Academic disciplines in the school curriculum which engage explicitly with cultural identities pose a major dilemma for liberal, pluralist societies seeking to foster the dual imperatives of diversity education and social cohesion. This paper uses the case of Islam as school knowledge to analyse the relations between political stances and symbolic constructions in English religious education. For this purpose, the study applies an interdisciplinary theoretical framework, integrating diachronic concepts of the nation-state with cultural recontextualization theory from the sociology of the curriculum. (Contains 4 notes.)