Friday 27 February, 2009

UK
Education

Think-tank calls for vetting of Muslim schools following the discovery of links with fundamentalist websites

By Charles Gardner

Some Muslim schools are threatening the country’s social cohesion by promoting a fundamentalist version of Islam that encourages children to despise British society.

This also creates a ghetto mentality which cuts them off from mainstream influence and, in the case of women, reduces them to a status out of kilter with the rest of Britain in which women are regarded as the equals of men.

And if rulings advocated by fundamentalists were applied, they would reduce women’s lives to something not known in Western society since the Dark Ages.

These are among the findings of Music, Chess and Other Sins, a study of websites and their links belonging to Muslim schools in the UK and produced by Denis MacEoin for Civitas, an independent think-tank on social policy.

Although Muslim schools only represent four per cent of the 400,000 school-going Muslims in Britain, the author calls for their vetting in order to eliminate fundamentalists.

One site linked from a school calls for a ban on cricket, chess, reading novels and listening to music. And on the website of the Madani Secondary Girls’ School in East London, it is stated that “our children are exposed to a culture that is opposed to almost everything Islam stands for”.

The study author says: “This should be taken seriously in light of the 7/7 bombings where hatred of what non-Muslims stand for was adduced as an excuse for massacre.

“We do not say that schools teach terror,” adds MacEoin, “but we do ask if they do not make some of their pupils likely to fall prey to even greater extremism.”

In a small number of cases, he found evidence of links between Muslim schools and those advocating jihad (holy war), as in the case of Feversham College in Bradford whose website links to islamworld.net where, in one section, all Muslims are urged to “prepare for jihad and be the lovers of death”.

Themina Ahmed, creator of the history curriculum for Islamic Shaksiyah Foundation schools in Slough, Berkshire, and Haringey, North London, wrote: “The world will witness the death of the criminal capitalist nation of America and all other (infidel) states when the army of jihad is unleashed upon them.”

The principal objection raised by the report is not that Muslim schools are linked in any significant way with terrorist activities, but that some of them create in children a ghetto mentality that will make it difficult for them to function in British society.

This is especially so with regard to the purdah (veiling) of women, only one aspect of the low status ascribed to them by a number of those associated with fundamentalist Muslim schools which may not prepare girls for life in mainstream British society.

Ask-Imam, a site offering religious rulings (now closed following queries relating to this report) carried extensive rulings on women, such as: “A woman who has been raped is jointly responsible for the crime with the man who raped her if she ‘does not cover properly and wears revealing clothing, which seduces men’.”

Similarly, the Jameah Girls’ Academy in Leicester has a direct link to a ‘fatwa’ site run by the school’s own patron which rules, for example, that polygamy is permissible, that it is a grave sin for a woman to refuse sex with her husband and that legal punishment for adultery is stoning.

Rulings such as these “run directly contrary to the whole purpose of providing equal educational opportunities to both sexes, and make a mockery of the basic principle of Western education, which is to prepare children for a future life in mainstream society,” says MacEoin.

Perversely, some of the schools about which questions have been asked have received glowing reports from Ofsted, the schools’ inspectors, which is of great concern, particularly in view of the fact that the website is part of a standard Ofsted inspection.

“If similar views were held by schoolteachers, headteachers, governors or trustees of non-Muslim schools, we would expect an enquiry and a great many reforms.”

The aim of the study is not to attack Muslims, but to draw attention to certain problems in schools run by fundamentalists… to “stand up for all the young Muslims who are cajoled or bullied into adopting a way of life that reduces them to lookers-on in their own country” and to “help roll back the tide of fundamentalist and radical Islam from places where it deserves to exert no influence: the British educational system and British schools.”

Among the report’s recommendations is the need for vetting imams, sponsors, trustees and others associated with schools for fundamentalist tendencies, and to restrict or terminate their role if their views are opposed to the basic values of British society.

“If someone is incapable in conscience of teaching loyalty to Britain and love for the majority of its citizens, their competence as educationalists must be called into question.”

Denis MacEoin is a leading international authority on Islam as well as a novelist.