Since the bombings in London, Paris and Stockholm, public debate about Islam and Muslims has often focused on contradictions, conflicts, and contrasting value systems. On one side of this debate are those with a growing concern that immigrants with Muslim cultural backgrounds would be disloyal to their European homes, thus requiring increased monitoring, surveillance, and control. And on the other side are those who argue that the West’s Muslim populations have wrongly suffered from the increasing fear, intolerance, and suspicion generated by the international politics and terrorism of a small number of radicals. Such voices claim that there is a need not for monitoring and surveillance, but rather for the safeguarding of religious freedom and the right to equal treatment regardless of a group’s ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and/or religious background.
In many countries these discussions have directed attention towards places of Islamic education such as Muslim schools, mosques, and Islamic organizations, with a focus on the often controversial and contested manner in which they have been depicted in the media, in public discourse, and, indeed, within Muslim communities themselves. Here it should be emphasized that issues surrounding the matter of how to transmit one’s religious tradition to future generations is crucial to the survival of any religious minority in any part of the world, making religious education both an essential and a challenging minority cultural aim.
In a “Democratically troublesome time” international knowledge transfer and learning from each other, across national borders, can be of utter importance. For this reason, I will, in this paper: 1) present a typology of publicly funded pre-university Islamic education in Europe; 2) present some findings from my latest research project that deals with young Muslims Experiences of Islamic and secular education in Sweden and Britain; 3) point to some challenges and opportunities concerning the integration of Islam and Muslims in Public Schools on the basis of 1) and 2).