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In the United States, Muslim communities and
Islamist advocacy groups are demanding establishment and support of Arabic
and Muslim schools. In New York City, controversy erupted over the charter
Arabic-language Khalil Gibran International Academy after exposure of the
radical associations and statements of its principal Deborah
Almontaser,[1] and over
Minnesota's Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy after an investigative reporter
exposed Islamist indoctrination in the state-funded school.[2] Expansion of the Islamic
Saudi Academy in Virginia has also come under fire after exposure of
textbooks preaching hate and intolerance.[3] While Muslim schools in the United States
are a relatively new phenomenon, in the United Kingdom they are better
established. In February 2009, Civitas, a London-based think tank
dedicated to the discussion of social problems and civic society,
published a 154-page report,[4] excerpted below, exploring the challenge
to social cohesion presented by many Muslim schools in the United Kingdom.
There are twenty-four Saudi schools in the United Kingdom alone; many of
the other 132 registered Muslim schools have Saudi ties.
Civitas followed links on school websites
that often led to the sites of radical preachers, locations where children
could buy books and CDs by extremist writers and, in a couple of cases,
sites that gave direct access to jihadi material. Some extremists founded
schools, and others sat on school advisory boards. Many guest speakers
preached extremism. Abu Yusuf Riyadh ul Haq, a known anti-Semite,
anti-Christian, and inciter of pro-jihad violence,[5] was a teacher of Hadith, Arabic, and
Islamic studies at a school in Kidderminster. Murtaza Khan, a vicious
anti-Semite,[6] taught at
Al-Noor school in Ilford. These figures and others inveighed against
Western society, indoctrinated children to have nothing to do with
non-Muslims, forbade participation in Christmas festivities, and described
non-Muslims as the corrupt and decadent enemies of all Muslims. Already,
the retardation of social integration caused by such schools is apparent
in British society. Because Muslim schools in the United States share some
of the same sponsors and have adopted similar curricula to their British
counterparts, the Civitas survey may also highlight a growing problem in
the U.S. education system that should be addressed directly.
— The Editors
The Muslim Curriculum
 Many guest speakers |
… The activities and lessons from which the
Muslim Council of Britain wants the right to withdraw Muslim pupils
include: mixed swimming; dance; sex and relationship education; music;
drama; figurative drawing. On farm visits, touching or feeding pigs is
prohibited, and staff are warned that pupils and parents may refuse to
shake hands with a member of the opposite sex at prize-giving
ceremonies.[7]
To achieve this, many Muslim educationalists
and those responsible for what is taught in Muslim schools have put
forward ideas about how to promote a curriculum consonant with Muslim
demands, and how to Islamize existing curricula. This is a conscious
process that threatens to derail the very notion of a shifting but fairly
uniform body of knowledge that is passed on to each new generation.
In the case of a prohibition on sex education,
the consequences may be severe. It may be argued that young Muslims often
marry earlier and, willingly or not, observe a stricter moral code than
non-Muslims, and that they do not, therefore, need sex education. This
ignores the fact that Muslim girls do have boyfriends and do get pregnant,
and that the consequences for such activities may be very severe indeed.
Many Muslim women have been killed for even minor infractions of that
moral code. Such "punishments" are not Islamic, but they do occur
disproportionately within sections of the Muslim community. More
information, not less, will surely make it easier for Muslim teenagers and
young adults to straddle the challenges of living between two worlds.
Given that several fatwa banks we have accessed through school websites
provide extremely explicit sexual advice for adults, introducing sex
education to Muslim schools should not be as hard as it seems. …[8]
Muslim Schools and Women
Many schools are linked to organizations
promoting misogyny, including active moves to restrict the freedom of
Muslim girls. Such actions rely heavily for their justification on a
belief that women are designed to be daughters, wives, and mothers and
that they should not venture outside their homes or, if they do so, should
not be seen without heavy veils. The website for the parent body of the
al-Mu'min primary school contains the following statement:
There are three grades of Purdah (veiling):
1. The first is that the woman covers every
part of her body except her face, her hands, and her feet.
2. The second is that the woman covers her
face, her hands, and her feet also.
3. The third is that woman keeps herself
indoors or keeps herself hidden in such a veil that no-one can ever see
her clothes. This stage is the greatest of all the three.
This will strike most readers as excessive, yet
it is part of a site run by a primary school. Hard questions must be asked
by government as to how healthy it is to allow hard-line Puritanism like
this to inform the lives of young and vulnerable children. There is little
question that a girl brought up under such restrictions may never be
psychologically robust enough to enter ordinary British life; may never be
able to take up employment in the mainstream world; may never be capable
of interacting with men at any but the most circumscribed levels.
If a young girl is made to wear hijab [head
covering] and taught that adopting it is the only way a woman may comport
herself in the world, by the time she grows up and leaves school, a broad
psychological barrier will have been planted between her and 99 percent of
British society. If a grown woman were to choose to wear hijab in any
form, non-Muslims might regret it, but would honor her choice. However
many Muslim schools are enforcing a strict rule of hijab, usually in a
form involving kameez [long shirt or tunic] with a headscarf, but in other
cases jilbab [long, loose-fitting coat or garment] or something like it,
sometimes from the age of four (al-Noor Independent School, Ilford; Madani
Secondary Girls' School, East London; Iqra School, Oxford; al-Islah
School, Blackburn).
We believe this to be harmful on several
grounds. Some rulings by 'ulama' and fuqaha' argue that
women and girls must wear the veil in order to protect them. But it does
not protect them so much as it infantilizes them and keeps them under the
tutelage of men. By putting a four-year-old or older child in hijab, she
is receiving a strong impression that, come what may, she must continue to
wear body and head covering for the rest of her life—which appears to be
the purpose of such rules in a school context—rather than learning how to
make such decisions for herself. The over-protection of children is known
to backfire, making the child more dependent and less confident. Western
styles of school uniform are invariably modest and very far from an insult
to Islamic standards of decency, unless those standards involve a level of
cover that is unnecessary in the UK. Full cover also has the undesirable
effect of cutting Muslim girls off from the society around them, making
them more likely to seek out Muslim friends and environments in preference
to non-Muslims. And this clearly makes them ill-suited to an adult life in
universities or the workplace …[9]
Ask-Imam is an online site providing
authoritative rulings on all matters pertaining to Islam. It can be
accessed through the website of al-Jamiah al-Islamiyyah Darul Uloom,
Bolton. It carries extensive rulings on women. Here are some examples:
Women may not attend mixed-gender
universities. Men should try to avoid them.Masturbation for women and men is a "filthy
and evil practice."Rather than study, women should remain at
home unless forced to go outside.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."Men have authority over women. A woman is not
permitted to serve as the head of any organization.Female circumcision [female genital
mutilation] is commendable (mustahabb).A Muslim woman may not marry a non-Muslim
man.Women must speak to men in stern voices [in
order to avoid using soft, "seductive" tones that may incite lust].Men are more intelligent than women.
There must be no free mixing of men and
women.The Western view of sexual equality is false,
claiming that a woman can do what a man can do.It is not permissible for strange males and
females to talk to one another without any valid Shar'ee excuse. If
there is a valid reason, the talk should be restricted to the necessity.
In that situation too, it is prohibited for the female to talk in a soft
and alluring tone as that conduct excites a male's passion. And Allah
Knows Best. Mufti Ebrahim Desai.Allah has bestowed on man the capability to
rule, become prime minister/ president or simply speaking as a leader of
any community. Allah mentions, "Men are overseers over women" (Qur'an).
Men are meant to go out into the world and seek a living, unlike women
who are embodiments of concealment. They are not meant to go out into
the world and become public figures. It is in the home where the honor,
respect, and dignity of women lie. Today, pandemonium has broken out
because women have emerged from their homes. Women are being treated as
advertisement tools. They are being used disgracefully to market even
the pettiest item. Therefore, women are urged to return to their abodes,
live or mingle with them; the legal punishment for adultery is
stoning.
Rulings such as these would, if applied, reduce
the lives of women to something not known in Western society since the
Dark Ages. That they may have an impact on British-born Muslim girls and
young women runs directly contrary to the whole purpose of providing equal
educational opportunities to both sexes, and makes a mockery of the basic
principle of Western education, which is to prepare children for a future
life in mainstream society. The very process of asking for fatwas,
often on the most trivial of issues, takes responsibility for people's
actions out of their hands and places it firmly within those of a small
elite of religious scholars, many of whom are, frankly, wholly lacking in
any understanding of British society. In the case of susceptible children,
many of whom may be brought up to believe that there is always a "right"
answer and that that answer is never one they themselves can make, the
practice has alarming implications in a society of free, rational, and
uncoerced individuals. If we wish to integrate Muslim children (and
adults) into that sort of society, very large compromises will have to be
made by the Muslim clerical establishment.[10]
Muslim Schools and Hate
A former teacher at al-Noor school, Ilford, Abu
Hasnayn Murtaza Khan, is hostile to Jews and Christians with equal vigour.
On Audio CDs, such as Return to the Quran by Knowledge Books, he
said: "Those whom the wrath of Allah is upon, is the Jews, is the
Christians." He continued:
We have become Jews in our clothing; Jews in
our eating; Jews in everything that we do, and the other half is
Christian in everything we do. Muslims are following one of these
accursed nations. And people are still not waking up to understand the
fact that these people are enemies towards us.
He has further expressed his loathing for all
non-Muslims in these terms:
For how long do we have to see our mothers,
sisters, and daughters having to uncover themselves before these filthy
non-Muslim doctors? We should have a sense of shame.
There are two Islamic Shaksiyah Foundation
schools, in Slough and Haringey, North London. The Foundation is a
creation of female members of Hizb ut Tahrir, a radical Islamic
organization that Tony Blair promised to ban following the 7/7 bombings.
"It is banned in Germany, Russia, and throughout the Middle East because
of its anti-Semitism and its stated aim is to establish a global Islamic
state. It also calls for the destruction of Israel and the re-union of all
lands that were ever under Muslim rule—including parts of Southern
Spain—through jihad if necessary." The creator of the schools' history
curriculum, Themina Ahmed, has written of her hatred for Western society,
and her wish to see it destroyed: "The world will," she writes, "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 website for al-Jamiah al-Islamiyyah Darul
Uloom, Bolton, links directly to a fatwa site run by South African
imam Ebrahim Desai. Here is another example of what pupils may expect to
find:
Islam has ordered us Muslims to fight against
the enemies of Islam and not be like the Jew and make other nations
fight their wars. We as Muslims may share in Hitlers hatered
[sic] for the Jews but we cannot praise him for the manner in
which he went about killing the Jews (if the history books are correct).
You should understand that we as Muslims firmly believe that the person
who doesn't believe in Allah as he is required to, is a disbeliever who
would be doomed to Hell eternally. Thus one of the primary
responsibilities of the Muslim ruler is to spread Islam throughout the
world, thus saving people from eternal damnation… if a country doesn't
allow the propagation of Islam to its inhabitants in a suitable manner
or creates hindrances to this, then the Muslim ruler would be justifying
(sic) in waging Jihad against this country.[11]
[1] The
Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Oct. 23,
2007.
[2] Star-Tribune
(Minneapolis), May
19, 2008.
[3] Fox News,
June
11, 2008; The Washington Post, Mar. 23, 2009.
[4] Denis MacEoin with Dominic Whiteman,
Music,
Chess, and Other Sins: Segregation, Integration, and Muslim Schools in
Britain (London: Civitas, 2009).
[5] Times Online, Sept.
6, 2007.
[6] "Undercover
Mosques," U.K. Channel Four, Jan. 15, 2007; "UK:
Muslim Hate Preachers Escape Investigation," Jan. 21, 2007.
[7] See Meeting the Needs of Muslim
Pupils in State Schools, Muslim Council of Britain, London,
2007.
[8] Music, Chess, and other
Sins, pp. 47-8.
[9] Ibid., pp.
79-81.
[10] Ibid., pp. 82-5.
[11] Ibid., pp. 97-8.
Related
Topics: Radical Islam
Summer
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