Facing issues of violence and conflict, authors of textbooks for Religious Education (RE) choose a range of different strategies. While some try to write as non-controversially as possible about such issues, other authors choose to leave them completely out. Even in the academic study of religions, a well-established perspective is that religion is primarily something good, and important for societies as well as for human development. Such basic presumptions/perspectives are often nurtured by an apologetic orientation to the representation of religion. In some cases, religious violence and conflict are therefore considered disruptive forces that destroy what is “true,” “authentic” and “valuable” in religion. Textbook Violence offers critical perspectives on how textbooks deal or not deal with issues of conflict and violence in religions. The volume’s contributions provide examples from textbooks for university level as well as from RE in schools, and include discussions of conflict and violence in a range of different religious traditions. The contributors bring issues of religious violence and conflict into focus through such questions as: In what way is violence and/or conflict treated? Who are the authorial voices? What are their aims? Who is the reader being addressed? How are the representations of religions framed by value judgments? Beyond certain obvious ideological considerations (e.g., nationalism; the interests of religious pedagogues who contribute to textbooks in some countries), there are a number of different factors shaping representations of religions in textbooks – from commercial considerations and statutory stipulations to situations where publishers and national examination boards work closely together to produce textbooks with contents keyed to national exams. This means that authors have to face different expectations and considerations when writing textbooks. Textbook Violence will also include reflections on the choices such authors are facing.

Although the public regards textbooks as accurate, objective educational tools that innocently provide students with needed knowledge and skills, textbooks are not neutral transmitters of knowledge. Apple and Christian-Smith (1991) point out that textbooks are important artifacts of culture. They create what society has recognized as legitimate knowledge by signifying particular constructions of reality that members of society want transmitted to their children. Thus, the textbook is a powerful educational tool that is written to instruct students rather than to be examined. By simply being in print, textbooks receive authority and have power to construct a sanctioned version of human knowledge along with impressions and images that later become students’ explanations, beliefs, understanding of the world and the “other.” The knowledge that gets into textbooks is not random but rather “it is selected and organized around sets of principles and values that come from somewhere, that represent particular views of normality and deviance, of good and bad, and of what good people act like” (Apple 1990, p. 63). Even textbooks that adopt a ‘fact stating’ format still send powerful messages to students because textbooks are written from a particular perspective. More importantly, the knowledge that is excluded from textbook pages could be just as, or even more important, than what is presented to students. Eisner (1994) argues the knowledge schools do not teach may be as important as what they do teach because “ignorance is not simply a neutral void; it has important effects on the kinds of options one is able to consider, the alternatives that one can examine, and the perspectives from which one can view a situation or problems” (p. 97). Adwan et al. (2002) point out that students often learn only one side of the story and usually it is their own perspective that is considered the ‘right’ one. Textbooks justify one side and offer a negative portrayal of the other, in a sense “one side’s hero is the other side’s monster” (Adwan et al., 2002, p. i). Given the significant role that textbooks play in many countries of the developing world, this chapter provides a complex discussion that allows readers to develop a critical eye when reading textbooks. To do this, several questions will be provided for readers to consider and these questions will be applied to several historical events that center on conflict. The tentative questions are as follows: 1) How do textbooks (the language used) define important terms? 2) How is conflict presented? 3) What are the implicit messages transmitted to students? 4) What knowledge is omitted that might shape students’ understandings of particular events? 5) How do textbook accounts treat the moral and ethical aspects of particular events? Examples are provided from several studies that have examined various textbooks from several nations and how authors address issues such as religion, 911 and America’s war on terror and the Arab-Israeli conflict. Finally, several practical suggestions are offered for teachers and students providing them with opportunities to challenge textbook doctrine and reading textbooks in a more critical manner. These include important questions that must be considered when engaging textbooks content and several facets of understanding that if used in classroom, can aid students in gaining comprehensive understandings of textbooks and uncovering embedded narratives.

This article begins with the author’s own experience as a high school textbook writer. Three years ago I argued with the Japanese Ministry of Education over how to teach about the relationship between religion and violence. The Ministry’s view was that if a group commits violence, they should not be regarded as religious. The Ministry insisted that religion is, by definition, free of any violence. Since all school textbooks in Japan must be authorized by the Ministry, I had to accept the Ministry’s opinion because, otherwise, my textbook would not have been published. This would have caused my publisher to incur a great financial loss. However, the Ministry’s attitude will increase rather than decrease the prejudice among Japanese young people against religions, Islam in particular, because the Ministry’s view flatly contradicts with the information these young people receive from the Internet, which many of them trust more than their teachers. I will expand my arguments by: 1. Comparing how Aum Shinrikyo (the Buddhist New Religious Group responsible for the 1995 Tokyo sarin gas attack) and Al-Qaeda (for the September 11 attacks) are treated in social studies/civic studies textbooks. 2. Examining the descriptions of State Shinto and Yasukuni Shrine in those textbooks and explaining what their implications would be in light of the ongoing contention between China/South-Korea and Japan. 3. Critically assessing college textbooks on the same issue, which are produced freely without any official, national authorization and are supposed to offer academically tenable, uncompromised views of Japanese scholars of religion. I will finally present possible alternative descriptions/explanations on religion and conflict/violence that can be taught to Japanese pupils. While there are works in English on the topics of Aum Shinrikyo, State Shinto, Yasukuni Shrine et cetera, there is no publication which addresses these topics together in a systematic way from the perspective of religion and conflicts/violence, especially in a school teaching setting.

The textbooks for religious education – Islamic, Catholic and Serbian-Orthodox – miss the opportunity to deal with war atrocities, violence and ongoing conflicts in the society after the most recent war in Bosnia and Herzegowina. Instead – to a different extent and in a different quality – they concentrate on their own history and identity which is connected with war-related discourse. Additionally, they do not, or only seldom, deal with the communist past and the violence committed during that period of time. Nevertheless, the “atheist danger” is presented and addressed rather openly in the textbooks. To concentrate on their own history and identity can be seen both as a problematic and an inevitable issue. It is problematic, because the political, national, inter-religious and other tensions can be strengthened through religious education. On the other hand it seems to be inevitable, because in the multi-ethnic, post-conflict states the collective identities must be “shaped” and “adjusted” anew on different levels. This article argues that the neglected debate on conflict and violence is not an indication of intellectual and pedagogical inability to deal with the war. Instead it is firstly a strategy to deal with historical ambivalences and social problems that cannot be solved. Secondly it is a strategy of Churches and Religious Communities to deal with their own inner tensions and thirdly it seems to be a normative “must,” that religious organizations after the war are responsible for “peace and freedom” discourse.

In grand narratives, stories about minority peoples and religions have a tendency to be overlooked or told with a certain bias. This article looks into Norwegian textbook presentations of colonization and conflicts related to the Sami, the Indigenous peoples of northern Finno-Scandinavia. In particular, I will analyze presentations of the Christianization process in the 18th century and the so-called Kautokeino rebellion of 1852. In both of these cases, the relationship between majority, state and church on one side and ethnic and religious minority on the other side is an issue. The Christianization process was part of an explicit colonization in which the state set out to convert the Sami into both Norwegians and Christians. The Kautokeino rebellion has an almost mythical status. Here, a group of Sami Christians brutally attacked representatives of the local authorities. Two were killed in an act of violence. In Sami history, this incident is, however, something more than a story about violence.

The “Ethics and religious culture” (ERC) program tries to achieve two primary objectives: the recognition of others and the pursuit of the common good, while placing an emphasis on “the search for common values, the promotion of projects that foster community life and respect for democratic principles and ideals specific to Quebec society” (MELS, 2008). Each of the three competencies that the student should develop throughout this program – i.e., to learn to reflect on ethical questions, to demonstrate an understanding of the phenomena of religion and to engage in a dialogue – participate differently in this large mandate. However, they all have the intention of making a place for diversity in the classroom. Speaking of conflict, and even more so of religious conflict, is therefore not an easy task: how should a teacher bring up conflicts between religions or even within a religion without offending some of his/her students or even worse, bring this conflict into his/her classroom? The program broaches this theme in a historical perspective by discussing “Peace and conflict: religious conquests, ecumenism, dialogue between religions, etc.” as a part of the theme “religions down through time.” But how do ERC textbooks discuss this subject, if they even bring it up? This chapter offers to examine the treatment of religious conflicts in the ERC textbooks. We wish not only to build a general portrait of this treatment but also to reflect on its strengths and weaknesses through an analysis that considers recommended approaches for teaching sensible topics that appear in established literature. Thus we demonstrate not only the difficulties of discussing this subject in a secular society like Quebec, but also the importance of doing so.

In Norwegian Religious Education (RE) textbooks, Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust are topics that have been covered in Judaism chapters since this religion first appeared in textbooks in the 1970s. However, contrary to what one might expect, these topics take up just a very small section of the chapters in most books. These topics nevertheless have an iconographic impact in some textbooks, due to the use of large illustrations of atrocities. In this chapter, I will provide an overview of continuity and change in the RE textbook representations of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, covering the period 1970-2014. Both the textual and the iconographic representations presuppose substantial prerequisite knowledge, and in the textbooks one can find three intertwined strategies for distancing readers from the problem of anti-Semitism. These strategies can be perceived as normative claims contributing to the formation of a Norwegian identity in the readers (pupils), but they also function as descriptive claims masking the fact that anti-Semitism both has been and continues to be an ongoing problem in Norway.

In this chapter, I look at how authors and publishers have handled the challenge of a potential conflict between the curriculum’s demand for “equal pedagogical principles” and the ideal that “all religions and views of life are to be treated in a professional and impartial way based on their distinctive features and variety” (Kunnskapsdepartementet, Læreplan for RLE). By studying changes in visual representation of Islam and Judaism in two “generations” of textbooks, namely those from the two curriculum revisions of 1997 and 2008, the article discusses the different interpretations of Islamic aniconism expressed in textbooks from four different publishers. The impact of the cartoon controversy of 2005 is one of several potential factors that will be explored in order to explain the palpable changes in the material that is analyzed.

This chapter focuses on the representation of Buddhism in RE-textbooks for upper secondary school in Australia and Norway. I attempt to demonstrate that the textbooks take the majority religion – Christianity, as well as particular ideas, norms, values from the textbook national context, as point of reference in representing Buddhism. In analyzing the textbooks I use a discursive approach (Fairclough 1992, Laclau & Mouffe 1985/2001, Lincoln 2003) and perspectives from current theory of religion (C. Martin 2009, L. Martin 2014). The interpretative strategies involved in the representation of Buddhism have theoretical consequences. I argue from a perspective of postcolonial criticism (Said 1978/1993) that the presentations of Buddhism reproduce orientalist structures creating a dichotomy between eastern and western culture and society. I argue from a perspective of cultural theory (Bourdieu 1977/2005) that the textbooks perform symbolic violence in misrecognizing Christian language as cross-cultural and comparative, and the textbook authors own context and understanding, as adequate representing Buddhism.

The chapter analyses textbooks in RE designed for Norwegian teacher education. An analysis of twenty seven books shows that topics concerning religion and violence, conflict and extremism are rarely mentioned in these books. The main picture is thus that future RE teachers to a very little extent are introduced to issues that relates religion to violence, conflict or extremism. Based on this finding the chapter offers a principle discussion on the absence of related issues in RE in Norwegian teacher education.

This chapter examines the unwillingness of most textbooks on Islam to deal with issues of violence, terrorism, or similar issues. I will do this through an autobiographical account of how I came to write my own textbook—Muslim Identities: An Introduction to Islam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014)—as a response to these others.

Over two decades ago, I authored a number of articles in which I critically examined Western portrayals of Sikhs and Sikhism. More specifically, I examined how the assumptions and interests of scholar-officials in the British Raj shaped their representations of Sikhs and Sikhism. Secondarily, I discussed how these often inaccurate images of the Sikh religion were picked up and redeployed by the authors of world religions textbooks that were written in the latter half of the twentieth century. In the present chapter, I propose to revisit the topic of images of the Sikh religion in Western scholarship, recapitulate my earlier arguments and examine the Enlightenment-informed Orientalist origins of Western discourse about the imputed pacifism/militancy of the Sikh gurus, broadening my discussion to include the most recent manifestations of these notions in contemporary textbooks.

Facing issues of violence and conflict, authors of textbooks for Religious Education (RE) choose a range of different strategies. While some try to write as non-controversially as possible about such issues, other authors choose to leave them completely out. Even in the academic study of religions, a well-established perspective is that religion is primarily something good, and important for societies as well as for human development. Such basic presumptions/perspectives are often nurtured by an apologetic orientation to the representation of religion. In some cases, religious violence and conflict are therefore considered disruptive forces that destroy what is “true,” “authentic” and “valuable” in religion. Textbook Violence offers critical perspectives on how textbooks deal or not deal with issues of conflict and violence in religions. The volume’s contributions provide examples from textbooks for university level as well as from RE in schools, and include discussions of conflict and violence in a range of different religious traditions. The contributors bring issues of religious violence and conflict into focus through such questions as: In what way is violence and/or conflict treated? Who are the authorial voices? What are their aims? Who is the reader being addressed? How are the representations of religions framed by value judgments? Beyond certain obvious ideological considerations (e.g., nationalism; the interests of religious pedagogues who contribute to textbooks in some countries), there are a number of different factors shaping representations of religions in textbooks – from commercial considerations and statutory stipulations to situations where publishers and national examination boards work closely together to produce textbooks with contents keyed to national exams. This means that authors have to face different expectations and considerations when writing textbooks. Textbook Violence will also include reflections on the choices such authors are facing.