This week a high court judge upheld the ban issued by the Michaela School, in London, on pupils praying on their school yard. The school was sued by a pupil asserting that the school’s rule banning Islamic prayers on the school yard was discriminatory.
Michaela is a phenomenon as is its founder and headteacher, Katharine Birbalsingh. The school’s outcomes are impressive, as is the head. Dubbed the country’s “strictest headteacher” – a title she embraces – Birbalsingh enthuses about that school with a distinct sense of love. In a challenging context she has worked wonders.
Ms. Birbalsingh is also committed to her small ‘c’ conservative values and her view that “aggressively promoting integration” means that the school has to be wholly secular. As such, when faced with a cohort of pupils praying during Ramadan in 2023, the school banned the activity, stating this was due to concerns that pupils were being segregated and even intimidated by the practice.
When it comes to the ruling, narrowly and legally, the court have it. What doesn’t seem right is the judgements that surround the court case – those that govern the school’s handling of the matter, namely the form of integration suffused with a lack of understanding that underpins the school’s policy.
Firstly there is the idea that integration comes through the restricting and reducing of religious difference. In actual fact, integration comes not from avoidance of difference but through a wholehearted embrace of it. The learning and celebration that follows is where difference becomes diversity.
Muslim teacher Nadeine Asbali challenged the idea that to get on we must suppress the differences between religions and cultures, and:
“the bleak and frankly insulting assumption that, in order for all of us to live harmoniously, we must become robots with no beliefs or ideas of our own, this also poses questions about what kind of school environment could so easily be destroyed by one group of students publicly expressing their religion for a mere few minutes a day?”
The notion that a school can lose all vestiges of religion is misguided, for this could only become a reality if the school were to lose all those within it who are religious. Instead, that rainbow of diversity should be encouraged.
The case has generated that most irksome of chatters that can burble around these matters, namely people who are not from a religious tradition telling those who are from it what they believe and how they are meant to worship and whether prayer times can be managed differently. In rows like this a lot of the rhetoric often involves non Muslims telling Muslims how to be Muslim.
For example, the response that what is being banned is not prayer, but just the practices connected, is the sort of hokum that could only really be said by someone who isn’t Muslim, but is ignorant. The idea that you are free to have a belief provided it is just held in your own thoughts and views but not to wear something or do something that publicly evinces may sit easy with a small strand of Western culture but is alien to huge swathes of the religious world.
Ironically Michaela school does have a creed that sounds a bit religious. Birbalsingh makes the case that to achieve excellence “our school must be a place where children of all races and religions buy into something they all share that is bigger than themselves: our country.” Even more ironically, in a school that says it has removed religion, they still sing “Jerusalem” and “God Save the King.”
Secondly, alongside the banning principle there is a real problem with the fact that it has been enforced.
It is worth noting that this started on the school yard, not as a school procedure. What is at stake here is a child who, inspired by Ramadan, had begun praying at break time and was then joined by others. The tipping point in Michaela came, not when pupils started praying but rather when other pupils seemed pressurized into also conforming to the religious practices of their more zealous peers. Understandably, that needed tackling, but is banning the practice the way to do this? Surely all the school has done is ended a situation where some pupils are putting religious pressure on others. In doing so it has failed to work with the zealots on why this is wrong and with the victims on how to respond. I suspect the school may not have removed religious pressure but rather just driven it underground and avoided tackling it. Instead the school has modeled its own form of religious intimidation, using its power to ban the practice. That’s a sorry message to send to young people – that the way to deal with difference is to forbid it.
Schools need policies. However, writing about diversity, Walter Brueggemann, contrasts the ways in which: “our knowledge and perception are either tilted towards “stories” that specify or towards “lists” that summarize and dismiss.”[1] His belief that every neighbour counts leads him to affirm the former, even in the face of the necessary summarizing required by policy formation. He advocates a policy making that is “flooded with stories about individual persons who have names” concluding:
“We may generalize only after we have individualized. And after we have individualized with specificity, we can again generalize for the sake of policy.”[2]
Let’s give an individual the last word, namely the pupil, whose response to the ruling was: “Even though I lost, I still feel that I did the right thing in seeking to challenge the ban, I tried my best and was true to myself and my religion.”
Huw Thomas
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[1] This distinction is drawn from John O’Banion’s “Reorienting Rhetoric”
[2] Walter Brueggemann “Real World Faith” pp17-18
Huw Thomas 