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.