This paper examines the psychometric properties of the 30-item Moral Foundations Questionnaire among a sample of 370 young adults between the ages of 18 and 26 years who were born in Punjab and who had lived there since their birth. Initial analyses did not support the internal consistency reliability of the five scales of moral predispositions…

The public resurgence of religious adherence in the West remains one of the defining qualities of this century. If secularisation theory can be understood to articulate the inevitable secularisation of post-enlightenment European societies, religious converts may be understood to epitomise some of the theory's failings. Through a…

This study developed and tested a Turkish translation of the 23-item Sahin-Francis Scale of Attitude toward Islam (containing six negatively-voiced items) on data provided by 493 participants (191 school students and 302 undergraduate students). Two research questions were tested on these data. First, exploratory factor analyses suggested that…

Maktab education serves many purposes. It provides the substantive knowledge thought to be compulsory for Muslim pupils. Its functional role is to enable them, through varied learning processes, to embody elements of their faith and live as Muslims. Hitherto, systematic attention to curricula in primary maktab education has been rare. This…

This paper presents a tentative argument for the application of a unique methodological approach in researching convert Muslims in contemporary Britain. By throwing into relief some of the theoretical limitations of previous studies on the topic, a case is made for a dialectical model of thinking that foregrounds Islamic epistemology and places it…

This paper arises from our concerns regarding the documented increases in xenophobia in the UK and more widely around the world. This is evidenced by a rise in religiously motivated hate crimes, especially against Muslims and Jews. Our enquiry is into the potential religious education has to mitigate xenophobia and educational justification for it…

There has been longstanding criticism of the whiteness of the professional discourses in teaching. Bariso (Race Ethn Educ 4(2):167-184, 2001) writes that where whiteness is constructed as being professional then blackness is constructed as unprofessional, in turn excluding blackness from the construction of the teacher. Similarly, Bhopal (Br J…

The purpose of this article is to describe with examples what kind of challenges there are in the handling of religion in public school. This is done with case examples from interactions between teachers and Somali Muslim pupils and guardians in a school. The school is located in the Helsinki Metropolitan Area and has 350 pupils in grades 1-6. The…

Recent decades have witnessed a change in European governments' policies from benign neglect to active management of religious diversity, where Islam is often seen as the most challenging religion for the European social order. However, the ways in which this 'management' is justified and undertaken varies from country to country and depends on…

This article presents the results of a participative study, involving a group of 27 British Muslim students aged 15-18, who were given the opportunity to reflect on the implications of having participated in two different 'traditions' of education: that is, Muslim supplementary education (in its various forms) and state mainstream schooling. The…

The paper critically approaches the western epistemological tradition and its psychologized perspectives that pose identitarian and cultural categories as standing at the basis of societal conflicts. It suggests that staying attached to a conceptualization of identity as a, more or less, fixed cognizant entity and of culture as a, rather, fixed…