Get off your knees

Afraid of being labelled Islamophobic, the left has fallen into an embarrassed silence on religion. We must speak up

Polly Toynbee
Friday June 11, 2004
reposted from The Guardian



Not long ago it was a mildly eccentric archaism to belong to the National Secular Society. As a liberal cause, it ranked in quaintness alongside the promotion of Esperanto and George Bernard Shaw's rational spelling system for the English language.

Campaigning for disestablishment of the Church of England was for constitutional anoraks only. Diehards sniping at the fragile remnants of Christian faith in Britain were seen as a little cruel, poking at a harmless near-corpse. For Britain is the most heathen of countries, deeply and profoundly irreligious. A recent Home Office study finds religion means little to 80% of the people.

But the relics of faith still embedded in the state are returning to haunt us. Now that religion is dangerously hot and divisive again, with new power to excite enmity and exclusion, the separation between church and state is no longer a dry academic question.

This week's report from Muslim academics and educationalists launched by Baroness Uddin in the House of Lords called for more Muslim schools and equal treatment. They found the present system "institutionally racist" and they are right. One third of British state schools are faith schools, and almost all 7,000 of them Christian. Only five are Islamic. The report calls for Islamic schools to be fast-tracked into the state system and the government has trouble thinking of any non-racist reasons why not. If so much Jesus, then why not more Mohammed?

The small Muslim population - under 3% nationwide - now has more regular mosque attenders than there are CofE church-goers. With 26 CofE bishops passing laws in the House of Lords and so many Christian state schools, the injustice of it is no longer sustainable. We expect Muslims to integrate, and yet offer them a model of society that deliberately excludes them. The answer, as secularists always said, is for the state to abolish all faith schools. It would take no more than an act of parliament. The faiths contribute a tiny proportion of the cost in exchange for governing them and running their own selection systems.

Abolishing them just because Muslims now want some of their own would add to their sense of affront. But that has to be answered honestly. Muslims want to keep their children separate, while most parents who choose Christian faith schools do it to help their children get ahead. In heathen Britain, anachronistic church schools thrive because they are a fraud. By definition, most (of course not all) parents choosing them are not religious. Often church schools are a semi-conscious device for screening out troublesome children, ensuring a calmer environment and better results. Surveys show that faith school on average take fewer children on free school meals or with special needs. Those with deprived intakes sink to the bottom of the league tables along with the rest: no magic there. It's about results, not sectarianism.

Except, that is, in Northern Ireland where religion stamps cultural identity. That is what separate Muslim schools risk replicating by keeping children apart in cultural isolation. Lord Ouseley, reporting on the Bradford riots, castigated the de facto segregation that happens even without making it official policy. Trevor Phillips, current head of the Commission for Racial Equality, doesn't think Muslim state schools are the answer. But he says there are real problems for Muslims in state schools. Too often they fail Bangladeshi and Pakistani pupils, often with all white teachers and little understanding.

But it doesn't have to be that way. Talk to Bushra Nasir, the Muslim headteacher of Plashet girls' school in East Ham. With many faiths, 70% Muslim and 10% Christian, the school is deeply sensitive to all religions and cultures. Nasir spends time persuading parents against sending their children to all-Muslim schools. (One has just opened up nearby.) "I tell them their girls will do far better here and it is far better for a cohesive society." Mostly she succeeds, but she just lost a potential A* science student to a Muslim girls' school where she fears she will do less well. Nor does she think Christian schools add the value they claim: "They interview parents to select: any headteacher can tell if parents are going to be supportive."

Nasir has done brilliantly with an almost entirely deprived ethnic minority intake, raising the number with five good GCSEs from 28% to 63%. It is not the religion that counts, but a good school and sensitive cultural approaches.

Standing against religious apartheid, atheists come into their own here. Those who are as anti-Christian as they are anti-Islamic can oppose state promotion of any religion without discrimination. Equally repelled by Christianity and its atrocities, they can challenge Islamic beliefs with an unembarrassed even-handedness.

But the rise of the concept of Islamophobia has struck too many dumb. They no longer express anti-religious views for fear of being Islamophobic. So, apart from protests by the doughty scions of the National Secular Society and their British Humanist Association allies, the left has fallen into an embarrassed silence on the subject of religion, just as it needs to speak up.

The BNP has been allowed to make the weather by abusing Islam as a proxy for race in their vile literature. They have done it so successfully that criticising Islam seems to ignore the attacks on Muslims that have increased by nearly 50%. Robert Kilroy-Silk's mindless anti-Arab tirade only made matters worse, as his attacks on Sharia law blended nastily into racist smears. He made it harder for others to challenge some of the savage passages in the Koran, which apologists are eager to smooth over.

"Islamophobia" blurs racism and anti-religion dangerously. It's interesting to see how Christian activists are now keen to make common cause with Muslims, drawing on their heat and passion. (The far left is doing the same, even less convincingly.) Far from a Clash of Civilisations between Islam and Christianity, in Britain they join together over religious broadcasting, schools and other rights. Officialdom is easily frightened of Islam, with good reason, treading carefully in a minefield. There is an essentially craven tendency to give in to the notion that religious belief deserves some special treatment by the state. Labour has opened 60 new faith state schools - including a Seventh Day Adventist one.

Nowhere more than in schools should that be resisted. It is the state's duty to give every child an open-minded, free-thinking education, opening windows away from the cultural narrowness of each child's family background. So where is the vigorous campaign against religious schools? Parents want good schools, and might prefer not to have to get on their knees in their local church to get into them. It is extraordinary that secular Britain is rushing to re-invent religion and give state aid to promote superstitions of every hue.

polly.toynbee@guardian.co.uk