The scale of Britain’s problem with Islamic extremism has been graphically illustrated by what happens to Muslims who fight it.
St Stephen’s is a secular state primary school in a largely Pakistani and Bangladeshi community in east London. Its results are among the best in England. Its head teacher, Neena Lall, decided with her chairman of governors, Arif Qawi, that children under the age of eight should be banned from wearing the Islamic headscarf in class. They also stopped children fasting on school premises during Ramadan in case they became unwell.
Lall was alarmed that very few pupils thought of themselves as British. She felt an obligation to teach them British values. So what was the reaction to this admirable stand against religious extremism? Qawi was forced out as chairman of governors and Lall was likened to Hitler. Five local councillors said that the headscarf ban would leave pupils “victimised, intimidated and threatened when practising their faith”. Nearly 20,000 people signed a petition calling for the ban to be lifted. Last week Lall was forced to apologise and reverse the policy.
This surely falls within the remit of Sara Khan, who has just been made head of the new Commission for Countering Extremism. Khan is a Muslim human rights activist and chief executive of Inspire, an organisation she founded in 2008 to fight extremism and gender inequality.
She encourages Muslim integration into British society. She says organisations or preachers promoting extremism or violence must be confronted, and has called for honesty among Muslims about the hateful ideologies and intolerance within their community.
Advertisement
So what’s been the reaction to her appointment from self-professed Muslim moderates? Unbridled horror. Her principal crime, it seems, is to have supported the government’s Prevent programme. Prevent is designed to stop individuals becoming or supporting terrorists. One might have thought that it was appropriate for the new anti-extremism head commissioner to support Prevent. But no. Prevent relies on the Muslim community “informing” on individuals with extremist attitudes before they commit any crime. Many Muslims call this state-sponsored spying.
The former Conservative minister Baroness Warsi says that Khan is divisive because many Muslims see her as “simply a creation of and mouthpiece for the Home Office”. Yet Khan opposed last year’s doomed counterextremism bill. So she’s hardly a government stooge. No, the real crime committed by the
anti-extremism head commissioner is that she’s anti-extremism.
According to the Labour MP Naz Shah, vice-chairwoman of the British Muslims all-party group, Khan “does not accept the concerns in the community”. No mention by Shah of concerns about some members of that community — concerns which led to the creation of the commission in the first place.
What these critics are really opposing is the idea that any Muslim groups or individuals should be considered beyond the pale. The Muslim Women’s Network, in a complaint endorsed by Warsi, says the commission head should be required to have “credibility and trust” across the Muslim spectrum.
Really? Including the extremist preachers and mosques and Muslim Brotherhood groups promoting anti-western doctrines? For if those people trust the new commission head, then the rest of us most certainly should not.
Advertisement
The real problem is that government policy is incoherent. It’s not enough to prevent vulnerable people being sucked into terrorism. Non-violent religious extremism itself has to be tackled head-on.
At St Stephen’s, a religious figure threatened to suspend from Islamic classes any pupils attending the school’s annual residential trip to an activity centre in Kent. As a result, several children didn’t go even though the trip was compulsory.
The education department’s response to this was feeble beyond belief. “Intimidation or bullying towards school staff or pupils is unacceptable,” it said. “Anyone who feels they are facing either should report it to police.”
Yet this is a state school. As Arif Qawi protested, the department should take all these issues out of the school’s hands “and tell every school this is how it should be”.
Fat chance. After the report on the Trojan horse scandal, where some Birmingham schools were infiltrated by extremists who imposed an Islamist agenda, the head of that inquiry, Peter Clarke, said there was evidence this was happening around the country but the government was refusing to do anything about it.
Advertisement
What’s the point of creating a commission to counter extremism when the government itself won’t deal with it? What’s the point of Prevent if attitudes which help form a continuum of beliefs feeding into extremism and terrorism are being inculcated in state-run schools?
The reason for this abdication of responsibility is cowardice. The government is too frightened to deal with those who either promote or wink at non-violent Islamic extremism. Why is it so frightened? Because its deepest fear is that such groups or individuals may have a critical mass of support.
We are repeatedly told that the vast majority of Britain’s Muslims are moderate. We must hope so; but from the way the community has treated Sara Khan and the head and former chairman of governors at St Stephen’s school, it would appear that Muslims who fight extremism are a most beleaguered minority.
