Learning to live together, or separately

Muslim education in Britain

Mar 28th 2013, 19:23 by B.C.

IT IS not easy to plan or regulate the education of children in an area where culture and demographics are shifting rapidly. There can be few places in Europe where that dilemma is felt so acutely as it is in Bradford, a declining industrial city in the north of England. Very nearly a quarter of the 523,000 people living within its municipal boundaries are Muslim, according to the 2011 census. That is a rise of eight percentage points over the past decade, while the self-declared Christian share of the population has fallen over the same period from 60% to 46%.

A high proportion of Bradford's Muslim population has family roots in south Asia, and in many cases they come from rural areas of Kashmir, where social and family mores are conservative even by the standards of the Islamic world. Just as they would back home, Asian Muslim parents in Bradford attach overwhelming importance to the instruction of their children in at least the basics of Islamic belief and practice. About 9,000 children in Bradford top up their regular state school education with at least an hour of instruction at a madrassa or religious school, several days a week; possibly 1,000 or more attend independent Muslim schools where they receive their entire education through a Muslim prism.

This week the Bradford Council for Mosques, representing 80 or so places of Muslim worship, published a report about the city's madrassas; its co-sponsors included the West Yorkshire Police and the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, a respected NGO. Although the language is cautious and euphemistic, it gives a sense of the distinctive social reality in which many Muslim children in England grow up. It opens by predicting that the number of Bradford children attending part-time religious schools "will increase considerably over the coming years" on present demographic trends.

It also notes that many religious schools "have a very narrow understanding of faith education - for example, limited to assisting children to identify and read the Quranic text, to memorise the five pillars of Islam and to be able to offer the five prayers. This is very basic, essential and highly commendable but parents desire their children to be given a fuller understanding of the faith...." And unfortunately, not all parents were as demanding as they should be. Indeed many "operate from a very low expectation base" and feel that "as long as [their children] come out being able to read the Quran, perform five daily prayers and know some other basics they are quite content."

In certain schools, there is "considerable difficulty" for children who receive most of their education in English and find their madrassa teacher is addressing them in a language of which they have "very basic or no command". What that means in hard reality, according to people who know the Bradford scene, is that in the poorest madrassas the teacher speaks nothing much but Urdu, which the English-born pupils hardly understand. Adding to the confusion, the children are made to learn and recite their prayers, and verses from holy writ, in Arabic; but they are not taught what these words mean.

A far more detailed knowledge of the faith is imparted by Bradford's full-time Islamic schools, such as the Darul Uloom Dawatul Imaan, a boarding school for boys and men aged between 11 and 23, some of whom will go on to become imams. As the report by Ofsted, Britain's official inspectorate of schools, approvingly notes: "There is outstanding provision for learning Arabic and Urdu with Arabic grammar and literature to meet the religious requirements of the Islamic theology programme...All students have the opportunity to practise the recitation of the Quran and nasheeds (Arabic religious songs)."

Whether their religious education is part-time or full-time, the Muslim youngsters of Bradford are growing up in a world that is very very different from their white and non-Muslim contemporaries. As the ethos of mainstream state education becomes more liberal and secular, children of Islamic background experience an environment where the role of religion is huge and growing. There is a sense of worlds diverging. Alyas Karmani, a well-known Bradford imam, told me that many Muslim parents were very happy with old-fashioned English grammar schools where there was an emphasis on order, discipline and excellence. But as "white" culture became more liberal (in its attitude to intoxicants and sexual behaviour, for example), the attraction of Islamic-only schools, where educational results were sometimes higher than average, had increased.

Saeeda Ahmad, a young Bradford woman who founded Trescom, a successful social-affairs consultancy, thinks the quality of Muslim education in the city will improve. But improvement, for her, does not mean growing more liberal or secular. Muslims of her generation wanted the sort of education that would help them and their children to explain their faith, when challenged, to other people. Mr Karmani also believes that madrassas are getting better. In his view, about 10% were already very good, and another 10% were so bad they might be in need of closure, while those in the middle were trying hard to improve.

Establishing madrassas where teachers and pupils speak the same language is doubtless a real problem, but it sounds a fairly easy one to solve. Harder problems may be in store. Imagine a Bradford in ten or 20 years' time where half the population consists of articulate, well-educated (in Islamic terms) Muslims, and the other half has grown up in a modern, permissive culture which is barely touched by organised religion. What will be the common language between them?

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2. Дарья, Арина, Мария, Елизавета, Анастасия

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