But I suppose if I'm going to tell the story, I'm going to have to begin much earlier than that. Then again, as I said at the start of my thesis (quoting Wittgenstein) "It is so difficult to find the beginning. Or, better: it is difficult to begin at the beginning, and not try to go further back." As I used to say to people when I first came back to Glasgow twenty-five years ago "Why don't you get someone to give me an honorary degree? They give them to footballers - and it would make me so much easier to fit into the system, and therefore much more useful in the areas in which you need me." Of course they all just thought I was joking and they didn't believe me when I said I wasn't.

O.K. Let's start at Glasgow University, where the Dean of the Faculty of Divinity had got to know me through my interfaith work and had asked me to put together an introductory module on Islam for the World Religions course they were about to introduce, and coming in as a teaching assistant with specialist knowledge, my lack of formal qualifications was not a problem. These lectures proved to be quite popular over the next few years, and I believe that popularity encouraged the Faculty to set up the Centre for the Study of Islam in 1998, a move which I considered to be a very positive one, but which in the event ended my relationship with the University as they were now offering full time posts for muslims in the Centre, for which I was unfortunately not qualified to apply.

Anyway, other things occupied me for a while until the idea was broached of my coming in as a teaching assistant in Religious Studies at the University of Stirling. But as they didn't know me personally in the way they had at Glasgow, I first had to jump through the various hoops required to prove that I had the necessary knowledge and was competent to teach, which wasn't too hard in the end, but highlighted once more my lack of formal qualifications for the jobs for which I seemed most suited. So when I started working there I also started talking about possibly taking a degree course on the side. Then it was suggested that rather than a degree course (which I could have knocked off in my spare time over three years) it might be more suitable for me to skip the first degree and study towards a research degree, a Doctorate or Masters instead (which until then I hadn't realised was possible), and that was my first mistake.

So first they made me do assorted research modules over a couple of years so that they knew I had a handle on how to approach research in the first place (the result of one is also on this website), and then I started doing what I had intended when I started. For the reason for doing 'research' as opposed to an ordinary degree was not to get a different set of letters after my name, but because I thought I would be able to make it an 'action research' project involving the implementation across a number of Scottish schools of some basic form of what I am now trying to make happen as IZWAYZ. In this, the intention was to use the University resources and use the University as a base from which to operate. My second mistake.

Well, for over a year I worked on that basis, establishing contacts in Local Education Authorities and schools across Scotland, as well as interviewing various people with an interest in values education and the like. But far from having a base in the University, it soon became apparent that as an 'external' student I would not be getting much in the way of support or resources, no computer, no desk, no phone, no mailbox, not even a hook on which to hang my coat. Of course, I did get a card for the University Library - but for the fees they were charging me that was turning out to be one very expensive library card. I did consider abandoning the whole thing, but once you've paid out your first couple of thousand pounds in fees, rather than just write that money off to experience, the temptation is to try to find a way to justify having spent it by keeping on going to achieve something that may not be what you had originally intended but will at least end up getting you something for your money. That course of action, however, does require that you add a good few thousand more to the money you have already paid out. My third mistake.

So I ended up speaking to the Professor of Education, the usual clash with a died in the wool secularist and a thoroughly dispiriting ordeal, after which I dropped the idea of a PhD (which for those who don't know usually requires an even narrower focus than a Masters) and tried to find a subject that I might find interesting and not a complete waste of time. Now for me that meant dealing with some big and awkward questions, as what I was interested in was the relationship between secular education and muslim children - and as an extension of that, children of other faith groups - as well as a more personal extension of that,  muslim students at university, like me. I don't really think that anyone was too happy with me taking on such a big idea, however, even though it was agreed that I would explore the subject. In fact, having agreed that they would keep taking my money, it took the best part of a year for me to get them to agree to a title for my thesis - and that is the title that you saw on the page that brought you here.

Anyway, you've probably forgotten it by now, so here it is again - "Knowledge, Religious Understanding and Education in a multi-faith society", with the sub-title "An exploration of the relationship between secular school and faith community in the development of a child's identity and values in a local and global context", a catchy title you must agree. Unfortunately, I think that when they agreed to my looking into how faith groups related to secular education, they didn't actually take on board that I included within that a critique of the system they were practicing and within which I was a student. But the trouble with big ideas is that they aren't easily constrained within preferred boundaries, and in dealing with the problematic issues of my thesis there is a further difficulty in that those issues are largely recursive, and discussed within the thesis itself.

So why talk about them here? I suppose because the thesis is 120,000 words, and it's not the easiest thing in which to find the key points. One of my problems (as I mistakenly thought I had made clear) was that the thesis itself is archaic and obsolete in its requirement for traditional modes of data presentation and interpretation, not to mention the linearity of its format, in the light of the ways that knowledge can be accessed and manipulated nowadays. What I would have liked to do was give readers access to my raw data to see what I had done with it, to see what I chose to strip out of it and how much of the original had survived, to give them the ability to directly compare the answers to certain questions, follow the words of a single interview or search across them all for key themes. I wanted to be able to link across from one section of my commentary and analysis to another in a different section, and provide means of grouping the words in different ways. But the system goes back to the middle ages, and doesn't work that way I'm afraid.

Anyway, it's not just the linearity of a thesis, and the way that it has to have its ideas following logically one after another, which I struggled to sidestep even while I was in it, but the very idea of reductive analysis as the be all and end all of the approach to 'data'. Come to that, I really didn't see why the interview results needed to be treated as 'data' and academic literature as providing the intellectual tools by which to approach it, as opposed to the other way around. Then there were all the other academic dogmas which one has to follow blindly if one is to be accepted into the academic priesthood. Some, like the self-referential nature of post-modern analysis, tend to be present in the theory while conspicuously absent in the practice of much research (self-awareness not being incorporated in too many university courses), a fact which I tried to highlight at the same time as incorporating my own self-referential take by including sections of autobiography relevant to points under discussion. But clearly what I thought were fairly original attempts to find ways to confront and deal with such academic problems were seen not as inventive, but bizarre.

The greatest problem by far, however was that of a muslim 'pupil' trying to function within the secular education system, an issue that in the end proved to be the greatest recursive poser dealt with in my thesis and faced by those who represented the system when they had to sit in judgement upon it. For when muslim parents are forced by the state (under threat of imprisonment) to send their children to school, they are told that the education they receive will not constrain their abilities to view the world as muslims in the way that their parents would wish. Now, if this is indeed the case and not a state sponsored fantasy (or if not a fantasy, then a lie), it is to be expected that the intellectual structure that permits this untrammeled freedom of perception is at the heart of the entire system, not just the schools in which muslim children are learning how to understand the world around them, but also in the universities that train the teachers in those schools and provide the academics who define the curricula and set the examinations for those schools, and who define the knowledge and understanding that those muslim children need to acquire if they are to be acceptable to those universities which define the system.

In other words, if it is true that a muslim child can go through school without facing any intellectual conflict between what they are taught and their religion, the same should be possible for a muslim at university. Or to put it another way - if it proves to be impossible for a muslim student at university (especially one who is in fact already teaching undergraduates at university, specialises in Islamic studies and has a broad understanding of Islamic concepts, and is also well known as a broadcaster for his ability to communicate across the muslim/ non-muslim divide) to successfully study 'as a muslim', that is to present work (in this case research) set in an Islamic ontology and have it prove acceptable within the system, what chance is there for a muslim child to overcome that system in school. And in the event, by refusing to abandon the muslim ontology which is my way of seeing and understanding the world in which I live, I had to face that aspect of my language of communication being labeled as 'polemic', rather than accepted as just one more normative viewpoint, equally acceptable to all others in a nominally all-embracing secular system.

Despite teachers best efforts to imbue it with humanity, I have to believe that what we have at the moment is not the all-embracing system that educationists would have you believe in, but actually an all-excluding system where all are welcome only as long as they leave their religious intellectual baggage at the door. Not that I think that the Islamic ontology of my thesis was the only reason for its rejection by any means. Its stylistic peculiarities alone might have been enough to have it turned down. Or my approach to the data, with its attempt to reintroduce a form of synthesis into an arena where reductive analysis has held sway for many years, only to be challenged by post-modern theories of the impossibility of any shared 'voice' (apart from that of the post-modernist vanishing up his own theories of course). I'm not sure that my external examiner was too much of a post-modernist, however, though I do know that he would have liked to have seen a lot more reductive analysis. Which brings me neatly back to somewhere near the beginning of this at the top of the page.

For after many thousands of words explaining how I had tried to present the data taking myself out of the equation as much as possible, by simply grouping the words of my interviewees around the various themes on which they had been speaking, leaving matters of interpretation to the reader, after thousands of words pointing out the gross limitations of reductive analysis as a tool to understand the world around us, the first words I heard from my examiner were "What is the point of this data? I can't tell who said what." (after all these years not an exact quote, but something very close). Now considering that the 'data' was the words of educationists who were Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, Sikh, Bahai, Church of Scotland, Episcopalian, Roman Catholic, Unitarian and Presbyterian, as well as Muslim, I thought that was an extraordinary occurrence that might be worthy of consideration by a wider academic public. I thought that what those indistinguishable voices had to say might be seen as relevant to the educational debate - and I still do, which is why I have put my thesis on this website in the form it is, even though I really think of it as an eventually pretty pointless attempt to try to fit within the language of the system.

Now you may wonder why I didn't rework it and resubmit it after all that work, but there is a sort of post-script here. The viva was, in the end, a fairly head-butting affair, and after they finally told me that they had rejected what I'd done I must admit I was pretty angry for a while, not so much for the fact that it had been rejected as for what I felt were the superficiality of the reasons. But I was still thinking of how I could bridge what from my viva conversation had seemed like the usual chasm between me and the secular educationists that I meet. So I talked to a few members of staff from different departments around the University, and it seemed like with one voice (clearly not a post-modern perspective) they all said "Why don't you just rewrite it to say what they want you to say, and get your degree?" and I found that almost more depressing than the rejection in the first place. And I felt that I was now so old that I really wouldn't improve my chances of getting a wonderful new job by putting some letters after my name, as those chances were getting closer to zero by the day. So, unlike Groucho Marx, who wouldn't dream of joining any club that would have someone like him as a member, I finally came to the conclusion that acadaemia was a club that I didn't want to join if I had to be like the rest of its members before they would let me in.

So I didn't bother to rework my thesis to make it say what they wanted it to say, and I didn't resubmit it, and it sits on my library shelf to this day - and now on this website - and one day I might take the material and rework it just for fun. But as I said at the top, I really knew what was going to happen, and I suppose that I summed up my attitude to the education system in the Mulla Nasruddin story that I tacked on to the last page as a post-script after the appendices. So if you don't fancy reading through the full 120,000 turgid words, you can use your Adobe Reader to go straight to the last page, where you will find the entire thesis in a one paragraph summary.