Controversial curriculum: ambiguities, silences, and the politics of religious and political pluralism in post-Assad Syrian textbooks

I explore how Syria’s new Islamist-led transitional government is using textbooks to navigate between competing demands of nation-building and state-building. Using a qualitative, interpretive analysis of history, social studies, and Islamic studies textbooks, I focus on three features within them: explicit normative ideals, narratives that implicitly promote certain values and ideas, and strategic silences. Across four themes – jihad, religious and cultural pluralism, women’s rights, and political institutions – Syria’s new textbooks are defined by deliberate ambiguities and silences that delicately balance promotion of some Islamist ideas alongside vague commitments to cultural pluralism and political rights. Syria’s mix of ambiguities and silences speaks to the need of weak authoritarian regimes to simultaneously promote their ideologies in redesigning educational curricula while doing so in a way that does not anger key constituencies, particularly in fragile post-conflict settings.