"Academic disciplines in the school curriculum which engage explicitly with
cultural identities pose a major dilemma for liberal, pluralist societies
seeking to foster the dual imperatives of diversity education and social
cohesion. This paper uses the case of Islam as school knowledge to analyse the
relations between political stances and symbolic constructions in English
religious education. For this purpose, the study applies an interdisciplinary
theoretical framework, integrating diachronic concepts of the nation-state with
cultural recontextualization theory from the sociology of the curriculum."