Knowing the Other as Religious Obligation: A Confessionally-Anchored Framework for Religious Literacy and Interfaith Education in Pakistan

Abstract

Religious education in Pakistan is confessional by constitutional design: Islamiyat is compulsory for Muslim students, and Article 22(1) grants non-Muslims a right to opt out of instruction in another faith without obliging the state to provide anything in its place. The system therefore teaches students to be religious without teaching them anything reliable about the religious lives of their fellow citizens, an arrangement that produces sectarian as well as interfaith illiteracy. International religious-literacy scholarship offers a well-developed remedy, but one built for secular and plural settings and premised on a non-confessional stance that is neither constitutionally available nor politically viable in Pakistan, where teachers across the national and religious sectors already read global citizenship education as a threat to Islamic values. This article asks how religious literacy can be constructed on foundations that Pakistani educational institutions can accept. Methodologically it combines a documented conceptual review of 96 sources with qualitative documentary analysis of curriculum policy instruments and a thematic synthesis of eight published Pakistani empirical studies. Three findings emerge: the opt-out provision creates a curricular void rather than an alternative; teacher disposition rather than curriculum content is the binding constraint on reform; and the framing of religious literacy as an external norm is the primary obstacle to its adoption. The article’s contribution is the Confessionally-Anchored Religious Literacy (CARL) framework, which grounds the obligation to know the religious other in taʿāruf (Q. 49:13) and in the indigenous Islamic tradition of milal wa niḥal scholarship, above all al-Bīrūnī’s methodological commitment to reporting Indian religion as Indians themselves state it. CARL specifies three competencies across four educational sectors, with sector-differentiated implementation. Implications follow for curriculum policy, teacher education, madrasah reform, and the comparative study of religious literacy in Muslim-majority states.