An Education In Muslim Integration
Could Islamic schools be part of the solution?
LONDON--The riots that spread beyond the densely Muslim suburbs of Paris into other French cities and even into neighboring countries have confirmed many people's worst fears about growing alienation and extremism among the rising generation of Europe's roughly 14 million-member minority. To date, at least, those riots say far more about the difficulties France and other European nations have had in integrating a largely Muslim underclass than they do about the rise of militant Islam in the West.
But beyond their obvious connection with race and social justice, the violent outbursts give pause to those who share French political scientist Gilles Kepel's view that the crucial struggle for Muslim minds is taking place not in the Arab world but in Europe. At the very least, the riots raise questions about the compatibility of liberal societies and Islam, challenging both the rigid secularism of many European liberals and the dogmatism of many European Muslims. And a number of those questions are being brought to a head in the arena of education, with debates raging about whether Islamic education is part of the problem of Muslim integration into European nations--or whether it might become part of the solution.
To Abdullah Trevathan, head teacher of north London's Islamia Primary School, a state-funded school that offers religious instruction and the study of Arabic along with the standard national curriculum, the answer is clear. Trevathan believes that schools such as Islamia--one of the first five Muslim faith schools to receive state funding in Britain--can play a vital role in hammering out a new Muslim identity, one that combines being a good Muslim with being a good citizen in a pluralist society.
Extremism. That identity is clearly at odds with the one being pushed by Islamic extremists throughout Europe, often in innocent-seeming sports clubs or after-school Koran classes taught by Saudi-trained imams. Their vision of Islam appeals to many of the second- or third-generation children of Pakistani, Turkish, or North African immigrants who crowd the ghettolike neighborhoods of Europe's industrial cities and suburbs. Often raised in households where religion is a loose cultural matter, they are easily seduced by the austere Wahhabi-Salafist vision of a global community of the faithful living under strict Islamic law. Attracted by the moral absolutism, some are even drawn to the violent ways of the jihadists.
But how do Muslim schools provide an antidote to all of this? They do so, Trevathan and others argue, by exposing students to the classical Islamic traditions, whose richness was derived partly from their openness to changing cultural conditions. In addition, argues Asmat Ali, head of the girls' upper-school division of Islamia, Muslim schools give students confidence in their own Muslim identity, a confidence that makes them more at ease with their Britishness. And having a strong ethical and spiritual core arguably contributes to the academic success that Islamia and other faith schools enjoy. With over 97 percent of its upper-school graduates going on to enroll in a university, Islamia itself is, Trevathan says, "the most oversubscribed school in the U.K."
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