Citizenship Education in Multicultural Societies
The events of the last three years in the Arab world, what used to be called rather optimistically the ‘Arab spring’, have focused on diverse issues in different countries but one of the common elements to them all has been the struggle to define some for
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The challenge to ‘citizenship’ in the Arab world The events of the last three years in the Arab world, what used to be called rather optimistically the ‘Arab spring’, have focused on diverse issues in different countries but one of the common elements to them all has been the struggle to define some form of collective belonging to a nation, often expressed in the term muwatana. This Arabic word is most often translated into English as ‘citizenship’, an idea which had been thought to have become the defining dimension of the new nations arising out of the collapse of the Ottoman empire at the end of the first world war. In the 1980s a number of widely-read Islamic intellectuals, especially in Egypt, individuals who were associated with the moderate end of the spectrum of the Muslim Brotherhood tradition, engaged in arguments for citizenship. In 1985 the journalist and commentator Fahmy Howeidi argued that the struggle for independence against the colonial powers was one in which all sections of the population participated, Coptic Christians as well as Muslims. The status of dhimmi was therefore no longer relevant, however useful it may have been in a certain historical period. This shared commitment to the Egyptian nation made people of all communities common citizens (Howeidi, 1985). Echoing this argument, Muhammad Salim al-‘Awwa asserts that the modern state represents a new kind of Islamic sovereignty to which much of traditional law cannot apply. Reasoning based on first principles (ijtihad) must be used to deduce a new system. The modern Muslim state is the result of a common struggle for independence and nation building in which the Muslim majority and the non-Muslim minority have shared. In this way it differs sharply from the early E. Aslan, M. Hermansen (eds.), Islam and Citizenship Education, Wiener Beiträge zur Islamforschung, DOI 10.1007/978-3-658-08603-9_3, © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden 2015
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Muslim state that was based on conquest. In this situation it is the duty of the Muslim majority to concentrate on applying the principles established by God and the Prophet rather than stubbornly insisting on applying outdated and inappropriate rules. The discourse in this approach has changed from one of contract (‘aqd) to one of constitution (dustur) and from dhimmah to citizenship (muwatanah) (Al-‘Awwa, 1989, 257-63).7 The background for these and similar writings during the latter third of the 20th century was growing support for religious forms of expression, which found a place also in politics, reviving many of the Islamic forms of categorisation which observers thought had disappeared. Helped along by the Iranian revolution of 1979, the world was again increasingly divided into dar al-harb and dar al-islam. And non-Muslim religious minorities were once again being described as dhimmis, protected communities.
The revival of ‘citizenship’ in Europe This increase in the references to citizenship in the Arab world accompanies similar developments in Europe. When I was in high school i
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