Headscarf optional at
Britain’s first state-funded Islamic school
(AFP)
24 October 2004
LONDON - Irish-Moroccan
or Egyptian-English, with headscarf or without, the diverse students
at Britain’s first state-funded Islamic school are at the vanguard
of a trend toward a distinctly European Muslim culture.
The
Islamiya Primary School of north London and its 210 students are
famous across Britain, and not only because the institution was
founded by Yusuf Islam, better known as the folk singer Cat Stevens.
Islam started
Islamiya in 1982 along with several friends, and then had to battle
through anti-Muslim stereotypes under prime minister Margaret
Thatcher’s Conservative rule in order to win state recognition.
“The Thatcher
government feared we would teach a radical Islam and how to make a
Molotov cocktail,” headmaster Abdullah Trevathan recalled.
Extraordinary in the true sense
Their goal of
instructing religion, so prevalent at Christian and Jewish schools
across the country, was considered radical.
“We wanted our
children to be extraordinary in the true sense. We wanted to educate
them ourselves,” said Trevathan.
In 1995, after a
13-year campaign, the Islamiya School won the breakthrough right to
public funding that the British government has long awarded to
Protestant and Catholic schools.
Today its
student body comprises 23 different ethnic communities, with most
students the product of an ethnically-mixed marriage.
“We are
Irish-Moroccan, Egyptian-English and a lot of Somalian and Pakistani
people. Everybody learns from each other,” the school head said.
“We are not here
to preserve a culture but to create a European-British-Muslim
culture,” he added.
Islamiya follows
the national state-directed curriculum, but also includes classes in
religion and Arabic.
From the age of
seven, children go to pray at the school mosque.
Girls are given
the choice of whether to wear an Islamic headscarf.
Religion, a critical matter at Islamiya
The mix of
British education, Islam and cultural diversity seems to inspire:
Islamiya’s students have chalked up a reputation for academic
excellence.
Their teachers
believe they have devised a model, moreover, that can fend off a
trend of Islamic radicalization among some disaffected European
youth.
“We believe that
a child from a minority who has the same culture reflected at school
and at home becomes a confident person who has self-esteem. As the
teenagers grow up, they don’t have an identity crisis and don’t tend
to turn to fundamentalism,” Trevathan said.
Religion, he
argued, is treated in a critical manner at Islamiya, where students
are encouraged to question, doubt and analyze in a Cartesian manner
instead of blindly learning set Islamic rules by rote.
But the idyll of
the well-adjusted European Muslim British school has been shattered
by Islamic radicalism at home and abroad, the September 11, 2001
terrorist attacks in the United States and chaos in Iraq.
“Being affected
by why happens at the opposite end of the world is not the daily
stuff of a primary school in London, but there it is,” the school
director sighed.
Since September
11, 2001 and the Iraq war, he said, students tend to say little
about the issues but are clearly worried, so teachers make it a
point to discuss them openly in class.
“After 9/11, I
realized that the whole community was traumatized pretty seriously.
Like in a divorce, the children blamed themselves. They were
wondering if their parents were responsible, if they were
responsible themselves,” the headmaster said.
“Today I still
feel anger against these people who have nothing to do with us,” he
said.
Photo courtesy:
Brad.ac.uk and bbc.uk
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