Teaching stories: “Teaching you your religion”
Steffen Stelzer, American University in Cairo, Egypt

5 – 6.30pm

The title of my talk, “Teaching Stories”, points in several directions. It announces an inquiry into the role of stories as a method of teaching. It points towards stories that tell of teaching, and, maybe, it even relates stories that happened to teaching.

Our actual inquiry into the role of stories for teaching is narrower. It focuses on a particular area, the “teaching of religion”. It takes its hints specifically from two of the so-called “Religions of the Book”: Christianity and Islam, and its inspiration from the famous “Hadith of Gabriel”. In this way, what might have appeared at first as a purely linguistic issue, i.e., the relation of word to meaning, shows itself more and more in its pedagogical aspects. It, thereby, reaches the two questions situated in the center of our talk: why should teaching through stories be regarded as an excellent way of teaching religion? And to which extent do the concepts of ‘religion’ prevalent at a certain time, direct our discussion about religious education? After all, is it not possible that Islamic education and Christian education are not only two branches on the same tree, two subjects in school, but two trees?

Steffen Stelzer is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the American University in Cairo and has been Chair of its Dept. of Philosophy. He received his PhD from the Freie Universität Berlin, has been a research scholar at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris in the 1970s, at Harvard University’s Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Department, and taught at Johns Hopkins University. His areas of specialization include comparative analyses of Western and Islamic concepts of knowledge and of the transmission of knowledge, Rationality and Revelation, and the ethical dimensions of Sufism. Due to his background in both Western philosophical learning and the dimensions of Eastern sapiental knowledge, he has published a variety of articles (on Islamic ethics, on Ibn ‘Arabi’s concept of spiritual travel, on Reason and Revelation, on the implication of Prophetic Authority for concepts of knowledge, and on the Sufic criticism of philosophy) which reflect, both in style and content, the influence of his ‘two studies’.

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