Headscarf allowed at Britain's 1st state-funded Islamic school

10/25/2004 9:50:00 AM GMT

Students at Britain's first state-funded Islamic school, Islamiya, from all nationalities, are at the vanguard of a trend toward a distinctly European Muslim culture.

Yusuf Islam, the former pop star, established Islamiya in 1982 with the contribution of several friends, they had to take the challenge of battling anti-Muslim stereotypes.

"The Thatcher government feared we would teach a radical Islam and how to make a Molotov cocktail," headmaster Abdullah Trevathan recalled.

"We wanted our children to be extraordinary in the true sense. We wanted to educate them ourselves," said Trevathan.

In 1995, after a 13-year campaign, the Islamiya School won the breakthrough right to public funding that the British government has long awarded to Protestant and Catholic schools.

Today Islamiya includes students from 23 different ethnic communities.

"We are Irish-Moroccan, Egyptian-English and a lot of Somalian and Pakistani people. Everybody learns from each other," the school head said.

"We are not here to preserve a culture but to create a European-British-Muslim culture," he added.

"We believe that a child from a minority who has the same culture reflected at school and at home becomes a confident person who has self-esteem. As the teenagers grow up, they don't have an identity crisis and don't tend to turn to fundamentalism," Trevathan said.

Islamiya treats religion in a different way, Trevathan said, adding that students are given the chance to question, doubt and analyze in a Cartesian manner instead of blindly following and implementing Islamic rules.

"Being affected by why happens at the opposite end of the world is not the daily stuff of a primary school in London, but there it is," the school director sighed.

Islamiya gives religion and Arabic classes, together with following the national state-directed curriculum.

Starting the age of seven, children are instructed how to pray at the school mosque.

Also girls are given the choice of wearing the Hijab, the Islamic headscarf.

"After 9/11, I realized that the whole community was traumatized pretty seriously. Like in a divorce, the children blamed themselves. They were wondering if their parents were responsible, if they were responsible themselves," the headmaster said.

"Today I still feel anger against these people who have nothing to do with us," he said.