In light of calls to examine, elaborate, and improve pedagogies in teaching and learning Islam, thematic analysis was conducted on literature in English on pedagogies derived from the primary-source texts, the Qur'an and Sunnah. Three themes were constructed, each capturing a distinct pedagogic principle, to suggest an expansive framework of principled, flexible, situated, holistic, and transformative pedagogies. First, Relational Pedagogies center learning and developing in warm human relationships. Second, Pedagogies of Mutual Engagement include doing, speaking, and inquiring together in participatory processes of making meaning. Third, Pedagogies of Conscious Awareness aim to make visible purposes, reasons, and principles behind Islamic practices. These three themes were then used as sensitizing concepts in examining data gathered in a sociocultural study on Muslim educators' perspectives and practices at a mosque school in Canada. Reflections of the themes in the data-and contradictions-suggest that educators passionately but partially draw from primary-source pedagogies to inform their praxis in a pedagogic diaspora where interpretation and application vary. Further research is required to examine whether the developmental potential of these primary-source pedagogies might be optimized when they are employed together, as a balanced group, and how they might address pedagogical criticisms in teaching and learning Islam.

In this interpretive research study, Claire Alkouatli inquires into the pedagogical activities Sunni Muslim educators employ in sites of Islamic education that are often marginalized by stereotypes, misperceptions, and charges of anachronism and indoctrination. She invited thirty-five Muslim Canadian educators to share their perspectives on their pedagogies around teaching Islam to children and youth. Her thematic analysis of participants’ variegated descriptions coalesced into a three-theme pedagogical typology. Distinct from mainstream secular pedagogies at the levels of ontology, epistemology, and developmental psychology, Islamic pedagogies are situated within a wider conceptual paradigm. Recognizing their qualities of holism and “double cultural relevance,” they are functionally significant in teachers’ repertoires for helping young Muslims think across paradigms and may contribute to both sociocultural continuity and more equal inter-epistemic interaction in heterogeneous societies.

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