Will the state protect Islamic teaching?

Published on Wednesday 18 May 2005 01:52

SCOTLAND’S only Muslim school was last week given just three months to improve its performance or face closure.

The Imam Muhammad Zakariya School for girls in Dundee received its second poor report from education watchdogs, who said it had not "addressed sufficiently" concerns raised following a previous inspection a year ago.

The only other Muslim school founded in Scotland - Iqra Academy in Glasgow - shut two years ago after it too was criticised by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Education (HMI).

Both schools were independently run, prompting calls for Scotland to have its first state-funded Muslim school in order to ensure their quality.

Here, Osama Saeed of the Muslim Association of Britain argues that Scotland’s Muslims, like the country’s Catholics and Jews, should have state-funded schools as a matter of urgency.

IT HAS BEEN put to me too many times that the bad reports for the Imam Muhammad Zakariya School in Dundee and the demise of Iqra Academy in the last few years damage the case for Muslim schools in Scotland.

My response is that it only does if the lesson you draw from it is that Muslims are inherently incapable of running schools. Not only would this be palpably offensive, but it is simply not the case if we look over the border to England.

There, Feversham College in Bradford finished top of the "Value Added" tables this year. This secondary school is one of only five state-funded Muslim schools in England, and by finishing top of the table demonstrated that no other school in the country improved the performance of their pupils more than it did.

Until they arrived at Feversham, its pupils may well have been destined for the underachievement that is blighting Muslims born and brought up in this country. The truth is that, despite the stereotype of well-to-do Muslim businessmen, the reality for the rank-and-file of the Muslim community is that they suffer from worse exam results than the national average, with the linked problems of unemployment and deprivation.

Feversham managed to buck the trend, with its pupils getting much better exam results than was expected at the age of 11 - thus adding "value". There is a belief in the Muslim community, backed up by academics and now real-life experience, that by providing a more relevant education to Muslim pupils, educational attainment will be lifted from the current situation where Muslims are the group most likely to leave school without qualifications and least likely to have degrees.

The lesson from this and from the IMZ and Iqra cases is that state funding makes successful schools. The Muslim school ventures in Scotland thus far have been private fee-paying affairs, which have suffered an inability to attract qualified teachers due to an understandable reluctance to put their careers on the line.

State funding avoids this problem by providing a stable environment for the many teachers who have said to us they would be willing to teach in a state Muslim school. After all, the reason that Catholic schools were brought into the state sector in 1918 was to safeguard their quality. The Muslim community is in the same predicament now.

The benefit would be to us all. The Islamic educational model is one that has much to offer Scotland, not just in adding value as above, but also adding values. A common misunderstanding of Muslim schools is that a few more religious lessons will placate the community. The demand for Muslim schools is not about the number of RE lessons, but more about the ethos of the school.

Muslim parents want their children to do well and be successful like any other parents. In that respect the school must follow the national curriculum. The crucial difference would be in aspects such as behaviour, dress and observance of certain rituals. Additionally in the values it promotes of respect for the self, respect for others, emphasis on family, social conscience, respect for the environment and more - all from a grounding of belief in God. The spiritual dimension needs nurtured as well as the mental and physical.

It isn’t just Muslim parents who see a lack of values currently within the non-denominational sector. There are a lot of questions raised across society about the role of schools in shaping young people in a selfish, consumer-driven world. I have no doubt then that non-Muslims would be interested in sending their children to Muslim schools, as they have done in other Western countries.

It is at this point that the gamut of segregation arguments go out the window. The point of Muslim schools is not to separate children - but rather to provide choice of educational model to parents. Additionally, as I’ve contended above, by providing young Muslims with a more successful education, they will have better job prospects and we will have a more cohesive society than the real social segregation we have at the moment. Those who claim faith schools create tensions between communities fail to provide any backing to their argument other than to appeal to basic anti-faith instincts. They also ignore the fact that bigotry existed before faith schools, and would still exist if the decision was taken to abolish them. In fact, Muslims have been attending non-denominational schools for decades now but still suffer from Islamophobia and racism.

Schools don’t create bigotry, bigots do. The fantastic example Muslims wish to emulate in Scotland would be that of the Jewish community. Their state-funded school has existed for decades, yet I’ve not heard one single person ever argue that Jewish people are isolated in society as a result, or use the blame-the-victims argument that the school has increased anti-Semitism.

In any case, there is no way that Scotland’s Muslim school children could all be housed in Muslim schools. The number is too great and the population too scattered. Therefore the alarmist scaremongering is wide of the mark. In an ideal scenario, we’d gladly accept five primary schools, catering for only around 1,000 of the 16,000 Scottish Muslim schoolchildren.

Right now, though, we don’t even have one school. Muslims are being denied choice for their children. As a diverse and vibrant society we should be confident enough to provide that.

• Osama Saeed is the Scottish spokesperson for the Muslim Association of Britain.