529 ‘I used to copy what the teachers at school would do’. Cross-cultural Fusion: The Role of Older Children in Community Literacy Practices Andrey Rosowsky Department of Educational Studies, School of Education, University of Sheffield, UK This paper is derived from a wider study of literacy practice that examines and explores the role played by Qur’anic literacy in the lives of men, women and children in a UK Muslim community. It also draws on the significant body of theoretical work being developed by Gregory and others on the role of siblings and older children in literacy acquisition and practices, and reveals further exemplification of what Gregory terms ‘mediators’ of literacy practices from within multilingual communities (in this case a Muslim, Pakistani-heritage, Mirpuri-Punjabi speaking community in the north of England) who, in this case, although not always siblings, are elder, more knowledgeable, peers. It outlines a short-lived experiment that took place in a typical mosque school in a northern UK town when the mosque administration had diffi- culties finding a female teacher for the girls who were attending and describes how two older girls were asked to take over the teaching of young girls. We observe how the two older girls fuse the literacy and language practices from both schooled and Qur’anic literacies to provide an example of syncretic literacy practice. doi: 10.2167/le661.0 Keywords: literacies, Qur’anic, syncretic, multilingual, Muslim, Urdu Introduction This paper is derived from a wider study of literacy practice (Rosowsky, 2004) that examines and explores the role played by Qur’anic literacy in the lives of men, women and children in a UK Muslim community. That study accepts that Qur’anic literacy is often misunderstood, marginalised, and even, at times, disparaged. It seeks to demystify this literacy practice by providing the reader with a thick and detailed description which includes an analysis of the multi- lingual and multiliterate nature of the community within which it takes place. It also seeks to present Qur’anic literacy as an intense, vibrant and esteemed cultural practice and goes some of the way to laying to rest some of the more pejorative notions that it is predominantly a matter of rote learning with little or no recourse to meaning. This paper also draws on the significant body of theoretical work being developed by Gregory and others (Drury, 2004; Gregory, 1998, 2001, 2004; Gregory et al., 2004; Williams, 2004) on the role of siblings in literacy acquisi- 0950-0782/06/06 0529-14 $20.00/0 © 2006 A. Rosowsky LANGUAGE AND EDUCATION Vol. 20, No. 6, 2006 le20-6.indb 529 30/11/2006 09:44:36