of the enemy and what to do about him. For example, the Palestinian National Authority discusses it in the context of countering colonialism (Da'Na)...