Ephemerid, it will take a while for this country to arrive at being secular. We have not achieved true separation of church and state yet, and our faith schools exist through long tradition, just as France has a secular state because of their long traditions. Such things take time, and in the meanwhile we are a diverse nation of people of many faiths and cultures. We have cultivated Saudi Arabia as a special friend, and in fact while we didn't create its people we did create it as a state. Wahabism is just one strand of Islam and a small one; in 50 years of living alongside Muslims here and abrooad, sharing education and eating meals with them, and watching my kids grow up with theirs, I never encountered it firsthand and only know of it in a social context because a friends daughter married a Wahabi man and she had concerns. He is very strict, their life together very rigid, and my friend tries to mitigate this through love and looking after their children often. Her daughter was of course required to converted, she covers up, and so do her girl children. And my friend worries about them. They are not 'harboured' by the muslim community, which does not exist that way. In spite of what people think it isn't a coherent whole any more that Christianity is. Wahabis live and worship largely separate from other muslims and in this city have their own places of worship, just like fundamentalist Christians in the US do.
A huge amount of Muslim organisations came out in sympathy with France over the Charlie Hebdo killings, I do not remember exactly how many but it comprised nearly all of them outside of Wahabism, and I remember watching a talk show of some kind where they were accused of not coming out and condemning the killings, and the moderate Moslim man who was part of the panel said words to the effect of 'what can we do, we collect this huge list, in good faith, to show our condemnation which is real, and prepare a written statement of condemnation of this terrible event and a messagebofbsympathy for France and the victims and their families, and even then we are disbelieved.'
You cannot outlaw faith or push it out of sight easily, the communist states tried that, it just comes back. Education is having an effect, but it will take a long time. Our Muslim communities, which are really overlapping groups of very different people who intersect with other communities, and only exist separately for historic and external reasons, have been driven closer by decades of anti-Islamic rhetoric, it is at fever pitch now and last night will not have helped. They are as scared by Wahabism as they are by the hatred they face on a daily basis. What is needed is to stop the rhetoric and build real friendships, start offering housing among them to people of other faiths and be welcoming when they move next door. Really.
Our councils have had as much to do with creating segregation as anything, it has long been policy to allocate school places poorly, resulting in schools that swing one way or another, so here we have the teriible situation where there are schools that have only token numbers of the three main groupings of black, white and Asian.
I lived for a while in Handsworth, famous for riots, but actually a great place to live, everything a multicultural area could and should be. This was fantastic till kids got to transition age. They nominally got a choice of schools, but the reality was that very few got first choice, the Asian kids, whatever religion they were nearly all went to the comp nearby, the white kids went to comps or 'good' schoolsin other areas. A few of the wealthier Indian kids also managed with lashings of tuition to get past the barriers and into the good schools. The black kids went to school in Lozells, which is where the infamous driveby shootings took place, and a more desolate school you'd find hard to match.nIn many ways it is a more closed area than any Asian area, it's a no go zone, where the police go in to stop and search, and where unemployment and deprivation are rife. We moved, for personal reasons,just a year before having to go through that choice, to the other side of the cuty, our local primary school had had only a handful of white kids, the rest were nearly all Sikh and Moslem mostly the former, and a smattering of West Indian and Somali kids. We were really dismayed when my sons' best friend, Scots as it happens, got chosen to be the sole token white boy in the Lozells school, the family eventually moved, their appeal was turned down by the council who regarded it as racist, (not lefties, but tory and libdem).Oddly the head of the school agreed with the parents. It would not have been the equivalent of being a sole immigrant child in a white area, it was a place where few survive intact anyway. Made and sustained by very poor thinking. The legal position was terrible, there was no case. On the other side of the city I had already been faced with similar, in an area with 22 primary schools it took five months to find a place for a ten year old. The lovely head of the closest, an all Moslem school, very sweet kids, and well run, had kindly suggested that I needed to look elsewhere for my childs sake, he was statemented and they did not have teaching assistants who could accomodate his needs; the only local preschool provision was in Asian self help playgroups, so their SEN was loaded towards mother tongue solutions, all the kids spoke English but reverted to their home language when explaining complex things. (The school itself had busy roads on three sides and virtually no playground.) The next closest was a Catholic school, and not even the weight of the education department could crack that one open, even though they had places in the right year group. Anglican schools close by were similar, and the hotly sought after schools were highly academic, didn't want a SEN child and would have had to be legally forced to take an extra child over the statutory class size. By this time, into February, a place finally revealed itself, it was three bus journeys away, and there was a 96% Moslem intake; still we took it with gratidude, because it could offer the SEN we needed. When the forms came round for a secondary school place we had the same problem! Funnily enough all of these schools were good, the ones that were failing were doing so because of the bad policies, not bad people or bad kids. And that really is what the Trojan horse issues came out of, and how a handful of stupid white men managed to engineer division here that had not really been an issue before. It never was, even the famous riots of years before came out of the same tainted bag. You vilify and segregate, educationally and economically deprive a single identifiable group, label them as a problem, then at some point that oppression will out. Its invitable. Today we see the result of decades of oppression by media, and tbh it is a miracle that the Muslim communities have been so restrained and tolerant. It might not look like it when we are in the middle of recovering from the shock of a terrorist event, but it is true, how do you think good hearted people feel when they are labelled by their fellow citizens and countrymen as terrorists? And France, which has suffered much harsher attacks in recent years, also has problems it needs to address. The segregation is much more real there.
In a country like ours do you think we could impose secularism? Our far right flag waving nut jobs would be screaming that they were being oppressed because of muslims, and that they were entitled to be religious because this is their Christian country, and they are now an oppressed minority, even though they aren't anywhere near a minority and have never set foot inside a church to worship. It wouldn't stop any of this, it would drive Wahabis further out of sight, their women would be rarely seen, and it would fuel those who would like to cleanse the country of foreigners. And our muslims, who like us have their good and their bad in an ordinary secular social way, who haven't contributed or wished for any of this, will continue to have children who have never known an existence when they havent been condemned on a near daily existence by the media, to an ever greater degree, by stupid politicians and ignorant haters.
You can't solve this through imposed secularism, it is a stance that people have to choose to adopt, brought about by education, equality, honesty and respect. The French paid a very bitter price for their liberte, egalite, fraternite, and their secularism, it took a long time to settle down, and only did so after the ripples of destruction had spread far enough to lose their power. Their revolution gave us a lot of good things to emulate, but in itself is not a good lesson, it bears more resemblance to yesterdays events.
To respond to all of this is going to take wisdom, and concessions all round, but most of all it will need those things I mentioned. I don't think there will be any short cuts, because the time for them was twenty or more years ago as every anti war campaigner then knew.
Edited to wish you all as much solidarity and love as possible, last night was horrific, and utterly wrong. If you have colleagues, friends, or neighbours who are Moslem please find some unity with them, even if it is only with a smile, because there will be a lot of the other stuff happening, snd if ever we needed s sense of togetherness it is now. And bless you, YahYah, for reminding us that suffering comes in many forms.
