Doumato, Eleanor Abdella and Gregory Starret. Editors. Teaching Islam: Textbooks and Religion in the Middle East.

• Author: Anthony, Sean W.
• Position: Book review

Doumato, Eleanor Abdella and Gregory Starret. Editors. Teaching Islam: Textbooks and Religion in the Middle East. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2007. 265 pages. Hardcover $55.00.

In November 2003, a conference initiated by Eleanor Abdella Doumato entitled, "Constructs of Inclusion and Exclusion: Religion and Identity-Formation in Middle Eastern School Curricula," convened at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University to examine content and influence of the religious curricula found in the textbooks of numerous Middle Eastern countries. The book under review gathers together the results of the participants' research into a single volume in order to make the results of the aforementioned conference available to a broader audience. As described by the volume's editors, the mandate underlying the conference was "to explore how religion is represented in textbooks used in state schools in the region, focusing especially on the way categories of inclusion and exclusion are configured through religious identity" (5). A year-long project funded by Watson Institute, the United States Institute of Peace, and the Institute of International Education, the project's organizers requested that each participant researcher limit their investigation to essentially the same uniform parameters: firstly, each individual research project would focus on a single country and, secondly, the textbooks examined would include those utilized for the school years 2002-2003 and 2003-2004.

As with any edited volume of contributions written by a score of different authors, concerns about maintaining coherence and quality across the essays always abound. Both the more or less uniform parameters governing the essays and Doumato and Starret's introduction to the volume itself allay many of these concerns and provide the book not only with a robust theoretical and methodological foundation but also with a measure of sober-minded perspectives on the history of the textbook in the context of state-sponsored nationalist education in the Middle East. The editors clearly intend to present the volume as a readable, approachable treatment of Middle Eastern textbooks presenting valuable insights for both specialists and non-specialists and are essentially successful in this endeavor. They argue for the relevance of the volume's discussions to the ongoing debates about the roots of Islamist violence while inveighing against the emergence of the American pundits'...