By Scott Barkett
Special Education/Social Studies Co-Teacher This year the Social Studies department at BHS launched a new heterogeneous ninth grade course entitled World History: Identity, Status, and Power. Throughout the second quarter, students will learn about pre-modern India with a particular focus on the Mughal Empire. This empire preceded the British Raj and was primarily Muslim in its beliefs. Of particular interest to us will be the ways in which Hinduism and Islam have intersected in India and the impact that has had on community. When teaching and discussing world religions, it can feel like an identity minefield. Part of our charge with FYC is to ensure that students see themselves “in the picture” of their curriculum and that their identity is shown in a positive light. However, when it comes to teaching about religion, it can be difficult to separate the beauty and power of a religion’s beliefs and rituals from the controversial political decisions and fights throughout history occuring in its name. But, this tangle of politics and religious identity is precisely why it is so important to work with students through divisive topics, as these pre-modern community divisions often remain unhealed in ways that deeply impact our modern world. Take, for example, the latest news out of India regarding a supreme court decision over a disputed religious site. In northern India just south of Nepal, there is a city called Ayodhya where Hindus believe that the god Ram was born. Many Hindus believe that a temple in the city was destroyed in the 1500s by the Mughal Empire in order to build a mosque on the site. Tensions boiled over in the early 1990’s with Hindu believers destroying the mosque, seeking to reclaim a sacred site they believed was rightfully theirs. Court cases preceded this destruction, but it is only now that the Indian supreme court has weighed in. The decision has gone in favor of Hindus, and has provided Prime Minister Modi and his Hindu nationalist party with an empowering political victory. While the legal question may now be closed, the division between the Muslim and Hindu communities in India is not. The complexities of this situation are immense, and the history is far more vast than is reasonable to properly contextualize in one blog post. For the purposes of our classroom identity work, we are less concerned with figuring out who, if anyone, is “right.” We are far more interested in examining the power of shared memory in either dividing or uniting a community. As a culminating project for our unit, students will design a community museum that will honor the two religious communities that existed side by side in Mughal India. The ways in which communities commemorate, memorialize, celebrate, and mourn carry great power. In diverse societies, these practices are not always broadly agreed upon, and as time passes attitudes about a shared history may change. We hope that our work with students through this unit will help them to more deeply grasp the power that religion plays in peoples’ identities. Likewise, we hope to give them space to consider how communities, including their own, remember the past and the weight that different forms of remembrance carry. Students may not initially be familiar with the situation in Ayodhya, but they are likely familiar with controversial remembrance issues in America such as renaming Columbus Day in Brookline, or the fight to remove Confederate monuments across the country. In his speech announcing the removal of Confederate statues across New Orleans, former mayor Mitch Landrieu said, "Centuries-old wounds are still raw because they never healed right in the first place. Here is the essential truth. We are better together than we are apart." We will be keeping that in mind as we lead our ninth grade class communities through this important work.
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