The increasing religious diversity in Italy raises new questions about how to organize religious education. Since Muslims rank as the second largest religious community in Italy, one needs to ask how Islam could be taught in Italian public schools. Due to the lack of an agreement between the Muslim community and the Italian State, it is not possible to opt for IRE in public schools until today. Whereas Austria does offer publicly funded IRE for more than 30 years, some German States only recently started to do so and other States such as Italy still lack any recognition of Islam as such. Therefore, this panel seeks to examine different ways of organizing IRE and elaborates on successful initiatives but also on shortcomings, gaps and failures. Particularly, it focuses on the important contribution of IRE in terms of identity formation and the prevention of radicalization.
Chair: • Khalid El Abdaoui (Universität Innsbruck)
Panelists: • Marco Demichelis (University of Navarra) - The amateurish feigned indifference of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies in Italy. Opportunities and Hypocrisies • Mariana Rosca (Institute of Human Rights, University of Deusto) - Islamic Religious Education (IRE) in Spain • Hüseyin I. Cicek (Erlangen Center for Islam and Law in Europe / University of Liechtenstein) - Islamic Religious Education in Austrian and German public Schools: A comparative analysis Dorothea Rechenmacher (Philosophisch-Theologischen Hochschule Brixen) - Religious Education in Italy