A deeper understanding
Oops, no freedom from hijab for you, little girl.
St Stephen’s primary school in Newham, east London, hit the headlines at the weekend after the Sunday Times reported it had banned Muslim girls under the age of eight from wearing headscarves, to the delight of campaigners who argued it enforces religious conformity on children.
That decision, along with curbs on children fasting on school days during Ramadan, upset many parents, who said they had not been consulted.
Consulted about starving and dehydrating their children? Consulted about treating little girls as sexual vampires who have to be muffled up in cloth to keep them from Tempting males? Parental rights stop where child abuse begins.
On Friday, the school’s chair of governors, Arif Qawi, said he was stepping down, telling colleagues in an email: “I wish the school continued success and am truly sorry that my actions have caused any harm to the reputation of the fantastic school.”
Qawi’s comments regarding “Islamisation” posted on social media attracted sustained criticism, while parents complained that they first heard about the ban through the media rather than the school.
The website for St Stephen’s posted a note on Friday, headlined as a uniform policy update, that read: “Having spoken to our school community we now have a deeper understanding of the matter and have decided to reverse our position with immediate effect.”
So, victory for theocratic bullies and defeat for secular education and children’s welfare.
Miqdaad Versi, the assistant secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, said his organisation welcomed Qawi’s resignation because of his “appalling” statements in support of the ban.
“This decision on religious symbols did not appear to target adherents of other faiths and appears to have been made without consulting the parents or community,” Versi said. “Yet serious questions remain unanswered as to the school leadership’s attitude towards Muslims, which are potentially discriminatory.
“It is deeply disappointing that a primary school with such a reputation has acted in this way. We hope that future decisions are made carefully and with full consultation with local communities.”
So that schools will never be a refuge from religious fanaticism and a place to learn about and participate in the real world instead of religious dogma.
Amina Lone, an activist who has lobbied the government to bar hijabs in schools for young girls, was disappointed by the school’s U-turn: “A result of clicktivism in all its polarised glory. So much for choice and individual liberty. Terribly sad day for a secular democracy,” Lone wrote on Twitter.
It’s pathetic.
I’m curious. Which other religions force women into blankets, with the insulting claim that men cannot but help to rape them if they don’t? Which religion implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) consider women to blame for their own rape, and men blameless, all based on whether she was sufficienttly blanketed? It might be said that some christian denominations approach this, putting girls and women into heavy ‘demure’ clothing, but do they make it a basic tenet of the religion?
That said, I don’t think a ban on headscarves is the right approach. I think a policy of letting the students take the scarves off and not be snitched on by the teachers would suffice.
I don’t know. I think a ban on all religious clothing in schools might be good. Children have a bad habit of sorting the kids into groups already, based on arbitrary distinctions that kids (and many of their parents) make of those who “are like me” and those who “are different”. Why give them one more category to sort into?
When I moved from Maine to Oklahoma, I was going into 5th grade. In Maine, we had two churches in our town, and they both preached about the same thing, and most people went because it was the center of the social life, and there wasn’t anywhere else to go. We didn’t even have library.
In Oklahoma, there were almost as many churches as they were people (I do exaggerate a little, of course), and all sorts of religions. The first question anyone asked me was “what church do you go to?” I, being an innocent 10-year-old who had no clue that you had to be the “right” religion, answered truthfully by acknowledging the church that my great-grandparents had helped build, and my family still belonged to – a rather benign, non-dogmatic church (my parents were not benign and non-dogmatic, so how they ever ended up in that church, I have no idea!). It was the “wrong” answer. The only right answer was Southern Baptist. Everyone else was just plain “wrong”. The teacher joined in the piling on, because she, too, was Southern Baptist and believed fiercely that everyone should be just like her. I was already beginning to have my doubts about religion, and that, coupled with my grandfather being very harsh and not allowing so much as a smile on Sunday, let alone television or romping, probably helped push my doubts along a bit faster.
The reality is, religion should be left at the schoolroom door – on the outside, sitting on the steps. If you are really godly, it will wait for you to pick it up again when you leave. If you are just pretending, well, you’re better off if it runs away while you’re in class.
Children need to focus on learning and playing while they’re in school, and making friends, of course. These are all hard to do when you’re in a bag, or when half the class is wearing crosses and the other half isn’t.