Assessing Islamic Religious Education Curriculum in Flemish Public Secondary Schools

Islamic tradition promotes a holistic approach of personality development in which, we argue, three educational concepts take the centre stage: tarbiyah, ta’leem and ta’deeb. Looking through the lens of these concepts, we analyse two Islamic religious education (IRE) curricula: the 2001 and 2012 curricula for Flemish public secondary education provided by the Representative Body for IRE. We conduct a systematic thematic document analysis of the 2001 and 2012 curricula to map curricula elements that potentially contribute to Islamic personality development through IRE classes. Crucially, this article seeks to investigate whether the 2001 and 2012 curricula for Flemish public secondary education are in line with these central IRE concepts. We observe that the 2012 curriculum does contain relevant anchor points to work on tarbiyah, ta’leem and ta’deeb and to strengthen an Islamic personality in Muslim pupils. Hence, we argue that there is an urgent need for a new, adequate and sufficiently comprehensive IRE curriculum for Flemish public secondary education, developed by an expert committee—which should include Belgian-educated educational experts—in order to meet the expectations of all the stakeholders. Since in our view, this is the first step for a qualitative update of Flemish IRE. Further reflections on both curricula and recommendations for a new IRE curriculum are outlined in the discussion and conclusion sections.