Curricular representations of ancient Egyptian indigenous belief systems and their manifestations within Egyptian students’ civic attitudes

• In Event: Curricular representations of indigenous perspectives: examining stakeholder interactions within African, Asian, and North American contexts

Proposal

The advents of the Abrahamic religions of Christianity (circa 30 CE), and subsequently of Islam (in 641 CE), brought with them a divisive cut from the country’s ancient indigenous knowledge systems. Captured and propagated through dominant interpretations of various Biblical and Quranic narratives, including the Israelite Exodus narrative, the Abrahamic tradition has generally vilified and ‘othered’ ancient Egyptian knowledge and belief systems (Assmann, 1998; Ezzat, 2017). Clearly, the religious-based discourse sanctions and accentuates that distancing of modern day Egyptians from ancient knowledge systems and epistemologies (Colla, 2007). As a result, with very few intellectual exceptions, efforts to create postcolonial indigenous alternative discourses in Egypt have generally neglected ancient indigenous knowledge systems.

To date, however, no study has examined how curricular approaches to and representations of Egypt’s ancient history and belief systems have evolved over time. Further, none have interrogated how Egyptian students make sense of such representations. Thus, in this paper I ask: how does the Egyptian curriculum present ancient indigenous knowledge system? And, how do Egyptian students interact with that history and these knowledge systems?
I am guided by critical discourse theorists’ calls to analyze how discourse shapes individual and societal worldviews, subjectivities, and civic attitudes (e.g., Fairclough, 2003; Luke, 1995; Rogers, et al., 2005). Heeding Eisner’s (1994) call, I am inspired to look beyond identifying the missing curricular content – such as the omission of a particular minority’s historical narrative or contributions – to more broadly problematize, “the options students are not afforded, the perspectives they may never know about” (p. 107).

I conducted an archival analysis of Egyptian social studies curricula since the 1800s until the present, as well as interviewed graduates Egyptian schools (n=39). In my archival analysis, I was mainly guided by Fairclough’s (2003) approaches to textual analyses. In analyzing the data collected from participants, I was guided by Grounded Theory approaches (Bryant & Charmaz, 2007; Charmaz, 2006). Data collection methods included written narrative exercises (e.g., Létourneau, 2007; Zanazanian, 2013), in-depth semi-structured interviews, drawing exercises (Lee, 2004; Mitchell, De Lange, & Moletsane, 2011), and two participatory visual methods workshops (Mitchell, 2011). I conducted this field research in Cairo between November 2016 and March 2017.

The data analyses reveal how the textbooks and curriculum at large propagate exclusionary dominant discourses, including a territorial nationalist and a religious-based discourse. Both continue to sideline and undervalue ancient indigenous knowledge and belief systems, albeit in different ways. Participants’ responses show how the majority have internalized and reproduced these dominant discourses. Pointing to the resilience and ubiquity of those discourses, even participants who were critical of the dominant territorial narrative were unable to problematize key elements of those dominant discourses, and thus seem to be confined by their approaches and worldviews.

Despite the growing body of literature analyzing Egyptian curriculum and textbooks highlighting their dominant exclusionary discourses (e.g., Abdou, 2016, 2018; Atallah & Makar, 2013; Botros, 2012; Sobhy, 2015), there is little attention paid to the potential of alternative discourses, especially those embedded within ancient indigenous epistemologies and worldviews.

Author

• Ehaab Dyaa Abdou, McGill University