The Governance of Islamic Religious Education in Finland : Promoting "General Islam" and the Unity of All Muslims

The chapter introduces one way in which ethnographers can engage with social and symbolic boundary marking in a complex suburban setting where globally produced sectarian and political discourses intersect with immigrant regimes and multicultural policies. The Iraqis in diaspora in Finland who hold contrasting religious and political perceptions and complex personal histories of persecution must come to terms with the fact that the rapid fragmentation of Iraqi society is in many ways present in the form of tense social and symbolic boundaries in the multicultural suburban contexts in Finland. The Iraqis in diaspora in Finland are caught up in a collision of discourses not only with relation to violence and social fragmentation at home; they also stand between the increasingly contradictory refugee regime and multicultural social policies that essentialize identities on religious and sectarian terms. Multicultural work attempting to build bridges between diasporic communities and the Finnish state often fail to recognize the internal divisions within the diaspora and thus engender particular types of responses: silences and forms of silencing that are rooted in cultural and religious practices.Recent decades have witnessed a change in European governments’ policies from benign neglect to active management of religious minorities. With respect to these minorities, it is Muslims who are often seen as the most challenging for the social order of a multicultural European society. Consequently, there is a growing need for studies on the opportunities that societies create or restrict for the development of Islam in Europe. One important issue concerns the Islamic religious education in European state schools. In Finland, Islamic education programmes are incorporated in the public school system. This chapter will look at the governance of Islamic religious education in Finland on three levels of administrative hierarchy: the state as a creator of legal opportunity structures, curriculum as a site of external regulation, and teachers as actors in internal regulation.Peer reviewe