The Warwick Islamic Education Summer School brings together a distinctive learning community of researchers and practitioners coming from diverse disciplinary backgrounds with a shared interest in exploring issues framing the ‘education and Islam/Muslims’ intersection within the context of contemporary Muslim minority and majority societies. Inspired by the Islamic educational principle of taaruf, openness to know and learn from one another, WIESS facilitates a transformative educational space fostering collaborative research activities and the sharing of knowledge, skills and best practice. WIESS promotes values of an inclusive, transformative, and compassionate education that is vital for facilitating holistic human flourishing, forming a shared culture of living well with one another and advancing a cosmopolitan model of citizenship nurturing a sense of belonging to more than one world.

WIESS aims to contribute to the generation of a new transformative Muslim culture of learning, teaching, and reflective inquiry through rethinking Islamic Education within the context of a secular and culturally and religiously plural Europe and the wider Muslim-majority world. WIESS is part of the Warwick Islamic Education Initiative, a model collaboration between British Muslim communities and the university that is based on a shared transformative vision of education and values of social inclusion. During the gathering participants will learn more about Warwick Islamic Education taught, research and community outreach activities and the wider research expertise and pioneering courses offered at the Department of Education Studies.

The Summer School has led to the establishment of the Warwick Islamic Education Research Network that has over two hundred members. The network facilitates collaborative research activities among Muslim educators and the wider community of researchers, practitioners and policymakers in Education, Social Sciences, and the Humanities.