Research On The Islamic Religious Education In Morocco

As a traditional Islamic country, the Kingdom of Morocco owns a long history of Islamic religious education. The traditional Islam regards seeking knowledge as the duty of Muslim people. Therefore, Muslims’ receiving education is not only to meet the needs of secular life, but also to fulfill the requirements of religious obligations. The traditional Islamic education is launched mainly around "Koran", whose function or purpose is to make the educated Muslims become qualified, who can fulfill their religious and social obligations conscientiously. Before French colonialists occupied Morocco, Moroccan society was mainly based on single Arab-Islamic Culture and Islamic religious education inherited the traditional mode of education.Invasion of French colonists brought Morocco the Western culture, which is different from the traditional Moroccan Arab-Islamic Culture. During this period, these two dissimilar cultures competed against each other, viewing education as their main territory. French colonists limited the development of Moroccan Islamic religious education through establishing Western style schools, restricting teaching contents, supervising the instructors etc. in order to replace the Moroccan traditional Arab-Islamic culture with the advanced Western culture. Consequently, the phenomenon resulted in the decline of the Islamic religious education in Moroccan society.After independence, Morocco took a unified Arabization policy in education so as to achieve recovery and development of local Arab-Islamic culture, and to reduce the impact of Western culture on the Moroccan colonial society. Through continuous efforts, Islamic religious knowledge became compulsory content of elementary education; Arabic became the main language of instruction; the proportion of Moroccan teachers increased a lot; plenty of Islamic religious institutes were established. Naturally, Islamic religious education has been developed vigorously. However, this kind of education strategy, regardless of their historical culture and education tradition, has caused many problems.Since the21st century, with the development of economic globalization and multiculturalisation cultural diversity, Morocco has also been aware that this exclusion from single cultural and educational policies of Western civilization is not conducive to the development of society. Then it begins to take a more tolerant cultural policy and formulates "National Education and Training Charter". Under the circumstance of ensuring that the educational system of the Kingdom of Morocco bases itself on the principles and the values of the Islamic faith, and the Character encourages the use of a wide range of teaching languages to strengthen the learning of several foreign languages, such as English and French and it also encourages to enlarge the scale of teacher training. What’s more, the form and contents of Islamic religious education are becoming more and more diverse.The development process of the Moroccan Islamic religious education also proves that any educational strategy which tries to substitute a culture for another one is not in line with social and historical development trends. Under the tendency towards current development of the world’s cultural diversity, multi-ethnic and Multilingual countries should also realize that every culture and education, whether strong or not, enjoys equal rights of survival and development. Taking tolerant and multi-cultural policy is not only a suitable cultural strategy that fits in with the development trend of human cultural diversity, but also an effective way to promote the harmonious coexistence of different cultures and education types and to promote each other.