This article explores the relationship between the recent growth of mass higher education in the Arab Muslim world, particularly in Oman and North Africa, religious activism, and the implications of the “objectified” religious knowledge and authority that modern education encourages. Study of the new ways of knowing and the emerging networks for communication and action produced by mass higher education and contemporary religious activism offers insight into the “political economy” of religious knowledge: the interplay of religion, politics, and national identity. [Islam, Middle East, authority, religion, education]

The study of education can be to complex societies what the study of religion has been to societies variously characterized by anthropologists as ‘simple,’ ‘cold’ or ‘elementary.’ Recognizing this potential, sociologists and social anthropologists have recently indicated a renewed interest in the study of how schooling, especially higher education, implicitly defines and transmits a culturally valued cognitive style, ‘a set of basic, deeply interiorized master-patterns’ of language and thought on the basis of which other patterns are subsequently acquired (Bourdieu 1967: 343; see also Cole, Gay, Glick and Sharp 1971).

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The historical and contemporary development of certain informal and formal articulations of Muslim social and political identities and forms of association in Muslim-majority and Arab societies has facilitated the emergence of a public sphere and limited the coercive power of state authority. This article suggests how a greater focus on religious ideas and forms of association can enhance the concept of the public sphere so that it better accounts for developments in these societies and in European societies themselves.