ISLAM takes a lot of stick in the Freethinker – all of it well-deserved. Yet, believe it or not, we do strive to find something positive to report about Muslims – and once in a while we strike gold.
Which is why we name Yasmin Alibhai-Brown as our Hero of the Week.
Alibhai-Brown is that rare variety of Muslim who treasures our secular democracy, and is prepared to come out fighting whenever it comes under fire.
Writing yesterday in the Independent, Alibhai-Brown launched an attack on the ghastly Catholic writer, commentator and apologist for Islam, Cristina Odone.
I cannot stand Cristina Odone, and the feeling is mutual …
And here is why:
She enthuses over faith-based schools, especially Muslim schools, where our children are apparently taught to be Muslim and British (you don’t say), as if, like donkeys and horses, we have to be specially trained into behaviours to get to this state of grace …
Apologist Muslim organisations use blackmail. Give them what they want or many more Muslims will become domestic hellhounds. If the state does not agree to fund further educational institutions of cultural, religious and gender apartheid, Muslim girls will be ‘disappeared, forced into marriages. From segregated schools, which, says Odone, are ‘crucial to traditional Muslim families’, they will one day go into higher education.
This stream of irrational consciousness leads to separate universities and colleges, for how can Muslim women be in the same lecture hall, tutorial group, common room, dining room with other Britons and men? Is Ms Odone going to recommend that too, next?
Go into any British university and you see huddles of manifestly Muslim men and women sitting apart from others, including Muslims who refuse to cover up or live separate lives. You never saw this before because, until a decade back, there wasn’t this distorted Islamicisation of Muslim life … More Muslims hate this reactionary Islam than do outsiders. Our thoughts tend not to matter to people like Odone.
The reason so many Muslim girls are abused, denied education and pushed into early marriages is because the community and family patriarchs and matriarchs violate their human rights. Proportionately more Muslim girls and boys run away from home than do the children of other Britons. Are they trying to escape the freedom of British society, or trying desperately to find it? Our state needs to protect these girls, not hand them over to their oppressors.
Odone praises one school where girls, covered up completely except for the face, are kept apart from boys. An ‘elegant Arabic-style courtyard with a fountain’ is the barrier. That’s fine then. What about those young girls so swathed and swaddled they constantly fall over in playgrounds? These shrouds sexualise them as much as boob tubes do the daughters of the ‘infidels’. Both see young females as objects of unhealthy desire.
She adds:
A bigger game is being played here. Some ardent Christians, Jews, Hindus, and Muslims are rising, collaborating to demolish secularism in the UK, which has always been weak and too loosely committed to the separation of faith and state. So the Archbishop of Canterbury ruminates fondly about Sharia family law and his conservative bishops plot to gain moral supremacy …
What I write springs not from personal hostility, but from extreme political opposition to the ideas on state and religion promulgated by Cristina Odone, high Catholic priestess of this new order and the circle of uncompromising believers. I hold my faith dear, and am wary of anti-religious bigots, but religions should not be allowed to dictate policy and politics, nor make ghettoes. Millions of Muslims like me – and others too – recoil from the ideas promoted by this multi-religious Opus Dei. Let’s hope God’s on our side, not theirs.
Another attack on Odone and her cock-eyed views on faith schools appears in today’s Guardian.
The Freethinker was founded in 1881 by GW Foote, an outspoken critic of religion. After the publication of 
July 2nd, 2008 at 5:37 pm
Salaam
London School of Islamics is an educational Trust. Its aim is to make
British public, institutions and media aware of the needs and demands of the
Muslim community in the field of education and possible solutions.
Slough Islamic school Trust Slough had a seminar on Muslim
education and schools in Thames Valley Atheltic Centre. The seminar was
addressed by the education spokesman of MCB. I could not attend the seminar
but I believe lot of Muslims from Slough and surrounding areas must have
attended. Very soon, the Muslims of Slough will have a state funded Muslim
school but there is a need for more schools. A day will come when all Muslim
children will attend state funded Muslim schools with bilingual Muslim
teachers as role model.
Muslim schools are not only faith schools but they are more or less
bilingual schools.
Bilingual Muslim children need to learn standard English to follow the
National Curriculum and go for higher studies and research to serve
humanity. They need to be well versed in Arabic to recite and understand the
Holy Quran. They need to be well versed in Urdu and other community
languages to keep in touch with their cultural roots and enjoy the beauty of
their literature and poetry.
Bilingualism is an asset but the British schooling regards it as a
problem. A Muslim is a citizen of this tiny global village. He/she does not
want to become notoriously monolingual Brit. Pakistan is only seven hours
from London and majority of British Muslims are from Pakistan.
More than third of British Muslim have no qualifications. British school
system has been failing large number of Muslims children for the last 60
years. Muslim scholars see the pursuit of knowledge as a duty, with the
Quran containing several verses to the rewards of learning. 33% of British
Muslims of working age have no qualifications and Muslims are also the least
likely to have degrees or equivalent qualifications. Most of estimated
500,000 Muslim school-aged pupils in England and Wales are educated in the
state system with non-Muslim monolingual teachers. Majority of them are
underachievers because they are at a wrong place at a wrong time.
Bilingual Muslim children need state funded Muslim schools with bilingual
Muslim teachers during their developmental periods. There is no place for a
non-Muslim child or a teacher in a Muslim school. As far as higher education
is concerned, Muslim students can be educated with others. Let Muslim
community educate its own children so that they can develop their own
Islamic, cultural and linguistic identities and become usefull members of
the British society rather than becoming a buden.
We are living in an English speaking country and English is an
international language, therefore, we want our children to learn and be well
versed in standard English and at the same time well versed in Arabic, Urdu
and other community languages. Is there anything wrong with this approach?
It is not only the Muslim community who would like to send their children to
Muslim school. Sikh and Hindu communities have started setting up their
schools. Last week. British Black Community has planned the first all black
school with Black teachers in Birmingham.
Scotland’s first state funded Muslim school could get the go-ahead within
months after First Munister Alex Salmond declared he was sympathetic towards
the needs and demands of the Muslim community.
Iftikhar Ahmad
London School of Islamics Trust
http://www.londonschoolofislamics.org.uk
July 2nd, 2008 at 8:26 pm
What if the children don’t want to be muslims? What if they don’t want to visit Pakistan? What if they don’t want to be cut off from the culture of the country they call home?
July 3rd, 2008 at 8:02 pm
I should point out that Ahmad posted the same reply beneath our report about a Muslim school in Slough http://www.freethinker.co.uk/2.....in-slough/
to which Andy Armitage replied:
There is nothing wrong with helping kids learn another language. I got a smattering of French at school, and it’s helped me a little. Arabic is not needed, though, if all you want it for is to read a desiccated old scripture, because there is no need, and I stress the word need, to learn the Koran. It’s just superstition made up by a madman who thought the Archangel Jibrail/Gabriel was talking to him. They did in those days, and people these can’t see that, back then, it was understandable that people would try to create a model for the creation of the universe (or the flat Earth, as many saw it back then, with the stars in some sort of firmament).
I’m sorry, but you’ve shown yourself to be one who wants Islam to insinuate itself into Western society with the words you use: ” Its aim is to make
British public, institutions and media aware of the needs and demands of the
Muslim community in the field of education and possible solutions.” Demands? Who are you to demand anything? You must take your place alongside me and him and her and the rest of us. You have no more right to demand than I do. Muslims make too many demands: look at the blog I write for, especially this story, to see what I mean.
Someone has left a comment there, saying that it’s only a matter of time before the majority rise up against all this carping and moaning and demanding and threatening and would-be censorship (of cartoons, of pig ornaments, of pig stories that “offend” your poor sensitivities), of short films that dare to criticise some of the mad bits of your “holy book”.
Come on! No one in Britain has to read this tosh. They’d be better off getting a good all-round education – and I’m afraid religion is just superstition. Let us learn about it, but not have it shoved down our throats. Yours ought to be left in the Middle East, or preferably expunged from thinking society by logical argument and ridicule.
If half the Asian kids in this country had not been born to parents who are not quite in touch with reality because they believe in the utter drivel you believe in, my friend, they’d truly be playing a better part in society. Fortunately, some are rebelling; unfortunately, other young Muslims are taking up jihad, with dangerous consequences.