Review of Channel 4’s “Revelations: Islamic school”

Revelations: Islamic school (Channel 4, 5th July 2009) was an 50-minute documentary following two Muslim girls in Nottingham through a year at a fee-paying Islamic school (a mixed primary with an all-girls secondary). The younger girl is Asian, and her parents want an Islamic education for her after seeing how her older sister has turned out (she doesn’t wear hijab, like the mother, and seems to enjoy the nightlife), while the older girl is white, with an Asian stepfather. The Observer’s preview, by Euan Ferguson, told his presumably white middle-class readers that it “manages to both illuminate and infuriate” by showing the indoctrination of “two very young girls”. You can watch it here (may not work outside the UK).

I wasn’t expecting the programme to be unbiased, whether in terms of the opinions expressed or what was shown. The fact that an awful lot of incidences of the younger girl talking about Hellfire may reflect the fact that she does talk about it a lot, or maybe just the fact that the editors wanted to get in a few sensational moments for the benefit of the white, middle-class, anti-religious audience. There was a substantial influence on the fact that both girls wore hijab and that it’s part of the school uniform, another source of disquiet for the secularist audience; the white girl in fact wears it all the time to hide her ginger hair, which has been a source of ridicule in the past. (I should add that hijab is not compulsory for younger girls in Islam; if schools insist on it, it is either to get them accustomed to it, or because it has become an item of cultural significance. You will often see young Muslim girls without hijab accompanying their mothers who do wear it.)

To their credit, they did show the school making a great effort to make sure that the white girl was properly included, as she had been experiencing problems with Asian girls not letting her join in with them. The women in the programme seemed to be strong and active; there were no niqabs in sight, not that the two are necessarily related, of course (the white convert told the journalist that she had flatly refused to wear it). Then again, perhaps if there had been a lot of niqabis, the school would simply have refused to allow filming. And why did they follow only two girls, when they could have followed a boy as well as, or instead of, one of the girls? Perhaps because outsiders don’t care much about Muslim boys, as long as they’re not being trained to be terrorists? Neither of the families were “typical” religious Muslim families which had been religious for a long time, and both had personal dramas, and one suspects that they were chosen for this purpose. They always need a “human interest” angle, and all the better when you can make it look like someone is religious for a motive other than simply believing in it.

All in all, it’s a lesson in why Muslims should be careful in engaging with the media on their terms. If you allow them to shoot hours and hours of footage over the space of a year, they may well use only that which suits their agenda. There is a certain section of the metropolitan middle class which believes that there are no such things as Muslim or Christian (or whatever) children, only children of Muslims or Christians, and that raising them into religion is child abuse, sowing the seeds of future hatreds, or both, and aspects of this programme did seem to be aimed at people with that opinion. I noticed that this programme did not mention that Nottingham Islamia is part of the Karimia Institute, a very moderate Bareilawi institution with a major presence in the area. I think allowing this to be made was a mistake, and that Muslims should be more hard-nosed in their dealings with the media, and give them less of the benefit of the doubt.

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