“And the Earth Was Laid Out for All Living Beings”: Muslim Epistemologies, Science, and Non-Western Ways of Knowing

• In Event: Providing for Ourselves: Mutual Aid and Gift Economy Politics as Practice for Liberatory Education

Abstract

For education to engage all young people, we must cultivate learning in a polyverse of scientific epistemologies and not simply rely upon Westernized conceptions of knowledge. By expanding notions of educational epistemology, not only can more diverse individuals pursue the making, sharing, and teaching of knowledge, but we can cultivate wider and more diverse questions to address current (and seemingly current) crises of ecology, society, and humanity. This paper explores the intersection of education, ways of knowing, and Muslim epistemologies. These explorations offer expansions to educational research’s limited, and limiting, understanding of who is considered to be (and is positioned as being able to be) “knowers”, and what ways of knowing are valued. Centering Muslim knowledge systems and ways of knowing offers just one example of the many knowledge systems and ways of knowing that are framed generally as “non-Western”. This paper considers how science, constructions of racial identities, and pedagogical gifts within Muslim ways of knowing transcend narrowed and exclusionary definitions of curricular texts and teachers by reflecting on a year-long symposium of offerings that brought together Muslim and Indigenous scholars to ask and reflect on these questions.

Authors

• Arshad Imtiaz Ali, The George Washington University

• Ebtissam Oraby, The George Washington University

• Samuel Burmester, University of California - Santa Cruz