By Mohd Ali
Many things have been written and said about the “Trojan Horse” scandal and the subsequent aftermath. The latest being an 8-part serial podcast by the New York Times that seeks to understand what actually happened.
The approach of the podcast hosts however has caught controversy where many have pointed out that the partisan nature of the approach used by Serial in covering what happened misses the central issue of what actually happened at these schools. Sona Sodha’s Observer piece delivers a devastating critique of the podcast and lambasts its journalistic laziness:
The Trojan Horse Affair presents a one-sided account that minimises child protection concerns, misogyny and homophobia in order to exonerate the podcast’s hero, a man called Tahir Alam. In doing so, it breaches the standards the public have the right to expect of journalists, with cruel consequences for those it uses and abuses along the way.
It is noticeable how given the allegations that have been levelled at some of the individuals involved in the Trojan Horse such as Tahir Alam, there was no serious scrutiny placed on the personal views of these individuals. This is particularly important because it goes to the heart of the subject matter. It becomes clear that this is a running theme in the podcast, where a distorted image is created around legitimate questions raised about individuals who were running these schools at the time. Local media investigations run at the time revealed the disturbing views of key figures involved in school boards.
As a former pupil of one of these schools, I have my own perspective.
When I started at the school, the social contract at the institution was already decaying because the schools in question are in areas blighted by knife crime and gang violence. There was no sense of order in our assemblies, we were in the wrong classes for most of the year, there were problems with kids bringing in knives. These schools were overwhelmingly filled with Muslim students in a part of the country with the highest deprivation rates and sadly, growing up in an insular environment where they did not meet anyone from mainstream society thus setting them up to fail. This situation was ripe for people such as Alam and others to push an agenda of religious conservatism which worsened the already segregated nature of these environs. There weren’t terrorism classes or beetle-browed fundamentalist preachers stalking the school corridors. However there was definitely an intimidating environment during the latter stages of my schooling years where fundamentalist ethos were being forced down the throats of people in the school. Things like forced fasting and forced prayer were common where students would pressure other students into praying which was approved by some of the teaching staff. There were clashes with staff such as our Sikh head who had been brought in when I was in Year 10 to turn around the failing school and he was eventually pushed out of his job. The lesbian drama teacher in year 9 basically got bullied regularly in her classes by vicious homophobia directed towards her.
There is no doubt that the crime and deprivation issues which plagued the areas these schools were located in spilled into the schools and urgent solutions were sought by parents and school officials. The podcast does touch on this but seems to rather supinely accept the narrative peddled by the individuals it primarily focusses on as victims of institutional islamophobia that an agenda to encourage an intolerant religious social conservatism was the answer to those problems.
In other words, what was uncovered by Trojan Horse and the pattern of behaviour described in both the Peter Clarke1 and the Ian Kershaw2 Reports at the time was a product of Britain’s laissez-faire multiculturalism policy. Whilst the initial letter was indeed established to be fake and whilst there was no evidence of violent Islamist plots, it was very noticeable at least when I was a pupil at one of these schools that an atmosphere that stifled integration and fostered a degree of separatism was created. In many of the schools, prayer and fasting was introduced, and contrary to what the podcast claimed as there being a choice, it was very clear at the time that bullying and intimidation was used to enforce these practices. By endorsing the politics of self-segregation and self-appointed “community leaders” where the most intolerant and atypical individuals from muslim communities were selected as representatives, this hands-off policy restricted the life chances of many of its citizens by giving the final veto to others.
Note: Mohd Ali is a pseudonym. He is an aspiring writer who has just completed his masters degree and still lives in Birmingham.
- https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/birmingham-schools-education-commissioners-report
- https://www.birmingham.gov.uk/downloads/file/1579/investigation_report_trojan_horse_letter_the_kershaw_report