No Muslim is just a Muslim: implications for education

It is widely accepted in academia and state policies that recent years have seen an increasing stress on publicly enacted Muslim identity in Britain and in many other parts of the world. Less recognised is the fact that many among those who call themselves Muslims do not share religion as a predominant identity-attribute for themselves. Such people go by many appellations including secular Muslims, cultural Muslims etc. Similarly, that which goes by the name of Muslim culture is indeed a ‘religio-secular’ culture. Despite this reality, media, policy, and educational discourse about Muslims continues to work with the binary of Muslims as religious and the West as secular. This means we are raising a new generation in an empirically unsound and socially unhealthy image of the self and the other. This article will trace the rise of religion as the predominant public identity-attribute, challenge this phenomenon by showing its empirical vulnerability and detrimental social effects, and propose the need to reconceptualise the nature of identities attributed to people with Muslim heritage in pedagogical narratives.