Politics, tech and media issues from a Muslim perspective
Here is an article from Zaytuna Institute by Imam Zaid Shakir, on What We Should Be Teaching Our Children (hat tip: Abu Eesa. It is a pretty comprehensive article about instilling taqwa in children,...
Last week Umar Lee blogged a piece about “child terrorists” who rampage in the streets of New York every day of the school year. The young thugs get out of school and terrorise the...
Today the House of Lords, effectively the UK’s supreme court, allowed an appeal by a school which had excluded a Muslim female pupil, Shabina Begum, because she insisted on wearing an Arabic-style jilbab, which...
Cherry Potter has an article in today's Guardian (Train them like rats) regarding the Channel 4 series Brat Camp, in the latest version of which a group of recalcitrant teenage girls are taken out...
The Times today reported that the Birmingham Guild of Students (the student union at the University of Birmingham) has suspended the college's Christian Union because its constitution forbids non-Christians from joining. The people in...
When I first saw this story in the Guardian I thought it was one for the "world's gone mad" department so beloved of certain radio talk-show hosts. A school in Wigan (in Lancashire, northern...
Madrassas have been getting a bad press lately, with this country's Dar al-Uloom schools getting savaged both on the papers and in the news by Andrew Gilligan. Ma sha Allah, nice to see that...
The Guardian reports today that someone managed to sneak a praise-poem for George W Bush into an English textbook which was being used on 16-year-olds in Pakistani schools: The leader Patient and steady with...
Another civil disturbance, another Nick Cohen comment (duplicated on his blog), and you can bet he'll use it to drum for his pet causes – among them his opposition to sectional politics of any...
In the edition of the New Statesman before last (19th Sept 2005), Nick Cohen had an article published in which he questioned the religion and religiosity figures in the 2001 census and called for...
This is something I’d never have thought of myself, but having read it, I sort of wonder why I never thought of it. The BBC reports that teachers think they can tell which kids...
The Guardian today published the results of a telephone poll conducted on its behalf by poll agency ICM, showing that two thirds of their interviewees oppose government funding for faith-based schools, which are, as...
There’s a report here about a girl who was sent to a special-needs boarding school ended up pregnant after being placed in a room next door to a 16-year-old boy. The report does not...
There’s a feature in this week’s Spectator (a right-of-centre political magazine) by one Leo McKinstry about the sexual advances he received from various men at his boarding school in Northern Ireland and how it...
The past few days appear to have been open season on Baroness Warnock, who in 1978 published a report advocating the integration of disabled children in mainstream schools. As you might expect, Melanie Phillips...
There’s a lengthy article in this week’s Observer Magazine about home education, A class of their own. The article is balanced (noting that some kids don’t learn much from home schooling, according to some...
I discovered the Bradford Muslim blog yesterday (that is, about two hours ago) through Deenport; brother Atif Imtiaz has an excellent bit of humour about Why School is Good For You. If you don’t...
Further to my earlier remarks about diet and behaviour at the bottom of this entry, the BBC has a piece about a report indicating that malnutrition leads to low intelligence, irritability and bad behaviour...
This morning on Jon Gaunt’s show they were talking about the recently announced government policy of moving “excluded” (expelled) children into the more popular schools, so that such kids don’t end up being concentrated...