Keeping up - or rather down - their usual record, the Evening Standard today published an article “exposing” the poor quality and aloofness from the wider community of the UK’s Muslim faith schools (not on the web; pages 16 and 17 of print edition). The article makes a number of serious accusations about some of the UK’s “Darul-Uloom” institutions, as well as a few tired old contentions from the secular lobby.
Arabic speakers might find this rather funny, because madrasa is simply Arabic for school. I’m not sure in what languages this is also true; in English, it seems to have acquired the meaning of Islamic religious school. In this article, it is also used with a derogatory tone: if a school fits the stereotype of a place where kids rock back and forth while reciting the Qur’an in an apparently chaotic manner, as on the apparent library footage we commonly see on TV, it’s a madrassa.
The article, by Andrew Gilligan (who left the BBC after the Hutton report) starts off with discussion of the al-Sadiq and al-Zahra schools which are on a certain road in west London with at least four such schools along it. One of them is a state Islamic school. He appears not to realise that al-Sadiq and al-Zahra are two separate schools; Sadiq is masculine and Zahra feminine, one being a boys’ and the other a girls’ school. Both are Shi’a schools run by the followers of Imam Khu’i of Iraq, who was murdered by Saddam Hussain, something which Gilligan omits to mention. He acknowledges that the schools, in which the Islamic part of the curriculum is 10% of the total, have excellent results.
Gilligan then raises the idea of faith schools dividing communities, “creating a series of separate, segregated cultures with potentially serious consequences for the future”. He brings in the entirely different situation of northern Ireland, in which a Protestant community was established by planting Scottish settlers. The two communities have been in on-off conflict since the late 19th century, when Catholics demanded an Irish state, which Protestants (rightly) feared would end up being dominated by the church. Schools had nothing to do with bringing about that situation. He also solicits the opinion of Keith Porteous Wood of the National Secular Society who makes the strange suggestion that society won’t learn to live with Muslims unless they go to school together.
Most of the second page of Gilligan’s article is devoted to an attack on the specifically religious schools, which he places at the bottom of the ladder of Muslim teaching establishments. “It’s not only Pakistan that has madrassas. Britain has them, too.”
This section contains a series of scaremongering false links. For example, we are told that Dewsbury, “home of one of the suicide bombers”, is the site of the Institute of Islamic Education, with its “madrassa-type curriculum” dominated by religious subjects, and even the teaching of secular subjects was “madrassa-like, relying on the memorisation and rote-learning of textbooks”. We then learn:
Children were not allowed to read corrupt English newspapers or watch decadent Western TV. GCSE results, not surprisingly, were dreadful: only 9 per cent of 16-year-olds at the institute got five good GCSEs [the standard certificate of education, usually taken at age 16] last year, the joint second worst score of any conventional school in the country.
The juxtaposition of shielding from TV and the media and bad exam results cannot go without comment! It is, after all, the TV which is widely blamed for the decline in literacy and social skills among the youth of today. The students at the IIE could string a sentence together, could they not? In perhaps three languages?
The worst ordinary school is apparently Darul Uloom London, actually located “in attractive leafy grounds down a lane in suburban Chislehurst”, only 8% of whose 16-year-old students got five or more GCSEs at A to C grade last year:
It teaches a medieval curriculum, largely in Arabic or Urdu, inspired by the puritanical Islamic movement of Deobandism - which also happens to be the ideological inspiration for the Taliban. The Taliban was born in Darul Ulooms such as the one in Haqqania, Pakistan, alma mater of Taliban leader Mullah Omar and known as the “university of jihad”.
Darul Ulooms (I’m not sure about the London one) tend to teach the “dars-e nizami”, which is a curriculum which pre-dates the emergence of the Deobandi school in India by a long, long time. Gilligan wastes little time before moving from Darul Uloom London onto Deobandism and then onto the Taliban. Deobandism is a school of thought and a community of scholars; exactly how closely linked Haqqania (the name of the school, not a town as Gilligan seems to assume) is to Deoband is something we have never found out. No doubt locals judge fighting Afghan warlords and the Indian army in Kashmir differently from hijacking aeroplanes in north America and crashing them into buildings.
He also takes a side-swipe at the institution’s student newspaper, Afkaarut-Tullab (Student Concerns), which has been discontinued, as the school’s website informs us. I find it puzzling that Gilligan digs up something published in the magazine in 2002 - does he have nothing more recent or has nothing of that nature appeared in it since? Later on, we hear that the community manager of a similar facility in Birmingham has been tried twice, and acquitted, of terrorist offences. No doubt the manager was not facing a jury of his aunts - only white people tend to get juries mostly of their own kind even here - so Gilligan might ask why two juries acquitted him?
Whether or not this piece is actually a slice of anti-Islamic propaganda, Gilligan really does miss the point of why we have Darul Ulooms. They are not there to raise the bureaucrats of tomorrow, but the imams and religious teachers. They are part of a chain of knowledge, and historically people did learn their religion from a young age. It was common, in centuries past, for children to have memorised the entire Qur’an well before their tenth birthday - some of the best-known scholars memorised thousands of hadeeth as well, including their chains of transmission. In this day and age when it is becoming more and more difficult for Muslims to pursue their religious studies abroad due to politically-motivated crackdowns, these places - particularly the Bury and Dewsbury institutions (I suspect the well-known one in Dewsbury isn’t the one Gilligan is talking about) - will become ever more important if our community is not to fall under the leadership of unsuitable and ill-educated people, the like of which have caused us, and the wider society, enormous damage in the past month. If they need reforming, it is to open it up to a wider range of Muslims by such measures as increasing the use of English and diminishing that of Urdu. We certainly don’t need them turned into training schools for the secular professions. That’s not what they are there for!
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