Images of the ‘Other’ in school textbooks and Islamic reading Material in Pakistan

Introduction e function of the curriculum, as Michael W. Apple famously puts it, is to ‘explicate the manifest and latent or coded reections of modes of material production, ideological values, class relations, and structures of social power – racial and sexual as well as politico-economic – on the state of consciousness of people in a precise historical or socio-economic situation’ (Apple 1979: 1-2). e most obvious way of a­ecting the consciousness of people is through textbooks. ough only one of the several ways of exercising control over the mind they are easy to use since they are disseminated through the education system and a­ect people at impressionable ages.