Learning to be British and Muslim

June 29, 2008

Author: Staff Writer

Source: Times Online

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/education/article4231194.ece

It’s 3pm and the girls at Madani high school in Leicester are trooping out of the gates. They wear white scarves over dark blue djellabas – a shapeless coat worn over trousers. No sign of the boys: they don’t leave for another half an hour.

Boys and girls operate on a different timetable, carefully calibrated to keep the sexes segregated. The architecture at Madani high conspires to do the same: there is a girls’ wing and, in mirror image, a boys’ wing – the two separated by an elegant Arabic-style courtyard with a fountain.

Segregation of the sexes is crucial to the traditional Muslim families who send their children to this state-funded school. Once girls reach puberty, their honour has to be jealously protected, and exposure to the opposite sex limited. To shield them from the drugs, sex and violence that mar British playground culture, traditional Muslim parents will often simply pull their daughters out of nonsegregated schools.

“Each year, hundreds of Muslim girls disappear from the state system,” acknowledges Idris Mears, an educationist and fundraiser for the Association of Muslim Schools UK.

“The drugs, sex and rock’n’roll scene is not an option for Muslim girls,” says Humera Khan, co-founder of Al-Nisa, which offers a wide variety of faith-based services to the Muslim community. “So there is a huge pressure to marry them off early or send them home.”

The parliamentary home affairs committee recently collected statistics on the number of children “not in suitable education” in local authorities with large Muslim populations: 385 in Manchester, 294 in Leicester, 250 in Birmingham. According to Mears, most of them are girls.

How, then, are Muslim girls to be properly educated so that they have a chance of becoming self-confident members of British society? Madani high is one of a small number of Muslim state schools that fuse cultural tradition with a full education under the national curriculum.

State Muslim faith schools give traditional parents who cannot afford private schools the confidence to keep their daughters in school. They raise the chances of Muslim girls going on to higher education. And they give boys as well as girls a sense of belonging to this country, its institutions and values. There are not enough of these schools, however. Although central government claims it wants to provide British Muslim children with a culturally acceptable – but socially empowering – form of education, it is not putting its money where its mouth is. Far from “fast-tracking” Muslim state schools, it is dragging its feet: it took Mohammed Mukadam, head of Madani high, five years to obtain state funding.