Knowing Across Traditions: Muslim and Indigenous Knowledge Systems in Education

About the Cluster

This THI Research Cluster sits at the intersection of education, Muslim knowledge systems, and Indigenous epistemologies. We take up THI’s theme of Language by centering recitation, oral tradition, embodied practice, multilingual navigation, ceremony, and aesthetic form as ways into non-Western and Muslim ways of knowing. We explore Muslim ways of knowing across some of their historically specific global formations, including West African, Black diasporic, Arab, South Asian, and Southeast Asian traditions, to examine what becomes visible and possible when those traditions are placed in conversation with Indigenous ways of knowing. We ask what these traditions, in conversation, carry for families and communities. We consider how the languages through which knowledge is transmitted shape what learning is for, and what otherwise futures they make possible for teachers, students, and communities.

Muslim ways of knowing are neither singular nor static. They are transmitted through distinct languages of knowing, among them Qur’anic recitation, manuscript culture, embodied practice, and communal participation. West African Muslim scholars, for example, developed an epistemology of embodied knowledge in which the human being is remade as a living vessel of Islamic learning. For example, Black Muslim communities have built educational spaces grounded in oral history, communal practice, and collective care. Indigenous communities have sustained land and water-based ways of knowing carried forward through ceremony, oral tradition, and kinship relations. There is also a long, well-documented history of the Islamic sciences serving as a foundation for European knowledge production, alongside a parallel history of that contribution’s erasure from curricula and the historical imagination. Exploring these traditions together, and attending to the languages through which each is expressed and taught, opens new possibilities for teachers, community educators, and collective learning spaces.

Co-Principal Investigators
Arshad I. Ali (Education)
Yasmeen Daifullah (Politics)
Thiago Mota (History)
Barbara Rogoff (Psychology)

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Banner Image: Laila and Majnun at School”, Folio from a Khamsa (Quintet) of Nizami of Ganja, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The painting is from a manuscript of the frequently illustrated story of Laila and Majnun by the twelfth-century Persian poet Nizami. The illustration depicts Qais, the future “mad one” (Majnun) for love, and Laila, his beloved, who meet for the first time as children at a mosque school.