Next autumn a number of Jewish schools will begin teaching Islam as part of their GCSE religious studies.

It is "on the whole, a positive step" which sends a "good signal" to Britain's Muslim community, according to Dr Ayman Agbaria, an academic who specialises in research on teaching Islam.

But he emphasises that there must be more to understanding another faith than knowledge packaged for an exam.

A Palestinian Israeli who is Muslim himself, Dr Agbaria lectures in educational policy at Haifa University and is a faculty member of the Mandel Leadership Institute in Jerusalem.

There is always a risk of reductionism if the teaching of a religion is restricted to a series of facts in a curriculum, he warns. At the end of the day, interfaith understanding should not be a matter of exam grades but the values of good citizenship.

Rather than teaching about Islam, the important thing is "teaching about Muslims", he said. "In Britain, this would be more benefit to students than studying Islam in abstract - how Muslims practise Islam in Britain, how they approach it."

One way, he suggests, is to look at dilemmas experienced by practising Muslims in the West, for example, the issue of the hijab and the circumstances when a Muslim woman might wear or not wear it.

"Through these dilemmas, you would see what Islam has to say, what different scholars say," he said. "We want a Jewish kid to study about Islam, but not an Islam that doesn't exist."

Doing this enables students to learn about Islam "in a living way - the dead way is to study Islam in the textbooks".

It is also important, he believes, for students to engage with primary Islamic sources rather than depend on second-hand description. They could study a passage in translation from Hayy ibn Yaqzan, a 12-century Robinson Crusoe-like story about a hermit on an island who finds God through the power of his own reason.

Dr Agbaria is currently leading courses on text study for Muslim teachers in London, where he is on sabbatical, working with the Institute of Education's Centre for Research and Evaluation in Muslim Education. "We are doing a kind of beit midrash," he said.

Students can also gain from exploring the similarities and differences between their own faith and another, he said. At the Mandel Institute, he has had Jewish and Arab educators comparing the story of Joseph in the biblical and Islamic traditions. "It is an amazing way to study when you have the two texts, one next to the other," he said. "Every story would enrich the other story, give it an extra layer."

Just as there is specialist training for teaching a second language, he believes, so teachers should be trained for teaching a second faith. "You can have the nicest textbooks and guidelines," he said, "but it all comes down to the teacher."