Human First
You should listen to Radio 4’s Inside a Muslim School . It’s rather horrible.
It’s about a very small school in Blackburn, mostly girls with a few boys in the primary grades. The headteacher (who is a man) explains the dress code:
According to the Islamic principle, women should not show their hair. So if the hair is not covered properly, then we will ask them to do so. That’s why they have to wear scarves.
And outdoors, ‘veils’ as well, we find out later – although a lot of girls don’t. But right off the bat they get this nasty, creepy, prying, domineering, bordering on prurient stuff of a Boss Man telling little girls that their nasty dangerous hair is showing, and to cover it ‘properly’. I don’t think that’s good for the way they think about themselves.
We hear a recitation in Arabic, and a lesson in which a teacher tells the students what the Koran thinks of homosexuality (it’s against it), and a teacher telling the credulous reporter that of course the students are taught to ‘question’ everything. Oh yes? Such as why anyone should care what the Koran thinks of homosexuality, or why the headteacher has nothing better to do than tell young girls he can see their hair?
The head says something interesting:
The only restriction is that, because of the Islamic principle, I can’t be very open with my female staff, like you would in any other school.
Oh is that all. The only restriction – as if that’s a small thing. As if it’s a minor point, that relations between adults who work together should be so warped and impoverished by ‘the Islamic principle’ – or what it’s taken to be. As if the free unafraid between-equals open interaction between adults were not one of the best aspects of modern life.
Mind you, he does at least notice it, and think of it as a restriction. But the school is all about restriction – that seems to be the point. There’s more to Islam than that, but you’d never know it.
The credulous reporter does point out that the school is not well-equipped, that there is no science lab and that ‘the school regards music as unIslamic’ (another pretty, enriching thought). And there’s a very interesting bit where she talks to a girl who left and went to a state school to do A-levels. She did not like al-Islah, and she loved the state school. But al-Islah was a friendly place, wasn’t it, the reporter urges – warm, safe? Safe, yeh, the girl said – and you could hear the thought ‘safe and suffocating, safe like a shroud’. But she didn’t like it, no. She wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.
And one can easily tell why, throughout the show. It’s that creepy note of suspicion, of over-supervision, of surveillance as Lucy Snowe disdainfully calls it in Villette, of coercion and overprotection, of more concern with ‘Islamic principle’ than with intellect.
Another girl says they were taught they were Muslim first, and she doesn’t want to be taught that. ‘I’m a human first,’ she says – and one wants to cheer, and give her a full scholarship to Cambridge. Her mother is Muslim, but she never taught her they were Muslims first.
That’s the problem* with ‘faith schools,’ isn’t it: that’s what they teach. The credulous reporter keeps using the maddening phrase, too – ‘faith school’ this and ‘faith school’ that. She also refers to state school as a place where there are people of all different faiths. Period. As if there were no people of zero ‘faiths’ in the UK. I thought it was only in the US that people assumed that, but apparently not.
*Well, one of the problems.
OB:*Well, one of the problems.
(Tumultuous applause)
Mind you, we find one or two problems in ‘non-faith’ schools too.
True, true. Though not so much because they’re non-‘faith’ schools, I would guess, as because they’re huge – discipline is difficult in huge schools, I think. It seemed to me that what the head meant by ‘Islamic principles’ at particular times was not actually Islamic principles at all but just practical, educational discipline.
I went to a very, very small school myself; everybody knew everybody quite well; certain kinds of bad bahavior just weren’t possible. (And, now I think of it, it was ‘safe’ too. And I hated it – but I didn’t want to go to a less safe school, I just didn’t want to go to school. Hey ho.)
I found I wanted to sling a few bricks at the quality of teachers to be found in faith schools; or at the chilling effect on intellectual enquiry of the faith component. Then I realised I had zero actual knowledge of these issues. Our kids are at state schools by our choice.
But then, as thae English writer Saki pointed out, “You can’t expect a boy to be vicious till he’s been to a good school.” (http://www.creativequotations.com/one/429.htm)
Fortunately school doesn’t last for ever and with some luck students get to see more of life than school.
Beyond that it is not so much the existence of ‘faith schools’ (such as all English state schools were, in name, in the days of religious assemblies, though there were particular denominational schools alongside them) that is at issue as attitudes to what they teach and practice. The school in the programme you refer to sounds dreadful, and may or may not be representative of faith schools at large, but the reporter should, from what I can gauge in your account not having heard the programme, have been far less acquiescent and keen to please. I suspect it is that that is at issue, because freedom to criticise may very well change the course of events. Attitudes can change.
You can’t stop people believing what they believe, and I would prefer not to try to stop them getting together and acting on those beliefs, unless those actions contravene laws we as a society may choose to frame. In a liberal society one tries to frame laws that allow for a wide range of actions and one tries entirely to avoid framing laws that refer purely to people’s thoughts and speech.
One should be free, however, to criticise those thoughts as trenchantly as you do, Ophelia. And one should be free to find the thoughts repellent and mischievous and to say as much.
I don’t imagine you would argue for the restriction of thought or argument, or (I would guess) against the propagation of most of those thoughts and arguments.
The anger, I think, should be directed at the status accorded those thoughts, and at the actions those thoughts produce. The first is addressed by argument with those who accord that status; the second by the framing and interpretation of laws.
This sounds fussy, as I am only too aware, but I really don’t think there’s anything to be gained by simply calling people who believe certain things idiotic monsters. I suspect I am myself sceptical about the universal and absolute value of pure scientific thought, if there is such a thing, as applied to everything in human experience. But it certainly covers most things.
Thank you, Paul Power, for reminding us of Saki. My own favourite is: “No one can be an unbeliever nowadays. The Christian Apologists have left one nothing to disbelieve.”
But *sigh* that was before Fundamentalism.
George, no, you’re right, I wouldn’t argue for the restriction of thought or argument, or the propagation of same. What I would like to see though (while having no idea how to bring it about, apart from endless nagging) is an end to the taboo on frankly challenging the assertions of religion. As long as the two sides don’t get to argue on equal terms…we end up with for instance credulous reporters crooning over ‘faith’ schools and failing to ask any number of obvious questions.