An Alternative Model for Islamic Religious Education: Critical Religious Education

Approach Critical Religious Education has been developed by Andrew Wright in the UK. According to this approach, religious education should aim at pursuing ‘truth’ and cultivating ‘truthfulness’. Critical Religious Education is grounded on the three premises of the Philosophy of Critical Realism: ontological realism, epistemic relativism and judgemental rationality. Furthermore, this approach adopts the Variation Theory as a learning theory. In Critical Religious Education, the primary aim of religious education is to develop learners’ religious literacy by providing them with rational, critical and reflective thinking skills, thus helping them to make sense of their faith identity as well as those of other religious and secular worldviews in the modern world. Although being developed in a Western-liberal society, this approach is claimed also to be applied into confessional contexts. This article includes a literature review examining, first, the theological, philosophical and pedagogical basis of Critical Religious Education, then, its contributions to Islamic Religious Educatio