When I came back to Glasgow in the early 1980's there seemed to be one heartfelt cry coming from virtually all the people that I met in the mosques. "We're losing our children. They go to school, and by the time they have finished their education they want nothing to do with us or their Islam. What can we do?" And all too soon it was clear that they could do nothing. But there again, as far as I could see I wasn't really qualified to do much about it myself. Nonetheless, having been through the system I did know how it works, so I thought that I would see if there was anything I could do. At the same time, friends in London in a desperate bid to save their children from what they saw as the iniquities of the state education system were paying a small fortune to send their children to the Islamia primary school set up by Yusuf Islam. Now the unpleasant craziness of what I discovered was happening in that school in the name of Islam (not just Yusuf) is another whole story to itself. Enough to say that with Yusuf's name being able to draw huge amounts of publicity it managed to draw all attention away from the situation of the vast majority of muslim children forced to use the state school system. With all eyes fixed on the few dozen kids being 'educated' at Islamia, politicians found an excuse to shelve every other initiative designed to help the 10.000 muslim children in Brent schools alone, let alone the hundreds of thousands around the rest of the country. And in two years one of my friends kids was due to finish her time at Islamia and be thrown back into the state system to fend for herself. So I promised her that I would try to do something, for her and all the others like her. I didn't know what or how, but I would try. Well, nearly twenty-five years of beating my head against a brick wall and I haven't managed to change anything yet, and she's got children of her own now. But if you're reading this Yasmine - I'm still trying.

Now as far as I could see, as an unqualified non-teacher non-parent, just about the only access I could get to the system would be to provide some form of educational material that could be used in schools by those who had to teach muslim children (as well as in homes and mosques by muslim parents). But books didn't seem to be the answer, as that would mean trying to involve a publisher, and there were plenty of books on the shelves already and no-one was reading them, and it seemed more important to come up with something that could be passed directly to the kids without the need for too much teacher/parent effort or involvement. So my first idea was to make a set of educational videos specifically for muslim children, and that was the Muslim Video Project (the plans for which may end up on this website at some point if I ever copy them in). At that time, video was just about the only technology which might make it possible for one person to get something out to the masses fairly directly. Unfortunately, the equipment needed to make anything of an appropriate standard would cost a considerable amount of money (of which I had none). Actually, the amount required to buy what was needed and to keep me alive while I did the work seemed like a trifling amount in terms of petro-dollars, or even a small company's advertising budget, and so it was that I made my first mistake. I should have remembered the words of a friend as we sat in the waiting chamber for a minister in Abu-Dhabi. A man from Medecins Sans Frontier (trying to get money for measles vaccinations) had just gone out after having been told to come back again on a certain day the next week. He had been there for months trying to get through that door, and as my friend said "He thinks because what he wants is such a small amount and for such a good cause that he just has to wait and in the end he will get his money. But he can wait forever and he will still get nothing." I should have remembered.

In the end it was my interfaith work that gained me access to people in education, as we first met socially at interfaith exhibitions for local schools, where I was providing displays about Islam (photocopies, paper and glue are much cheaper than video), and they realised that I could be useful to them. So they got me in to advise on this and that, and I got passed from one to another, and I gave talks in schools and at in-service days for teachers, and led a course at the University, and got picked up by the BBC and started to be heard regularly on radio, and before too long I was the in-demand muslim 'expert'. Not that the local muslims were any more inclined to pay any attention to what I had to say - well, they didn't mind me saying it as long as it wasn't going to cost them any effort or money. But then the Conservative government decided to break up Strathclyde Regional Council (SRC), and things changed, and an opportunity arose. Because, as it is with politics, there are always a few sums of money sloshing around somewhere not really allocated to anything, just in case of emergencies, and as they couldn't take it with them they thought that they might use it on one or two 'grand ideas'. Now I like to think that their 'Religious Instruction' initiative was my idea, as I had been talking about it for years, but I've heard Hindus and Sikhs who were certain that it was their idea in the first place also, so perhaps it was just an idea of its time (I don't believe that - it was me). 

For years I had been discussing issues concerning the problems faced by muslim children in their schools with senior educationists in various branches of the Council, and once they realised that they had a sympathetic ear to talk to and were not going to be sued for racism or the like, they could express their complete incomprehension at to how what went on in the madrassahs was thought to bear any relationship to education. The mindless rote-learning with no apparent purpose they were aware of, but even amongst those I knew well I had to be extremely careful with regard to my knowledge of the casual brutality with which that 'education' was imposed. Not being around the madrassahs too much, I rarely saw anyone beaten, but I knew of kids who described it, and the head of the biggest weekend school in Glasgow seemed much too happy to flick his cane about for my liking (a cane that seemed to be always in his hand). Still, it could have been worse - at one of the madrassahs the head teacher had a chair leg hanging on his wall by the strap at the 'handle' end (a handle bound with electrical tape - presumably so that it didn't give his delicate fingers blisters or splinters while being used on the children). One of the things that had greatly disturbed me at Islamia was seeing the head teacher slap a five-year old girl hard around the face for talking to her friend while walking between classes. Actually I often wished that I had been privy to something a little more brutal on my visits to some of these places, so that I could have called the police and acted as a witness in assault cases rather than just passing on hearsay.

But quite apart from what went on in the madrassahs in the name of Islamic education, the educationists were aware of the social and identity problems caused by this double life that the children had to lead and try to make sense of, and with the best intentions would have liked to do something to improve their situation. So we came up with a plan. The idea was that they would contact all the main 'ethnic' religious communities. I did push for the inclusion of the various Christian churches (who in fact now share many of the problems faced by muslims, such as the preservation of their community identity and faith heritage as a minority in the population)  but that was a step too far for the SRC. In the end, I think it was a mistake to leave them out, as they would have balanced the political weight of the muslims in the endgame. But 'foreign' faiths it had to be, and the plan was to establish models to show the possibility of providing religious 'instruction' (as opposed to the religious 'education' the kids received in school - disagreement over terminology was just one of the problems we needed to face). From this point on, although the plans included Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Bahai, and Chinese faith groups, I will deal with things in terms of the Muslims to keep it simple.

The SRC proposed that two schools with a preponderance of muslim children (one north and one south Glasgow) would be kept open after normal school hours, at which time muslim children could regroup (on a voluntary basis) and faith educators from the community could come in and teach the children in their normal educational surroundings. As part of the package, they also agreed to give those community teachers free training in modern teaching methods and fund and assist in the provision of educational material for use in these new 'religious instruction' classes. For their part, the muslims had to come up with teachers acceptable to the community (it being assumed that they would be happy to accept the free training) and an outline of what they would be teaching in  enough detail to shape educational material around it. Of course, the difficulty for the community in this situation was that the SRC had sent this invitation to all the individual mosques, Sunni and Shi'a, so the Central Mosque was not in a position to negotiate on behalf of them all (as they would have liked), and so the community as a whole had to agree on acceptable teachers and agree on what needed to be taught. Which is how the Glasgow Islamic Education Council (IEC) came into being.

Now politics anywhere has a tendency to attract some pretty unpleasant people power hungry people, and mosque politics are much the same (though set against the backdrop of the devotional purpose of the mosques it always somehow seems uglier), so I don't think those of us who had hopes of a successful outcome ever believed it was going to be an easy ride, especially as it is so much easier to disrupt progress than facilitate it. It seemed that the first tactic was to make progress so slow that the SRC was disbanded before the goal could be achieved, but persistent and time consuming work from a few of us managed to push things along, albeit at a snail's pace compared to the other faith communities (and to the hair-tearing despair of those involved at the SRC). For some of us this just meant the loss of a good deal of time and effort, but for the very supportive Secretary of the Central Mosque, his stance unfortunately ensured that he was abruptly fired. Meanwhile, as the IEC deliberations dragged into a second year, the balance of the IEC was subtly shifted as representatives of other muslim 'organisations' with some 'interest in education' were brought in to make the politics of the situation even more tricky.

But the other faith communities were ready to go, so the SRC carried on despite the muslim delays and held preliminary meetings for community teachers and other interested parties to outline what would be involved in the teacher training they would be offering, giving an insight into modern teaching methods and showing what it was actually like in modern classrooms. Four separate meetings a week apart ran from six to eight p.m., with all the SRC trainers volunteering their time. And here again, from the very first meeting the pattern was set with the muslims really standing out from the crowd. As might be imagined, with so many different faith groups represented, and all full of hope that they might achieve something positive for their children's education, the crowd mingling before the proceedings started had that heady atmosphere that the best interfaith gatherings can sometimes summon up. Unfortunately, apart from myself and one or two representatives from the local mosque the muslims were largely notable by their absence. But the meetings went ahead on time without them anyway - which was disappointing enough - and the SRC educators did their thing, with their OHP's and sample handouts and notes they had pre-prepared. Until about 7.50, ten minutes before the end, when a group of perhaps eight muslim women arrived, teachers from the Central Mosque weekend school, dressed in full glitter as though for a wedding, and laughing and joking amongst themselves. Having missed the first hour and fifty minutes, they then proceeded to disrupt the last ten minutes as they tried to find a block of vacant seats, and just managed to get themselves comfortable as the meeting was drawn to a close. This was not an accident - it happened each week - and I am still at a loss as to exactly what message they thought they were communicating, or even if they had any interest in communicating to the others there at all, but I do know that most people saw their behaviour as arrogant and insulting, and I would have to say that I agree.

Anyway, by this stage of the game there was little that could keep the IEC from having to deal with deciding on some sort of curriculum, and as I was the only one involved who seemed to be in a position to cope with it they agreed to make me 'curriculum co-ordinator' responsible for getting something together that would be acceptable to all the parties involved. They then had to decide who were the people in each individual organisation that I would have to refer to, and rather suspiciously there was suddenly a small huddle formed at the head of the table which started speaking in Urdu (the meetings had always been in English), and when it was finished the chairman just said 'get the list of your curriculum committee from the office tomorrow'. So next day I went into the Central Mosque and there was the IEC secretary with his list of names of the people that I needed to get to agree to some form of curriculum, and as he handed it over he laughingly said 'You'll never do it. These people don't even speak to each other.' But despite my anger at the obvious nature of their blocking tactics, I just took it as another challenge, and after six months of going round and round from mosque to mosque (so that they never had to sit in one room and agree with each other) I ended up with the curriculum that you see here on this site, all signed and sealed, done and dusted (I even have all their signatures on paper formally accepting the result) with just a week to go before my deadline was up - the last IEC meeting before the SRC required all such issues to be resolved if they were to be able to get things up and running before they were disbanded.

There were still a couple of gaps - the 'school context' strand I could work out with non-muslim teachers, the 'mother tongue and culture' strand could draw on cultural groups that were not necessarily nominally muslim, and the 'arabic language' strand was still in abeyance as the arabs of the Muslim House who had taken responsibility for this aspect of the curriculum had not managed to come up even the most basic of language learning structure (this I could perhaps have anticipated as their weekend arabic language school had the unbelievable distinction of being able to take children who spoke arabic with their parents at home, and in a few short years of teaching manage to get them to be able to speak less arabic than when they started - no joke!). But despite these gaps I was really pleased with the result, and flushed with my success in the week before the IEC meeting I showed the curriculum to senior educationists at SRC, who were sufficiently impressed to immediately allocate £10,000 for me to turn it into classroom education material once it had its formal approval at the next IEC meeting. To give myself that extra bit of reassurance that what I had come up with was acceptable (as well as giving the curriculum itself a bit more Islamic credibility) I then drove down to England to show it to Khurram Murad at the Islamic Foundation in Leicester and Shaikh Abdul Mabud at the Islamic Academy in Cambridge (both of whom gave it their blessing).

Unfortunately, I should have known better than to think that would be enough to circumvent mosque politics. When I turned up for the next Council meeting with a stack of copies of my precious new curriculum (printed at my own expense, of course), surprise, surprise, the mosque was dark and empty. 'Oh, the meeting was cancelled - did nobody tell you?' said the secretary when I phoned next day. Of course, they hadn't told me - and if it comes to that, nobody ever told me of any IEC meeting ever again. Not that there were many, as within a fortnight the Central Mosque had managed to sabotage nearly three years of work by arranging a meeting with the SRC education people at which only those few members of the IEC who were beholden to them were invited, and in the name of the entire IEC and the muslim community had withdrawn from the SRC Religious Instruction Initiative. So, with the support of by far the largest 'ethnic' religious community withdrawn, the Initiative collapsed for everyone. And so it is that Glasgow's muslim children are still receiving nothing more than mindless rote-learning in the madrassahs (admittedly in ever decreasing numbers), why they have confused and fractured identities, and why they are so wide open to the comfort to be found in the simplistic certainties of ill-educated extremists.

In retrospect, I'm sure that there were a number of reasons that things went the way they did. The public point of view of those who brought the initiative to a halt was that it would have detracted from the central role of the mosque in the community, although a strong case can be put that in the long term it would actually have had the reverse effect if it had strengthened their children's commitment to their Islam. A cynic might suggest that there were concerns that shifting the madrassah education away from the mosque would have meant it possible to justify taking away the various grants and fundings that the mosques currently receive for such 'community' work (quite large sums of money in the case of the Central Mosque). But even if fear of loss of funding was the main motivation, I think there was another more fundamental issue that goes to the heart of who holds the reins of power in the muslim community. The curriculum was based on muslim curricula from around the world, all designed by scholars in Islam and setting out the bare essentials of what it is desirable for muslim children to learn if they are to be thought of as 'educated'. To make it feel familiar in the context of the Scottish system, it was arranged in five levels to cover from the early primaries at Level One to children of 14+ at Level Five. For the powers that be, it must be hard to accept that when it comes to the education they are demanding for their children, while claiming the right to be in charge of that education they find themselves too ignorant of those Islamic 'bare essentials' to get past (or even through) Level One themselves.