How Muslim identity politics colonised education
by Tim Black, spiked:
From Batley Grammar to Michaela, schools are being besieged by religious hardliners.
British schools are being turned into political battlegrounds. A militant Muslim identity politics is mounting an ever-stronger challenge to their educational authority. Over the past few weeks alone, the Michaela Community School in north-west London has appeared at the High Court, having been sued for discrimination by a Muslim pupil over its decision to ban prayer rituals. And a few miles away in east London, Barclay Primary School has been under attack from Islamists and a few parents after it told children not to wear clothing or badges displaying some form of ‘political allegiance’ in school – a move interpreted as a clampdown on pro-Palestine symbols.
In both cases, activists’ response to the school’s decisions has been marked by menace. Following Michaela’s decision to ban prayer rituals last spring, bomb threats were made to teachers, the school was vandalised and a brick was thrown through a classroom window. And in response to Barclay Primary’s change to its uniform code, arson and bomb threats were sent both to the school and individual staff. Masked men climbed the school’s fence at night to hang Palestinian flags around its perimeter.
There is a tendency to frame cases like this as part of an age-old conflict between religion and modernity. Between the demands of faith and the demands of public life in secular societies. But it’s a misleading characterisation. The aggressive imposition of Muslim cultural practices on to education has very little to do with Islam and everything to do with decades of multicultural policymaking. That is what we’re seeing right now in the cases of Michaela and Barclay. Not quiet displays of faith, but loud, all-too-visible assertions of Muslim identitarianism.
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