Epistemological shifts in knowledge and education in Islam: A new perspective on the emergence of radicalization amongst Muslims

I theorize that the idea of knowledge and education has shifted in Islam from an inclusive and rational search for all knowledge to a narrowed focus on religious knowledge, void of rationality. By synthesizing literature on education and knowledge in Islam, this study identifies three shifts in the cultural history of Islamic education. I argue that those shifts in what was deemed valuable knowledge have played a significant role in the emergence of radicalization today. The study shows that once the social world of Islam destabilized, the sense of belonging and sense making became inward and less reflexive as compared to that of early Muslims. Belief became privileged over the rationality mechanisms that had previously formed Islamic endeavors. I demonstrate that a decline in intellectual and scientific production followed, allowing extremists to skew Islam’s narrative by putting forward an idealized version of the Islamic caliphate divorced from rationality

How do people radicalize?

Very little is known about how violent extremist practices are learned, and the role of educational channels through which they are spread. This empirical study extrapolates insights specific to the Bosnian and Herzegovinian context to demonstrate how one ultraconservative ideology, Salafism, can radically alter the dominant thinking and behavior of ordinary individuals once they feel displaced from the mainstream institutions and particularly from the formal education. At the core of the displacement and replacement model of radicalization is an informal and tactful teacher, influencer, or a mentor that individuals connect with either online or in person. Using the primary data collected in Bosnia and Herzegovina through 20 in-depth and semi-structured interviews with radicalized persons, the study sequences a ten-step radicalization model through which the interviewees have transformed from ordinary citizens into radicalized actors with a potential to engage in violent extremism

Ending Educational Displacement: Storytelling as a Method for Transformative Learning, Healing, Recognition, Inclusion and Empowerment

There is limited research on the effects of storytelling on the Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) community’s sense of self, particularly on those individuals who have been displaced from their homeland due to violence and persecution. In the field of education, such an analysis is particularly cogent considering that the physical displacement and ethnic segregation the Bosniak community experienced in the 1990s was built on multigenerational displacement from the educational system in the former Yugoslavia. Educational displacement translates into being invisible and unacknowledged in the educational curricula, leaving a permanent imprint on those affected. In the case of Bosniaks, their lived experiences and representations were transposed from mainstream curriculum in schools in the former Yugoslavia, engendering a feeling of a lesser contribution, meaning, and value to society relative to non-Bosniaks. This marginalization still reverberates through Bosniak collective thinking and culture, at home and abroad. This chapter explores the role of storytelling in the process of healing, recognition, inclusion, and empowerment of Bosniaks deracinated by the Bosnian Genocide. Storytelling is a necessary step to heal and gain a sense of belonging for those in diaspora and in the homeland. I investigate the role of The Cat I Never Named: A True Story of Love, War, and Survival in initiating a cross-national conversation within the virtual and physical Bosnia and Herzegovina. Following the book’s release, I received a significant amount of public feedback and reactions from the Bosniak community about the impact of my autobiographical account as a genocide survivor. Through content analysis, I detect patterns in this engagement relating to notions of recognition, identity, empowerment, healing, inclusion, and belonging using theories of transformative learning, incidental learning, educational displacement, and recognition. I demonstrate the power of storytelling that has fueled societal acknowledgment within diaspora communities and broader recognition of the Bosnian Genocide. The following section details the various displacements of Bosniaks in the years leading up to the 1992–1995 conflict with a particular focus on Educational Displacement. The sections thereafter examine the public social media engagement and posts I have received as a measure of engagement from Bosniak diaspora members and those living in Bosnia proper relative to the impact of The Cat I Never Named. I show the effect the book has had on Bosniaks’ sense of self through public social media engagement. I also address the relevance of autobiographical accounts, examine the effectiveness of storytelling, and reflect on my positionality, something the chapters in this volume by Dino Kadich and by Mišo Kapetanović also problematize for scholarship more broadly. The chapter demonstrates how empowerment can happen at the intersection of storytelling, public social media engagement, and education. Keywords: Educational Displacement, Storytelling, Transformative Learning, Healing, Recognition, Inclusion, Empowerment, Bosnian Genocide, The Cat I Never Named, Bosniaks, Muslims, Identity, Adult Learning, Social Media, Truth-telling, Trauma, Survivor, Belonging, Connectedness, Resilience, Representation, Diverse Voice

Making of a Voiceless Youth: Corruption in Bosnia and Herzegovina's Higher Education

This research has analyzed a set of structural elements, procedures, and behaviors within Bosnia and Herzegovina's (thereafter, "Bosnia" or "B&H") higher education that have jointly created an encouraging space for the increasing and self-serving utilization of higher education by the country's post-war elite. Of the particular interest is this elite's impact on the forms of educational corruption, which have shifted away from standard bribing processes and moved toward more complex favor reciprocation networks. This process has ensured that today's corruption is perceived as a norm in Bosnia's higher education. Its prevalence has disrupted existing social mobility mechanisms and created a duality in the social mobility process so that the unprivileged still work hard to obtain their degrees while those with social connections are reliant on Turner's (1960) sponsorship model. The analysis goes beyond dissecting corruption's impact on modes of social mobility by redefining Hirschman's (1970) notions of voice, exit, and loyalty within higher education and expanding his theoretical framework to adequately capture and understand the unique set of coping mechanisms that has emerged within Bosnia's corrupt higher education. I reinterpret the voice mechanism that Hirschman sees as a political tool capable of bringing about change as, ironically, severely diminished in its power when observed within a corrupt environment. I further reformulate the notion of exit and contextualize it within the corrupt Bosnian educational system by differentiating amongst various types of exit. In the process, the study finds that Bosnian students often remain in the same educational institution despite the high level of perceived corruption. By ignoring their immediate surroundings and rather than departing physically as Hirschman would expect, students choose to exit mentally from the corrupt operational framework in which they continue to function physically. Lastly, with hard-work and morality marginalized, the question remains open on when the youth will push the educational system in Bosnia toward a tipping point, regain their voice, and transform from an indolent mass to an active reformer. Projects requiring greater transparency of the exam and grading procedures, enhancing external support, and providing spaces for disclosure and adequate management of incidences of corruption, when and if detected, would constitute a meaningful starting point that would help incentivize change. In the absence of concern with the current level of educational corruption, however, the dominance of the incompetent elites will only continue to dilute the effectiveness of the aid being poured into the EU's broader nation-building agenda for post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina

School Uniform Cost Reduction Study: Standardization, Simplification and Supply Policy

The primary goal of this Financial Crisis Response Project’s component (thereafter “Project”) was to gain insights into the school uniform related issues and inform the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (“MECS”) on the ways to lower the school uniform cost in the Mongolian market. This study drew on the data collected via 20 interviews and focus groups with students, teachers, parents, manufacturers, and educational officials, as well as data gathered by surveying 462 teachers, students, and parents in Ulanbaataar, Dornod, and Bayan Ulgh provinces. The data analysis centered around key descriptive statistics and cost simulation scenarios(24 Scenarios, each including 4 SubScenarios). This study reviews the key findings and recommendations aimed at improving the school uniform quality, supply, and pricing

Education and Corruption

Corruption is a societal problem which adversely affects nations’ efforts to improve lives of their citizens. It is normally thought to be centered on government procurement, taxation, and legal decisions and not in education. But it is a problem in education. How serious is it? The difficulty of responding to this question is that corruption in education, as with all illegal and unprofessional activities, is difficult to accurately measure. This limits researchers to predicting institutional and systemic levels of corruption by relying primarily on individual perceptions. Measuring direct experience with corruption is more difficult and hence more rare. Since 1993, Transparency International has taken a global pulse of corruption by conducting the world’s largest corruption survey to derive the Corruption Perception Index and rank nations from the most to the least corrupt. When it comes to corruption research, participants generally hesitate to share their experiences for fear of repercussions, which is why less corruption is likely to be reported than may be actually occurring within education systems. Corruption is manifest in a wide variety of forms. A broad range of literature on corruption in education has been published in the early 21st century, with the goal of defining corruption typologies and examining the effects which corruption has on education systems and those who depend on those education systems. But anticorruption efforts in education have had limited success and more research is needed on non-pecuniary forms of corruption and their relation to elite formation and institutionalized racism

Who Gets Radicalized? What I Learned From My Interviews With Extremist Disciples

Who gets radicalized? What I learned from my interviews with extremist disciple

Amid COVID and Racial Injustice, Teachers Matter More than Ever

Today, our students need the kind of teaching that fosters understanding and knowledge — not in a social, political, or emotional vacuum but instead, by doing the messy work of negotiating conflicts and compromises as we incorporate more of our lived experiences into our math, literature, history, and science lessons. As our youth process their experiences of this pandemic and of the public images of racist violence and public protest, we must make our post-COVID19 classrooms into physical “safe spaces” that allow them to confront their traumas, losses, and fears about their futures

America\u27s Familial Tribalism: Will it Impact Education Internationally?

With President Trump in power, the United States may have entered a new era of familial tribalism, a style of governing that could best be depicted as a sudden disruption to the traditional democratic governance and merited mobility the United States has historically promoted both at home and abroad. With this form of familial tribalism, a new level of power has been given to the members of the First Family, resulting in the United States increasingly mirroring the modus operandi of many developing countries that it had formerly criticized for their own lack of ethics, transparency, and competence amongst the governing elites. Ironically, the U.S. can now learn about the impact of familial tribalism on society and particularly on higher education from those very countries it has tried to reform in the past. Bosnia is one of those countries, where familial and social relations matter and where people are known to seek connections even to secure a spot in a graveyard. Bosnia’s widespread corruption amongst the elites in government stalled its post-war recovery in the late 1990s, eventually seeping into the country’s higher education system. When elites signal that they value belonging and loyalty to their own group over competence and skill, the consequences, as Bosnia shows, are profound. Today, Bosnia is a country marked by the world’s highest youth unemployment rate of 67.6% and a continuous brain drain, where the most educated citizens leave for more attractive opportunities abroad. Examining the effects of familial tribalism on Bosnia, particularly in higher education, provides a warning for those worried about the imprint that a developing familial tribalism in the United States will make on the U.S. itself and the rest of the world

America\u27s Familial Tribalism: Will it Impact Education Internationally?

With President Trump in power, the United States may have entered a new era of familial tribalism, a style of governing that could best be depicted as a sudden disruption to the traditional democratic governance and merited mobility the United States has historically promoted both at home and abroad. With this form of familial tribalism, a new level of power has been given to the members of the First Family, resulting in the United States increasingly mirroring the modus operandi of many developing countries that it had formerly criticized for their own lack of ethics, transparency, and competence amongst the governing elites. Ironically, the U.S. can now learn about the impact of familial tribalism on society and particularly on higher education from those very countries it has tried to reform in the past. Bosnia is one of those countries, where familial and social relations matter and where people are known to seek connections even to secure a spot in a graveyard. Bosnia’s widespread corruption amongst the elites in government stalled its post-war recovery in the late 1990s, eventually seeping into the country’s higher education system. When elites signal that they value belonging and loyalty to their own group over competence and skill, the consequences, as Bosnia shows, are profound. Today, Bosnia is a country marked by the world’s highest youth unemployment rate of 67.6% and a continuous brain drain, where the most educated citizens leave for more attractive opportunities abroad. Examining the effects of familial tribalism on Bosnia, particularly in higher education, provides a warning for those worried about the imprint that a developing familial tribalism in the United States will make on the U.S. itself and the rest of the world