PRINCIPA L ES TECNICAS DE TRATAMIENTO EN L A RET

Malta’s contemporary ethnicity and diversity discourses cannot be understood without reference to the impact its size and geophysical location has had on its his- tory (Mitchell, 2002, 2003). At only 316 square kilometres and sitting nearly in the centre of the Mediterranean, Malta has a history of creative adaptation to the chal- lenges presented by small island vulnerability. Whilst not arguing for a historicist, path-dependent interpretation of present ‘smallness’ policies, it is clear that these two factors of size and location have contributed significantly to the cultural formation of identity, and this in successive periods. As Dobbernack and Modood (2012:10) find, in relationships of toleration, parties “do not usually encounter one another ex

novo”. Modood (1997, p. 4) provides five possible models of the “multicultural state”.

These include the decentred state, the liberal state, the republic, the federation of communities and, finally, the plural state. As a country that was directly colonised up until the 1960s, Malta does not fit easily into any of these categories. In the face of domination by diverse occupiers, Roman Catholicism became an ethnic religion as in the collectivistic religions described by Jakelić (2010). Following a republican phase

in the 1970s, the present5 government’s political alliance with the Catholic Church

has continued to accord it the “institutional authority structure” (Jakelić, 2010:1) of collectivistic religions.

Mitchell’s (2002) anthropological ethnography of the Valletta parish of St Paul’s Shipwreck [L-Arcipierku] demonstrates that the collective memory of the parishioners (and the general population) has been shaped by attachment to the idea of a continuous Christianity dating back to the shipwreck of St Paul on Malta in 60 AD (St Luke 28:1), whilst Woolner’s (2002) finds that in present day Malta social memory regarding the

local Muslims. In his study of the Europeanisation of the Maltese islands during the medieval period, Wettinger (1993:144) finds “[a] heritage of absolute ignorance of, and profound repugnance for, anything Arab”, despite an Arab administration from 870 AD to at least 1127 AD (Wettinger, 1986, 1993). Regarding myths of uninterrupted Christianity, Wettinger (1993:150) argues that the religious lexicon of Semitic prove- nance (with words such as “priest”, “baptism” and “mass” coming from the Semitic) do not antedate the Arab conquest of Malta, but entered in post-Islamic or Norman times. The Norman myths of origin were most successfully propagated during the

16th _{and 17}th _{centuries, justifying the claims of Maltese notables to rights overruled by}

the Knights of St John, as well as serving the purpose of mobilising popular feeling against the threats of Ottoman invasion and North African attacks (Cassar, 2002).

Malta has had its own history of “Othering” as Borg and Mayo (2006) have pointed out in their account of Malta’s representation of the Saracen in its iconography, in public sites as well as in popular discourse. Malta has had a long Muslim period which was “virtually obliterated” by the Knights of Malta (Order of St John) who left “a Eurocen- tric imprint” on the island (Borg and Mayo, 2006:153). According to Borg and Mayo (2006:154), Islam “becomes the object of repudiation in the Maltese psyche” where

the Ottoman Turk is “replaced by the Arab neighbour”. Well into the 16th _{century the}

Maltese were known to the Knights of the Order of St John as “Saracens” (Wettinger, 1993:154) on the basis of their language and possibly their ethnic origins, rather than their religion, which was by then Christian. It is this psychic denial of self (typical of others so colonised) which has seen repeated periods of rejection of a common Semitic (and Muslim) heritage, most recently in the discourse surrounding Malta’s accession to the European Union when, despite a claim of a European ethnos, a peculiar Catholic imaginary was about to derail membership since Europe was seen by many as not suf- ficiently Christian, rather as more “riskily” secular (Mitchell, 2002). If the Malta of the 1960s and more recently of these last few years has spent most of its energies looking for evidence of an aboriginal and an uninterrupted Christianity, then this needs to be explained in terms of the present ‘psyche’. What history does imply though is that ‘Is- lamophobia’ as we now know it as both a religious and racial and ethnic prejudice was not present in this form in the past. Indeed, the religious rights of minorities, even of

slaves, were protected throughout the 17th _{and 18}th _{centuries (Wettinger, 2002).}

During the British colonial period6 a form of concordat was established between the

Protestant colonial power and the Maltese Catholic leaders, including the Archbishop, which led to the Religion of Malta Declaration Act of 1922, the first Act of Malta’s first Constitution (Fenech, 2005). Chircop (2001) argues that the Maltese education system was fashioned by the collibration of the British Imperial project with the interests of the new local élites and the upper ranks of the Catholic Church who were instrumental in both design and implementation. In the first, laissez faire or passive phase of the project, the British gave the Catholic Church near total monopoly on education. In the second phase, a strategy of cultural colonisation through public education was

employed (Chircop, 2001). From the 1840s the Maltese were administered as one of “the Coloured Races of the British Colonies” (Sultana, 2001).

In 1974, during Malta’s more republican phase under a Labour government, an amendment to the Constitution enshrined individual freedom of conscience and free exercise “of their respective modes of religious worship” for all persons in Malta. Though the Constitution then, as now, obliged the state to provide Roman Catholic religious education to all pupils in state schools, an opt-out clause was guaranteed by

sub-article 2 of Article 40. Subsequently, a number of agreements with the Vatican7

have given the Maltese Episcopal Conference total control of the Religious Education curriculum in state schools, a curriculum which is doctrinal and catechetical (Secretar- iat for Catechesis, 2008). The Episcopal Conference determines the religious education of Roman Catholic students in any school within the national system in which Roman Catholic pupils attend. The most recent draft National Curriculum Framework (2011) “An Education of Quality for All” has left intact this status quo despite discourses of “inclusion”, “diversity” and “intercultural education” (see below).