This is a guest post by Uncle Daud
According to advice given to Stoke-on-Trent City Council, Muslim pupils should not attend swimming lessons in the month of Ramadan, because:
Schools with a significant number of Muslim pupils should try to avoid scheduling swimming lessons during Ramadan to remove unnecessary barriers to full participation.”
Nor does it end with restrictions to swimming lessons:
It also suggests re-scheduling sex education classes during the holy lunar month, as Muslim followers who have reached puberty are required to avoid sexual thoughts during this period.
But who is behind this ‘advice’ imposed on schools, delivered in the manner of a religious edict or a ‘fatwa’? Who else but the excitable people at the Muslim Council of Britain:
“The council said the document, produced by its Standing Advisory Council on Religious Education, was based on information from the Muslim Council of Great Britain”
Time was when traditional pious Muslims ‘not so very long ago’ would observe the Ramadan fast by going about their normal worldly business without extracting special privileges, importuning for concessions or paying heed to “information from the Muslim Council of Great Britain” to relieve the burden of the fast.
And if school children cannot cope with lessons because they cannot observe the fast, they should not be fasting at all. It is as simple as that.
But if Muslim pupils must observe the fast, they should be taken out of classes which they do not wish to participate in. Rearranging the entire school day for everyone else, simply to satisfy the needs of a few pupils who are Muslim and who observe Ramadan, is an exaggerated over-reaction and completely unorthodox.
12 Comments
School is about preparing children for work. In this case it is preparing them for when they will be excused telephony duties in call centres, for instance, because their throats are dry, or any other occupations where their self-inflicted incapacities force them to pass off work onto others.
School is not just about preparing children for work. Education is not simply instruction. Children are not, in Gradgrindian terms, little pots to fill with only those facts that will best fit them for the life of work.
Nor is the wanted inclusivity in children’s educational life about pandering to the every whim, opinion or view (however deeply held) of any group when it can be shown that by so doing children are effectively excluded from a learning experience (and yes, there *are* learning experiences to be had in even swimming – and these are not just about learning to swim).
At the beginning of my career I worked in a school with a majority of its children on roll from Muslim families. The extent to which the Local Education Authority and head teacher bowed to the pressures from the local (very illiberal) mosques was such that the children in my charge were *excluded* from participation in learning covering a quite wide and important swathe of the curriculum (music, dance in PE, aspects of science deemed irreligious or immodest). Thus these children were effectively ill-prepared for a life of work, let alone any of the other aspects of life for which their education has purpose.
More selective quoting from Spittoon
and here is the BBC clarification story
Finally Abu Faris, on Music at schools, this is what the MCB said:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/london/hi/people_and_places/religion_and_ethics/newsid_8780000/8780567.stm
Here is Tabloid Watch about the whole affair:
http://tabloid-watch.blogspot.com/2010/07/council-doesnt-force-schools-to-do.html
Rambo
You should note that the statement by the MCB you’ve linked says this:
“The council guide suggests re-scheduling sex education classes during the holy lunar month, as Muslims who have reached puberty are required to avoid sexual thoughts during this period.”
In other words, it still admits (or rather, cannot deny) that it gave advice to Stoke-on-Trent to re-schedule exams for the benefit of fasting students. And this does not change the underlying point made in my article.
Also this MCB statement makes no mention about advice on taking pupils out of swimming lessons in their last report to Stoke. But I note that it stays silent on whether the their “earlier guidance document, Towards Greater Understanding (2007)” contained the “advice” for taking Muslim children of swimming lessons in Ramadan so that they do not “do not swallow water”. Nothing is said, but I doubt Stoke Council would make up such a stricture without external advice.
Rambo
I was not commenting on the MCB’s position on music in schools. I was commenting on the exclusion of children from participation in a subject of their education in a particular school as a result of undue and illiberal pressure from the leaders of particular local mosques – and the shameful and absurd bowing to that pressure from a particular Local Education Authority and a particular school’s Senior Management Team.
Do learn to read. It will stand you in good stead when you grow up.
Since when did the BBC news service become a tabloid?
Faisal
“Tabloid” is another catch-all term of approbation like “neo-con” and “Zionist”. It may be applied to any item that the writer strongly dislikes.
For example:
“What can you expect from the tabloid journalists of X, who work for neo-con Zionists who control the media.”
Oh I see. The *reportage* is “tabloid” whether it’s by a real tabloid or the BBC or whoever. Which poorly-educated eejit came up with that?
I should imagine it is the same people who also believe anything that the MCB pump out. The same people who believe that any critique of Islamism is automatically “Islamophobia”.
OT, but have you noticed Bungles is now promoting Islam online fatawas on his “Idiot’s Corner” blog. Apparently the one forbidding the keeping of dogs as domestic pets is “not that loony”.
Good to see Bungles promoting his long-term relationship with the MB website on his own corner of the interweb.
“Schools with a significant number of Muslim pupils should try to avoid
scheduling swimming lessons during Ramadan to remove unnecessary
barriers to full participation.”
Why not learn from the Hinduised peasants of Beggardesh? Most of them
water babies spend Ramadan under water because of the floods that
afflict that benighted “country”. They could give advice on how to
fast and swim and the same time.
On a thread on Pickled Politics, marwan posting as “john” is complaining about being victimised by Jews and how the Spittoon has made life harder for Muslims!
http://www.pickledpolitics.com/archives/9308#comment-213505
And lo and behold, here he is, posting racist comments against Bangladeshi Muslims. Previously it was only the Spittoon who were “munafiqs and murtad kafirs” – now it’s any Bangladeshi!
No wonder Islamism in the UK is in such a poor state. It’s full of racist and sectarian nutters who can barely stand to be in the same room together.
Yes, dawood – followed up by the depressingly common sight of Hundal leaping to the defence of this insane racist bag of excrement:
http://www.pickledpolitics.com/archives/9308#comment-213547