Developing a dialogue between Muslim and Catholic educators: overcoming the stereotypes of the past

This article examines the contours of the colonialist/Eurocentric education its author received in Catholic Convents in Pakistan and traces the genealogy of some common stereotypes of Islam/Muslims, the Prophet Muhammad, and the Qur’an such an education propagates. This exercise is meant to help Catholic and Muslim educators confront these misrepresentations knowledgeably. To the same end, the essay also describes the author’s liberatory Qur’anic hermeneutics as a way to offer a very different understanding of its teachings than the one that predominates in Muslim countries today.