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Wednesday 29 November 2017

Why liberals need to get over their fetish for how young Muslim girls choose to dress

OfSTED’s recent declaration that school inspectors should question Muslim girls who choose to wear Hijab strikes a blow to the freedom of conscience that most in the UK enjoy. Freedom of conscience was defined by the United Nations’ in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights as everyone having the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion.

Much of the discussion over the OfSTED Hijab story in the press and on social media has been around whether it is a requirement for Muslim women to cover their hair or not. While I’m sure that this is an important theological discussion for many Muslims to be having, it falls short of the discussion that all of us should be having in response to OfSTED’s decision. We should be talking about the legitimacy and value of the State deciding if young women can freely express their culture while at school.

The recent targeting of young Muslims by OfSTED and the Department for Education is not an isolated incident and is the latest move in a secular crusade that has been waged on our schools over the last few years by the likes of Michael Gove MP and Michael Wilshaw, the previous head of OfSTED. This secular crusade gave us the ‘Trojan Horse’ ‘scandal’, when schools in Birmingham were accused of having been taken over by so-called ‘Islamic extremists’ in 2014. This resulted in OfSTED issuing advice that led to the imposition of the PREVENT Counter-Terrorism Strategy on our schools. A strategy that has been widely criticised for unfairly targeting Muslim pupils and for stoking anti-Muslim sentiment.

The events that became known as the ‘Trojan Horse’ focussed on schools in Birmingham and subsequently in Tower Hamlets where I was working as a secondary school teacher at the time. These were schools that served majority Muslim communities and where the students gained better exam results than both OfSTED and the Department for Education expected them to. Much of this success has been put down to the schools respecting and valuing the cultures that children brought with them to school. In a book chapter from 2006 titled ‘The Trojan Horse’, Gove does not see value in the culture that Muslim children arrive at the school gates with. He describes the existence of Islamic ideology in the UK as a ‘symbolic fight’ and questions if the UK would be ‘strong enough to defend the idea of secular space’. Despite Gove’s concern for ‘secular space’, schools in the UK are not secular. Whether Gove and his fellow secularists like it or not, the UK is a religious state where the law suggests that freedom of conscience (religious or secular) should be respected.

The importance of respecting the culture that children bring to school presents an alternative interpretation to the events that became known as the ‘Trojan Horse’. This alternative view fits better with my experience as a teacher in Tower Hamlets. Young girls who I have worked with describe feeling welcome at school when their headscarf is allowed as part of their school uniform and how this helps them feel comfortable which in turn helps them to concentrate on their school work. Pupils who were offered a classroom when they asked for somewhere to pray at lunchtime describe feeling accepted and were more engaged in class. Similarly, a school where I previously worked brought in players from the local football club, Arsenal, to help motivate disenfranchised young white boys to learn to write. Ensuring that the cultures that all children bring with them to school are respected is necessary if they and their parents are to engage in their education and if our schools are to serve all of our children.

I’m sure that the Amanda Spielman (HM Chief Inspector of Education) who has advised schools inspectors to question Hijab wearing girls is well-meaning but her instructions are likely to do more harm than good. Quizzing young girls over the legitimacy of their choice to wear a headscarf to school tells these girls that they do not belong. Had Spielman spoken to some of the kids who I have taught, she would have heard that there are many reasons for wearing a Hijab; considered theological positions; fashion; I’m told that it’s quicker to put on a headscarf than to do your hair in the morning and, yes, because dressing modestly and wearing a Hijab keeps your Dad off your back, often so that he lets you stay out later in the evening. If OfSTED’s move was really about care for young Muslim women, these voices would be heard and respected.

The liberal fetish for the headwear of young Muslim girls is a textbook example of the contradictions of liberalism. While discussing the West’s response to 9/11, Jacques Derrida warned that these contradictions result in the ‘autoimmunity’ of liberalism. He tells us that liberal aspirations tend to backfire. Creating an institutional requirement that Muslim girls are questioned about how they chose to dress is likely to make young people feel alienated from their schools and teachers and may undermine much of the excellent work that has previously been done to raise the academic standards for children from minority communities as they are implicitly told by OfSTED that our schools are not for them.

3 comments:

  1. Of all the problems that lie in the British education system: poverty, socio- economic inequality, a system that feeds the preferences of certain classes, overworked and underpaid teachers, tick box exercises that schools implement just to impress Ofsted, the disparity that widens between resources available in the North and South, Amanda Spielman is worried about the Hijab! I'm speechless! I'm extremely disappointed that she’s used the term sexualisation in the wrong context. However, I'm not surprised at that; a few years ago a head of a school had to send Ofsted an email about the number of spelling and punctuation errors on an Ofsted report that had been published. That’s what Spielman should be worried about; Ofsted’s credibility. Not hijabs! What sort of message are we giving to young people? We teach and embrace unity in the classroom, break down barriers that the media has corrupted young minds with, and now we have Ofsted making things worse. On a positive note, this will bring young Muslim women together and together we will see lawyers, doctors, entrepreneurs, Headteachers, engineers all of whom wear a headscarf!

    I have a friend who has been teaching in a state school with majority of Muslim children and we discussed this issue. One thing that stood out for me was an observation that she made. She said that she realised girls wearing the hijab were doing better academically than girls that weren't, and they were also better disciplined. Statistically girls were doing much better than the boys at the school, but it was the girls that wore the hijab that were getting the highest marks. It's something interesting that we all have to try and understand.
    IA
    http://www.londonschoolofislamics.org.uk

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  2. Islam teaches the importance of modesty and how Muslim women should wear the headscarf (hijab) when they reach the age of puberty. It is well within the rights of Muslim parents to teach their girls at a younger age about this concept in Islam. Furthermore some younger Muslim girls do admire and long to wear the hijab earlier as means of expressing their modesty and wanting to please God. As a result, their parents may accordingly encourage their interest in wearing the headscarf earlier.

    I think the singling out of young Muslim girls by Ofsted and quizzing them is really invasive and inappropriate. Young Muslims are already aware of being portrayed as ‘the other’ in the media and this will further deepen the divide and make them feel targeted. A school should have no right to separate a group of children and question them for wearing a religious garment. I think the claim that hijab could be interpreted as sexualisation of young girls is disgusting and perverted.

    Why should Ofsted of all boards interview these young girls? Would it not be better that teachers have a chat with parents if they have reason to believe a young girl is observing the hijab against her will? Schools should absolutely not ban young children from wearing a headscarf. It is an expression of their religious beliefs.

    Ofsted accused of Islamophobia over hijab questioning in primary schools. The schools watchdog Ofsted has been voted UK Islamophobe of the Year. Ofsted won the dubious accolade at a ceremony organised by the Islamic Human Rights Commission in London on Sunday evening.

    Many in the Muslim community feel that Ofsted has targeted Muslim children over the past few years. Several high-performing schools in Birmingham were put in Special Measures by Ofsted and Muslim educationalists were forced out of their jobs following the “Trojan Horse” affair, which was later largely discredited.
    IA
    http://www.londonschoolofislamics.org.uk

    ReplyDelete
  3. Amanda Spielman, the head of Ofsted and chief inspector of schools, said she respected parents’ choice to bring up their children according to their cultural norms, but wanted to tackle situations “where primary school children are expected to wear the hijab [that] could be interpreted as sexualisation of young girls”. The opposite to hijab wearing is the display of highly sexualised forms of many western women. Western men get to enjoy this without thinking they are entitled to help themselves to every woman wearing a skirt up to her bumcheeks. The bottom line (pun intended) gents, is you can look but not touch. If you are offended, look away you control freak prude.

    Today's head of Ofsted has no background in education. She was forced upon the inspectorate by the Minister against the advice of those appointed to oversee such appointments. She has an agenda to make a splash and get out before that splash lands back on her. Pandering to radicals, in this case feminists, humanists and the like is all se is up to. She has not got the background or experience to make effective positive changes to education, so she has taken the easy way out, and politicised Ofsted.

    Where is the freedom of religion? Can she not express her identity at young age. Surely preparation makes one better . I do not want my children to be brainwashed by half naked girls instead I'll teach her what's right or wrong and that is my duty not yours not the government. Asking little girls why they wear a headscarf is silly. It is forced on them in one way or another, through dictate by parents, training, social pressure.

    The letter, written by Nadine El-Enany, a senior law lecturer at Birkbeck Law School, University of London, Waqas Tufail, a senior lecturer in criminology at Leeds Beckett University, and Shereen Fernandez, a PhD candidate at Queen Mary University of London, said: “We, the undersigned, ask that Ofsted immediately retract its instruction to inspectors to question primary school children wearing the hijab.

    “We find the decision to single out Muslim children for questioning unacceptable, and insist that no school children be targeted for action on the basis of their race, religion or background.

    “While a wider conversation about the sexualisation of girls in Britain’s culture and economy is welcome, the singling out of Muslim children for investigation is unacceptable.

    “The message the Ofsted decision sends to Muslim women is that the way they choose to dress and the decisions they make in raising their children are subject to a level of scrutiny different to that applied to non-Muslim parents.

    “Further, the Ofsted decision reduces the hijab to a symbol of sexualisation and ignores other interpretations ranging from a display of faith to a symbol of empowerment and resistance. Constructing women and children who wear the hijab as being either sexualised or repressed is both reductive and racist in its reproduction of colonial and Orientalist tropes about them.”

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