My paper focuses on the reported experiences of Muslim students that regularly shift between Quran-centred supplementary Islamic education and mainstream secular school. The paper thus reflects how the Islamic worldview of the students impact their motivation and way of learning in secular school and also how their secular school environment impact their Islamic learning.

The aim is to better comprehend how these students make sense of this dual educational experience while negotiating the knowledge, skills, and values that are taught to them by two apparently disparate institutions. The interviews were conducted in Stockholm and London, and thus a secondary aim is to assess the similarities and differences between these two national contexts. To balance and enhance our understanding of student experiences, this article employs a constructive understanding of Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of cultural capital and habitus as well as Andrey Rosowsky’s notion of liturgical literacy. It shows differences between Quran-based and mainstream notions of “reading”, especially with respect to their contrasting definitions of “understanding” and “meaning”; it also explores how competency in Quran recitation might become a valuable “capital” when translated from the language of “liturgical literacy” to the language of “skills”.