N Islamic school in Sussex has been shut down, and another, in London, has attracted criticism for failing to remove religious hate literature from its library.

The Jameah Islameah school, which was raided by police on September 1 last year during a terror alert, was closed after education officials said it was no longer good enough to operate.
The Department for Education and Skills removed the independent Jameah Islameah school in East Sussex from the Register of Independent Schools. This means it is illegal for the school to continue operating.

The closure came after the school failed to meet an action plan aimed at improving its performance.

The school, near Crowborough, was searched in September 2006 at the same time as 14 people were arrested in a series of raids in London.

Although no-one at the school was held, concerns were raised about it at the time, and a series of Ofsted inspections followed. The school, which is not currently operating because of a lack of pupils, was required to satisfy an action plan, but this had not been met, the Department for Education and Skills said.

A spokesman added: “The department has now concluded that, while some progress had been made, the school nevertheless continues to fail to meet the standards which all independent schools must meet under the Education Act 2002.”

This relates to the quality of education provided; the welfare, health and safety of pupils, and the standard of the premises and accommodation.

chools Minister Jim Knight said: “It is important that parents and the wider public are assured that all schools – whether in the maintained or independent sector – provide their pupils with a suitable education, and that we will take strong action against those that are failing. In the past three years more than 45 independent schools have shut down as a consequence of this government’s tough approach.

“However, the government remains keen to support the delivery of high quality education by schools in the independent sector, and the recent Education and Inspections Act 2006 will make it easier for independent schools to enter the state sector to improve standards.
“The government has funded the Association of Muslim Schools to advise independent Muslim schools interested in joining the state sector,”he said

The founder of the school claimed in an interview in the Guardian that he was a victim of demonisation of the Muslim community in the media.

Bilal Patel told the Guardian that unsubstantiated claims that Jameah Islameah had links with notorious extremists such as Abu Hamza so debilitated the institution that it struggled to attract staff and pupils.

There were reports the school had been used as an al-Qaeda camp because Abu Hamza and others linked to him rented space within the grounds in 1996. Mr Patel said he sought police advice before allowing Hamza in and was told there no reason to bar him. As suspicions were aroused, Hamza associates were asked to leave.

Mr Patel said: “We always cooperated with the authorities. We are in this position because our school was Islamic. We suffered unfair treatment from the media. We never had anything to do with terrorists.”

Sir Iqbal Sacranie, former Secretary General of the Muslim Council of Britain, said: “The school was forced to endure the most terrible onslaught from the media. Who would send their children there in the face of such an onslaught?”

Shortly before the school’s closure the King Fahad Academy in west London, funded by the Saudi royal family, found itself the focus of media attention because it had failed to remove text books which branded other faiths as “worthless”.

The head of the academy, Dr Sumaya Aluyusuf, said pupils had never been taught from the chapters in question but that they would be removed “in the public interest”.

An ex-teacher at the academy has claimed that pupils were taught from books which describe Jews as “repugnant” and Christians as “pigs”, but the head insisted pupils were never taught religious hatred or intolerance. She said the academy promoted “inter-culturalism and inter-faith awareness”.

She admitted that the textbooks – translated for BBC Two’s Newsnight programme by two independent scholars – were kept at the school, but insisted that the translations were “taken out of context” and had “lost some of their meaning”.

She said the controversy had arisen from the misinterpretation of the material which was based on the Koran.

“The school is currently moving towards an international curriculum and new books are being developed for that curriculum,” she said, adding that pupils and parents had suffered discrimination and intimidation as a result of the controversy.

One local shop had put up a sign saying pupils from the school were not welcome and a passer-by had shouted abuse at a parent waiting outside the school gate.

“The local MP called me and said he was very concerned about the safety of the children and asked if we would like him to send extra police around the area.”

Allegations about the Arabic books emerged when a former teacher accused the King Fahad Academy of institutional racism.

The British Muslim teacher began a case for unfair dismissal, complaining that he was made to suffer for whistle-blowing allegations of cheating at exams, and suffered discrimination as a non-Saudi.

The school denies the allegations and maintains that the teacher was rightly dismissed for misconduct.

About 600 children, aged five to 18, attend the King Fahad Academy private school which receives more than £4-million from the Saudi royal family each year.

The controversy centres on the use of textbooks produced by the Saudi Ministry of Education. A textbook dated 2005/2006 allegedly asks the reader to “give examples of worthless religions … such as Judaism, Christianity, idol worship and others”.

The book also asks the reader to “explain that those who die without adhering to Islam will go to hellfire”.

In another textbook for 12 and 13 year olds, dated 2004/2005, the author says that a Koranic verse, which talks of turning people into monkeys and pigs, is about Jews and Christians.
The author quotes an early Islamic scholar as saying: “The monkeys are the Jews. And the pigs, they are the Christian infidels at Jesus’s table.”

This is not the first time that the academy has found itself in the line of fire. In May, 2004, the Telegraph carried a report that the Saudi government “is facing complaints from parents that it is teaching British children ‘fundamentalist’ Islam while giving girls an inferior education.”

The Telegraph revealed that the academy, named after the current Saudi ruler, devotes up to 50 per cent of lessons to religious education and teaches almost all classes in Arabic, with boys and girls following different curricula.

Former teachers and parents have come forward to criticise the academy’s religious teachings for instilling “hostility to the outsider”. They also claim that there is discrimination against female pupils.

The school was opened in 1985 for the offspring of Saudi diplomats in London. Since then, many children of British Muslims have joined the school. In 2002, only 37 per cent of the 738 pupils were of Saudi origin.

Originally the British and the Saudi curricula were taught side by side. Five years ago, however, the Saudi Arabian government ordered the school to phase out British lessons and to teach Saudi-style classes.

The school is segregated and younger boys and girls are now taught different courses, to comply with Saudi education policy, which states that a girl’s education should “enable her to be a successful housewife, an exemplary wife and a good mother” or prepare her for work which is “suitable to her disposition as a woman”.

Girls at the academy barely do any physical education and the only type of technology they will learn is “home technology”.

‘The books they used to teach girls kept going on about idolatry and sin and how to avoid it. It was about the fires of hell, torture in the grave and how to make sure that your ways are not those of the infidel’

Dr Mai Yamani, a research fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, had two daughters at the school, but removed them when she became uncomfortable about the education they were receiving. “I moved my eldest daughter at the age of seven. Her new school said that, in their opinion, she had been ‘totally untaught’ to that point. They had to put her in a class with much younger children, which was terrible for her.

“The books used to teach girls kept going on about idolatry and sin and how to avoid it. It was about the fires of hell, torture in the grave and how to make sure that your ways are not those of the infidel.

“The school is trying to make sure that the Saudis who go there abide by the system of state control in Saudi Arabia. The method is ‘loyalty to the system and hostility to the outsider’. Three years ago I interviewed some of the pupils for a book and some of them were talking as if they didn’t live in London at all.”

Dr Yamani, the daughter of the former Saudi oil minister Sheikh Yamani, believes that girls at the school are given an inferior education to that provided to boys and that they are taught to “know their place”.

She added: “They consider that the mind of a girl is less capable of absorbing education.” Another parent who has two teenage girls at the school is unhappy with the direction the academy is taking.

“It used to be a wonderful school that taught the two traditions side by side. Now only one lesson in six is taken in English. The children would not have the standard to even read the paper by the time they reach A-level,” he said.

“It has arrived at a situation where the school seems to be saying: ‘This is the only correct version of Islam’. It’s such a fundamentalist approach.”

A senior teacher at the school, who asked not to be named, admitted that girls did not receive the full curriculum. “Girls will not have as much PE and they will be taught home technology, rather than any other type of technology. The Saudi-type teaching is more didactic, with a lot of rote learning and factual stuff. There is not much in the way of understanding and applied learning. At 18, pupils will probably be at the equivalent of GCSE level.” He said that it was “very definitely true” that Saudi education would not prepare pupils for life in Britain.

When asked if the school provided an inferior education to girls, he said: “It provides an inferior education to boys and girls.” Dr Ali Alghamdi, the then principal of the King Fahad Academy, defended the phasing out of the British curriculum. He claimed that because the school taught mostly Saudi children, the curriculum was appropriate.

Dr Nasim Butt, a former teacher at the academy and an Ofsted inspector, said that the school’s curriculum was no longer appropriate for British children. “As a teacher and an inspector of faith schools, I am interested in personal development and producing individuals who reflect deeply, self-evaluate and make a contribution to society.

“A Saudi education is not going to create individuals who make that kind of contribution in a free society.”

Pupils in Saudi Arabia are obliged to spend half of the school timetable studying a rigid interpretation of Islam. A recent review of the curriculum by the Saudi government concluded that almost a fifth of lesson plans contained tracts preaching anti-Western and anti-Semitic views. The Saudi education department is now considering a redraft of the whole curriculum, the Telegraph said.

But in a report in June, 2006, the Telegraph revealed that Saudi Arabia had continued “to foster religious hatred in its schools, despite its repeated assurances since the September 11 attacks that it would rewrite textbooks that refer to Jews as “apes” and Christians as “swine”.

The charges come after Freedom House, a non-partisan American research group which monitors civil rights worldwide, examined textbooks that it smuggled out of Saudi Arabia. The group found that despite promises of change from leading Saudi officials, including Saud al-Faisal, the foreign minister, and Turki al-Faisal, the ambassador to America, schoolbooks in the kingdom still promote hatred of those who do not practise its strict form of Wahhabi Islam.

The report also alleged that some of the textbooks were used in official Saudi schools around the world, including the King Fahd Academy in London.

“Even if only a small percentage of the people who are exposed to this take it to heart and act on it, that’s still a lot of people,” said Nina Shea, Freedom House’s director, after the release of the 39-page report, Saudi Arabia’s Curriculum of Intolerance.

The report cites extracts from textbooks used in religious education classes for children aged between five and 16. It quotes the following exercise for the youngest children: “Fill in the blanks with the appropriate words (Islam, hellfire): Every religion other than …….. is false. Whoever dies outside of Islam enters ……..”

It claims that older students are taught: “It is part of God’s wisdom that the struggle between the Muslim and the Jews should continue until the hour (of judgment).”

The report was an embarrassment for the Saudi government, which had made great efforts to restore its image since being painted as a bastion of extremism after September 11. When it emerged that 15 of the 19 hijackers that day were Saudi, many blamed the kingdom’s education system for breeding hatred.

Only days before the report was released, the Saudi education minister gave a joint press conference with the American secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, in which he boasted of Saudi school reform.

“The education reforms in Saudi Arabia go beyond textbook rewriting,” he said. “They go into teacher training [and] the messages that are given to children in the formative years… The whole system of education is being transformed from top to bottom.”

When asked about offensive language in textbooks, he said: “This is taken out.” But, according to Miss Shea, this is not true. “Teaching methods that ask kindergarten children to give examples of ‘false religions’, like Judaism and Christianity, add up to an ideology that runs throughout,” she said. “It is not hate speech here and there. It adds up to an argument, an ideology of us versus them.”

In the Saudi capital, Riyadh, the accusations are being investigated. “We do think some things need to be changed,” Abdullah al-Obeid, the Saudi education minister, admitted. “There is some misunderstanding of some of the texts.”

But according to Tanya Hsu, a political analyst in Riyadh with close ties to the education ministry, there is anger behind the scenes at an alleged propaganda campaign designed to make the government look bad.

“The charges are absolutely not true,” she said. “We’re really just looking at a few sentences and a few words. I don’t know of any country in the world that doesn’t have a few mischosen words in textbooks.”

But Turki al-Faisal insists that change is happening. “We admit we have people in our midst who are bigots, who are intolerant and who see the world through a prism of ‘us and them’,” he wrote in a recent newspaper article.

“Are we working hard to change mindsets that encourage prejudice and intolerance? Yes, absolutely.”