In this article, I would like to highlight some aspects of peace education in the context of Qur’an teaching. In our epoch characterised by militarization as well as by the manipulation of religions for war purposes, I would like to show how the topic of peace can be integrated into the teaching of the Qur’an from a multidisciplinary perspective
by Milena Rampoldi.
In the field of peace education, in Qur’an teaching I think that it is essential to combine the individual and social skills, which according to Wulf are regarded as the basis of peaceful action as a dynamic concept, with the concept of peace in the Qur’an and to promote these skills positively from childhood. In my opinion, the competencies that can be incorporated into peace education are essentially the following:
*The recognition of one’s own self:
This basically means sensitivity in dealing with and perceiving individual feelings and attitudes, including the ones towards others, and the analysis and representation of internal psychological conditions. During the Qur’an teaching, of course, the focus is on talking about oneself as a Muslim child in order to cope with conflicts and to practice peace literacy. For this reason, peace education is about the perception of one’s own intercultural and interreligious experience and, beyond this, also about the understanding of the other children studying in the same Qur’an class and outside, not to avoid conflicts, but to actively deal with them. Since it is only through one’s own strong identity formation that the understanding of and access to others become possible in a peaceful way. I am tolerant if I respect my own self and maintain my dignity. The more confident a child is, the more peaceful this child is and the more tolerance the child shows towards others.
*Recognition of individual and social dependencies:
This term refers to the sensitivity in the perception of the structural, social relationships of dependence, which should not be experienced as a potential for conflict, but as a source of inner balance. Overall, it is about awareness of one’s own life situation as a Muslim guy/Muslim girl and about discussing the social structure of relationships within the international Muslim community (the Ummah). This perception can be promoted in Qur’anic teaching from the age of primary school. The Qur’an teacher should tell his/her pupils that a community and a society are built on relationships and also on dependencies that are by no means considered negative. In this network of connections and sometimes conflicts, the child should begin to find his/her own place in the Qur’anic course by learning to define himself/herself in relation to the own family and culture, the other Muslim cultures in the Qur’anic school and the culture in the school and society outside the Qur’anic class. Indeed, healthy self-definition is a guarantor of peace.
* Role distance:
The ability to critically distance oneself from social roles once taken up, or to express an individual distance in one’s own role or to critically question and, if necessary, change their normative requirements, is also essential for the promotion of peaceful action in community and society.
*Empathy:
The ability to empathise with and respond to the expectations of the social counterpart can be learned and strengthened very well in the Qur’anic course in the pair and group work of the children. These social forms are often used to refrain from frontal teaching. It is mainly about practicing tolerance, understanding and patience in working with other students and about learning moral values such as modesty and practicing them in the small social “laboratory” of the Qur’anic course. All these competencies then flow into the overarching peace competence.
*Ambiguity tolerance:
Ambiguity tolerance means the ability to perceive and endure ambiguous situations and conflicting expectations of others, even if it is foreseeable that one’s own needs can only be met to a small extent in order to achieve a state of general peace. This occurs especially in intercultural conflict situations that could already occur in the school classroom. Again, I would like to emphasize the importance of the Qur’anic course as a “laboratory” of social behaviour in the sense of peace. The child should be aware that he/she cannot and may not always enforce his/her own ideas and needs, but must also observe the points of view and requirements of others.
*Communicative skills:
The ability to adequately present one’s own needs and interests to others (identity representation), i.e. the ability not to be completely absorbed in the expectations of others, nor to completely ignore the expectations of others (communication breakdown), but to establish an individual balance between different points of view in a process of understanding, is crucial for peaceful dialogue with other cultures and religions. The communicative competence includes various points of view articulated within the framework of the dialogue and do not lead to a distancing or to a break-off of a social relationship. This polylogue, which consists of several voices that differ without fighting each other, is the goal of the steep path that the Qur’an school must also take with the children. These prerequisites show how important interdisciplinary and interreligious peace education is.
Not only in Islam, but also in Judaism and Christianity and in the other world religions, there is a long history of efforts for peace. This is usually a silent story, in contrast to the loud historiography of wars and invasions.
As the Norwegian peace researcher Johan Galtung states, a negative concept of peace in the sense of an absence of war and direct violence is not sufficient to create a culture of peace. In my opinion, a synergetic effort of all cultures and religions is required to implement a positive concept of peace, as the philosopher Spinoza writes:
“Peace is not the absence of war. Peace is a virtue, an attitude of mind, an inclination to kindness, trust, justice. ”
This moral dimension of peace is also very clearly expressed in the Qur’an. This view is intended to serve the Qur’an teacher as a starting point for the pedagogical efforts in this area. In Islam, peace is not a rigid concept, but the moral capacity of peacefulness, i.e. the competence to bring about peace through one’s own actions, by seeing oneself as creatures of Allah (swt) and acting in this sense. Transcendence is considered the foundation of the concept of peace in Islam and also in the other monotheistic religions.
Peace education, which is limited to pure knowledge transfer in the context of teaching the Qur’an, does not suffice. Rather, one should deal intensively with the causes that lead people to decide against peace and to act against peace in order to teach peace as “behaviour”.
The children are the best recipients of a dynamic peace education in our age full of wars and conflicts precisely because they are creative. For, as Wulf says so meaningfully, without creative thinking it is difficult to develop strategies and solutions for building lasting peace.
The Qur’an teacher can positively use and promote this creativity of the students in order to achieve the core goals of peace education: the teaching of peace competence as a subject competence, the introduction to the individual capacity for peace, which requires a strong personal identity in Islam, and the ability to act in the name of “creative” and “shaped” peace in school and society.
Peacefulness and peace literacy can very well be taught and learned. Closely linked to peacefulness and peace literacy is the intercultural competence, the development of which is regarded as the core of peace education, since one can prevent violence through communicative strategies of conflict resolution.
Peace education is always value-based. As a consequence, it cannot be practiced in a value-neutral way outside one’s own worldview. This is essential when it comes to peace education within Islam. Thus, the Muslim children will develop their creative potential and their readiness for conflict in the Islamic context. Finally, it is again about an interreligious implementation of peace education through Qur’an methodology, on the one hand with the highlighting of the special Islamic principles of peace education and on the other hand also the discussion of the similarities between the world religions when it comes to peace education and the ideal of mental and social peacefulness.