Re: Music, Chess and Other Sins
Reply #1 - March 05, 2009, 05:03 PM
Thanks Nour, I have cut & pasted the conclusion (the last paragraph is particularly poignant) for those that do not have the time to read the 125 page report.
Conclusion
There is nothing in this report that a genuinely moderate Muslim will not find disturbing, an offence to his or her faith. There is nothing that a well‐integrated British Muslim will not find antipathetic or intimidating.
We have written this, not to attack Islam or offend moderate Muslims. Our report has been designed with one thing in mind?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.
Our report stands up not just for British society and its integrity, but 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. We have a duty to these children, and if the schools or their trusts or their boards of governors or their sponsors do not value that integrative duty, then our broader obligations to society overall must take precedence. The government, with its ministries, its inspectorates, and its powers of legislation will make better decisions about education than fundamentalists with axes to grind and lives to ruin.
We have said nothing to suggest that any Muslim school is a training ground for violent extremism. But there is evidence that young Muslims hold increasingly hardline and anti‐Western views, with the 16‐ to 24‐year‐old group coming across as more alienated than their parents and grandparents.1 To the extent thatmany Muslim schools enforce fundamentalist ideo‐logies, they cannot be exempted from some measure of responsibility for the hardening of young people?s attitudes.
It is here that possible connections to violence and jihadism become of real concern to society at large. Not all fundamentalists go on to become violent, and we have no wish to imply it. But all those who do become violent or preach violence start from a point at which they have been radicalised. No society can allow a trend towards violence to go without check.
Numerous schools betray no signs of holding anything but innocent views. However, a number cause concern simply because their fundamentalist views are such that pupils may be more likely to listen to the views of more hardline preachers or recruiters. This is something that needs to be looked into carefully by government and the security services.
It should be made clear that we distinguish between remarks, articles etc. made by people directly associated with a school, like teachers, governors, and trustees, and statements or rulings found at one remove, through a linked website or on a forum or by an individual who has been hosted by a school on one or more occasions. In a different context, this latter might seem to create guilt by association. The problem, as we have said elsewhere, is that we are dealing with schools. Mainstream schools do not invite repre‐sentatives of the BNP or the IRA to speak, they do not make links to their websites on the school site, and they do not ask them to attend their prize days. Schools
have to be much more careful than other institutions in society not to expose those in their care to extremism, to hate speech, or to religious fanaticism. And it must be concluded that, if a school displays a preference for suspect individuals, the school itself cannot be averse to what they write or preach.
Do not some of the passages cited in this report reflect attitudes that seem to call for basic lessons in common sense and human dignity? No child raised in close contact to this kind of thinking has much hope of developing into a balanced British Muslim, someone with non‐Muslim friends, perhaps a non‐Muslim partner, a job in a mainstream place of work, love for English literature and international sport, and a freedom from neuroses that can only be addressed by backing away into the safe realm of the ghetto.
Let us be frank: 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. Yet Ofsted, not knowing where to look, provides most Muslim schools with a clean bill of health. There will indeed be good Muslim schools with good examination results. We have no wish to challenge that. But in some instances, these achieve‐ments may be offset by other considerations. What, one may ask, is the point in educating Muslim children partly according to the National Curriculum if, in the end, they have also been taught how to avoid life in a non‐Muslim society?
We do not doubt that many Muslim schools pursue a positive approach with regard to inter‐faith relations
and integration. But others display the opposite tendency. Many have affiliations with fundamentalist groups and individuals. And many are deeply embedded within anti‐integrationist movements. The relentless condemnation of Western society that they preach, and the rulings on keeping apart from the kuffar, do not make for easy reading in this regard.
There has been a growing notion that the Muslim community must be left to itself, a more or less tacit assumption that, if Muslims want to live in ghettos they should be allowed to get on with it. That is, in itself, highly divisive. When it concerns schools, a laissez‐faire approach is irresponsible. There can be no compromise on how far any one community may go towards setting up a parallel society and educating its children to inhabit it exclusively.Government, government agencies, the Department for Children, Schools and Families, Ofsted, the churches, the synagogues, educators, and anyone else involved in education have to tackle this problem head‐on. Left to fester for years to come, it will only become unmanageable in the end. The recent proposal that imams should lead citizenship lessons in state schools3 should remain in mothballs until a reliable method can be found to distinguish moderate from extremist clerics, and only if it can be established that genuinely moderate imams are available. It is hard to think of seminaries where liberal Muslim ulama are trained, whether in the UK or abroad. Government may have to find new and better ways to work with the moderate Muslim laity, perhaps by providingfunding and facilities for new places of learning where a different kind of cleric can be trained.
Denouncing this report will not make these problems go away. The representatives of the British Muslim community have to become more realistic and more proactive in dealing with problems within their own community. No one and no community is above criticism, and knee‐jerk reactions that routinely throw criticism back against the critics only represent a self‐defeating state of denial.
Topic: Music, Chess and Other Sins