From Conflict-Independence to Dialogue-Integration: Design & Discovery of Resources for Rethinking Religion-Science Relationship in Muslim Communities

The education system in modern Pakistan is divided into two streams: the madrasa, which traces its roots to the famous Darul Uloom Deoband seminary (est. 1866), and the university, which traces its roots to Aligarh Muslim University (est. 1875). Framed in terms of Ian Barbour’s four typologies (i.e., conflict, independence, dialogue, and integration), the course content and pedagogies of both streams largely promote a 'conflict-independence' conception of religion and science. However, the publicly declared position of both the madrasa and university is that religion (i.e., Islam) and science share a 'dialogue-integration' relationship. Consequently, Pakistan provides a challenging yet promising environment to discover resources and design methodologies to shift the promoted conception of science and religion from 'conflict-independence' to 'dialogue-integration'. Validated by analysis of data collected from eleven workshops conducted in Phase I of our project (Grant #59639), this second phase project will ideally build on those findings. Preliminary indications even suggest that these findings apply to Muslim communities outside of Pakistan, thus providing another target of investigation in Phase II.