Islamic and Religious Education: Egyptian Primary and Secondary Schools

This chapter gives an overview of religious education in Egypt. This is pre-dominantly Islamic, but there is also Christian religious education to serve the Christian minority. Education in Egypt is predominantly public, and religious education is compulsory. There is an Islamic and Christian variant of religious education for the Muslim and Christian pupils respectively. A quite extensive overview of the goals and content of Islamic religious education is added that shows that religious education in Egypt is both modern (it helps young people to recognize the Islam view of current ideas and issues and plays an active part in implementing human values, ethics, and culture) and traditional since it goes back to old Islamic sources and books. Tolerance among people of different religious groups is an important ethical value in the Egyptian Islamic education curriculum and is taught in the lessons.