Like ghetto culture in the US, jihadism is cool, violent, rebellious and gives young people an identity. What can schools do to combat the lure?
One of the cries coming from heads at the recent NAHT conference was to make Religious Education (RE) compulsory. ‘If it’s laughable that we would withdraw our children from English or science, why is it ok to withdraw from RE?’ asked the head of a Trojan Horse school in Birmingham. Allowing Muslim children to be withdrawn from RE and exposure to other value systems and ideas makes them more vulnerable to grooming and radicalisation, she added.
It’s not helpful that moral, social and spiritual education is increasingly bundled under RE, rather than citizenship – RE is a term likely to frighten the more devout Muslim parents. Making it compulsory could speed up the exodus from state schools into Islamic ‘free’ schools and do the opposite of what was intended.
ISIS supporters: More than just weak-minded followers?
Furthermore, RE itself doesn’t seem to have stopped the propagation of ‘un- British’ values among some sections of Muslim youth, and of overt support for ISIS or other extreme forms of Jihadist Islam among its ‘outliers’. It’s not surprising. Simple teaching and exposure to other value systems in school is contending with family and temple ideologies. Those who monitor these things have been surprised, for example, at the level of support among Salafi temples – the majority and ‘moderate’ doctrinal allegiance of UK Muslim temples – for the Pakistani assassin who murdered an elected minister for his support of the reform of the country’s draconian Blasphemy Law.