Pluralism in search of a new curriculum: The challenge of religious education in the Middle East and North Africa - ABC Religion & Ethics

Australia Broadcast Center

25-06-2025

Since the 1990s, I've had extensive experience engaging with universities in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region around the study of religions — especially in Morocco and Jordan, which are both close US allies. In fact, I've just finished a year teaching at the University of Jordan in Amman.
Time and again, I have found myself running up against the question of religious pluralism . In my experience, colleagues and students at these universities, all Muslims, were as kind as any people I've encountered. They recognised the human dignity of all. But other religions didn't have a specifically religious value for them — only Islam did. These were open-hearted and generous people, who nonetheless would switch to attack mode when the conversation turned to religion.
Now, I am fully aware that people of my own religion — Christianity — can be highly polemical. What has come as a surprise to me was to face such polemicism in the university classroom. How was I supposed to explain what initially appeared to me as a kind of schizophrenia?
How disinterest gives rise to theological susceptibility
Imagine a country where ignorance of other religions is pervasive, not on fringe websites or from one-eyed pundits, but within state-accredited academic institutions. Imagine a country where university students study other religions only to demonstrate their falsehood. They might be polite to people of other religions — if they were raised to be polite by their families — but would nonetheless be prone to imagine that God is not pleased with those who adhere to 'false' religions.
Imagine a country where there isn't a single university scholar with internationally recognised expertise in the study of other religions, or with experience engaging religious communities sympathetically in order to understand their convictions as they themselves understand them.
Such is what I've generally found to be the case in MENA universities. I often say to colleagues, 'It's fine to see your religion as the true one, but you still have to be fair. If you want others to study your religion as you understand it — rather than as terrorists who act in the name of Islam do — you have to study the religions of others as they understand them.' I'd go further and say that the goal of studying another religion is to enter into a life-giving relation with its adherents, allowing us all to know new life in the one God.
But my MENA colleagues are typically nonplussed. The society is overwhelmingly Muslim, they say. Nobody in our country is actually interested in religious pluralism. It doesn't really make sense for us. (And to be fair to my colleagues, there is no state support for the study of religious pluralism, only slogans and rhetoric — though that doesn't mean it's not a vital issue.)
Disinterest is the general outlook, and disinterest makes for theological susceptibility. If you're ignorant of other religions and have been taught that they are a bundle of lies and devotions to false gods — making their adherents enemies of the one God — you will be susceptible to messaging that tags them as a threat.
The situation is similar in religious education in the region's state schools. The textbooks may call Muslims to be kind to everyone but leave gaping holes when it comes to positive knowledge of other religions. Others might be disbelievers, and yet you're to be nice to all, as Islam teaches. But then a clash occurs — close to home or on the other side of the world — and it suddenly makes more sense to emphasise the status of others as disbelievers, whose truth is a threat to your own.
It's no wonder Christians will rarely send their children to state schools — even in a place like Jordan, which is held up as a model of religious tolerance in the MENA region.
How theological susceptibility fuels populism
Over the last years, MENA universities have begun to host programs on the study of religions. The language of instruction is English, which, it is felt, is the only way to connect to global religious studies, but such instruction is destined to remain isolated and irrelevant to the religious discourse in Arabic that shapes the region's public life.
To be sure, the real MENA-region challenge is the lack of economic development, which has left large swaths of young people unemployed and discontent with the regimes that rule them. But material factors alone don't explain the tensions between religious communities in the region — tensions that sometimes turn into conflicts.
A system of education that makes young people theologically susceptible to conflict is also a factor. If your schooling does not allow you to identify specifically religious bonds between your religion and that of others, if it teaches you that your religion and others have nothing in common, as I've said, you'll be susceptible to messaging that tags them as a threat.
That's populism in the MENA region. You are made to feel that your religious community — Sunni, Shi'i, Christian, Jewish, Druze — is at risk. In good times, cordial relations prevail. Communities may even intermarry. But when things fall apart in society, the crisis is read through the lens of theological susceptibility. Shi'a with their Iranian backers are the threat. Sunnis with their Saudi backers are the threat. Christians with their Western backers are the threat. Jews with their American backers are the threat. Druze with their Israeli backers are the threat.
Theological susceptibility, a mere idea, thereby turns into social reality.
The possibility of religious synergy
With no vision for the academic study of religious pluralism and no positive knowledge of other religions in schools, what is to immunise against such susceptibility?
What if your religious education taught you to view other religions, despite differences, as essentially related to yours — and that their peoples are also guided by God? The question is doubtless challenging. It breathes relativism. If other peoples are guided by God through — and not despite — their religions, which religion is the true one?
I'm sympathetic to the question. The idea of religion as a source of guidance has largely been tabled in the Western study of religions. It's generally taught as a social phenomenon. As a result, religion is frequently treated as little more than a curiosity. But that's not the whole story. Religion guides people in powerful ways (as does atheism). The commitment of MENA-region schooling to the idea of religion as a set of compelling truths is a helpful corrective to the Western approach. But can we see those compelling truths as shared in some measure — as uniting rather than dividing?
The powerful nature of public religion on the global stage is not going away, raising the prospect of endless sectarianism — but it also opens up new horizons of meaning. A common future requires us to see the religious synergy. You can regard your religion as the true one, I suggest to colleagues and students here in Amman, and still recognise that other peoples are guided by the one God. After all, it doesn't make theological sense to say that divine guidance is somehow bound to human categories.
Students especially warm to the idea. They're quick to point out the falsehoods in other religions, as they've been taught, but they're also receptive to non-polemical explanations. A student came to my office last autumn and was relieved to hear that Christians and Hindus both have a sense of divine oneness, despite what he had learned. He still believes Islam is the one true religion, but he discovered that he doesn't have to hate other religions because — as he had been taught — they're not monotheistic.
Hatred is self-destructive. Freedom from it is relieving. Despite widespread institutional disinterest, a rising generation is eager to reconsider religious pluralism.
The MENA region can become a leader in the global study of religions — doing so innovatively, beyond Western world-religions approaches that are based on claims to objectivity now seen as naïve. Innovation is needed in all fields, not just in technology, but for the welfare of humanity. Educational institutions in the MENA region are well positioned to develop programs that take divine guidance seriously as a reality all peoples seek.
There's no silver bullet when it comes to the study of religious pluralism. The current approach in Western institutions is certainly not the solution, nor is the one in MENA-region institutions. The way forward requires a great deal of patient dialogue across cultures. But we urgently need a way forward that takes people's religious convictions seriously as a source of knowledge, rather than a mere curiosity with no truth value, as in Western institutions, but that also sees them as they truly are, as deeply aligned across religious traditions — points of mutual discovery and mutual inspiration rather than mutual fear.
Paul L. Heck is Professor of Theology and Islamic Studies at Georgetown University. His most recent books are Skepticism in Classical Islam: Moments of Confusion and Political Theology and Islam: From the Birth of Empire to the Modern State.