Representations of Islam and Muslims in Slovenian Primary School Textbooks

The article discusses the representations of Islam and Muslims in Slovenian primary school textbooks. The critical discursive analysis focuses on four thematic emphases around which such representations are concentrated: security and violence, geo­graphical and cultural placement, the role of women and gender relations, and the contribution of Muslims to the development of Western civilization. A comprehensive analysis reveals that a multitude of minor biases and/or exaggerations in the absence of certain themes and/or visual illustrations together form a distorted representation that reproduces certain stereotypes as well as ancient fears of Muslims and Islam.
KEYWORDS: Islam, Muslims, primary school textbooks, representations, stereotype

The article discusses the representations of Islam and Muslims in Slovenian primary school textbooks. The authors applied the critical discursive analysis to all officially certified textbooks from 1st to 9th grade in the 2015/2016 school year. In the analyzed teaching material, the authors detected and analytically defined four main thematic emphases around which the representations are concentrated: security and violence, geographical and cultural placement of Islam and Muslims, the role of women and gender relations, and the contribution of Muslims to the development of Western civilization. The results show that rare examples of the representations are problematic. Only a comprehensive analysis reveals that a multitude of minor biases and/or exaggerations in the absence of certain themes and/or visual illustrations together form a distorted representation that reproduces certain stereotypes as well as ancient fears of Muslims and Islam. As the analyzed examples of the representations of the Turkish invasions and terrorism show, the textbook discourse often places Islam and Muslims in the context of violence and aggression, thus connecting them both explicitly and implicitly with the semantic meanings of danger, threat, and aggression. The textbooks often present a violent version of historical contacts with Muslims. At the same time, they neglect or distort the more positive aspects of interactions between the former Ottoman Empire and the cultures of the Balkans, which is relatively close to Slovenia geographically and culturally. The authors’ analysis reveals the processes of cultural othering of Islam and Muslims, which also occurs through the symbolic placement of Muslims exclusively in the Arab geographical-cultural part of the world. The essentialist construction of Islam as the Other in the representations of primary school textbooks also works at the level of explicit exclusion. In those rare cases in which it is included, the textbooks present it only in a latent form. These findings are particularly disturbing because the use of textbooks occurs between unequal participants in an interaction in which power is on the part of the authors – their message has the status of being understood by students as an absolute truth.