The Centre For Social Cohesion

This deficit, so the Report maintains, is not something that could be made good even by attendance at a madrassa. Despite their adopting towards Islam a wholly ‘internal’ approach, in focusing, as they do, solely on study of classical Islamic literature, such as the Koran and the Hadiths, and on classical Muslim jurisprudence, they fail to consider and make explicit the relevance this body Islamic literature and thought has to the contemporary life-circumstances of Muslims living in western societies.

Nor, according to the Report, do programmes of Islamic Studies currently available at British universities. Having been primarily designed by and for non-Muslims, they adopt towards Islam a wholly ‘external’ approach. They, therefore, tend to focus on Islamic history and civilisation, or on the politics and history of the Middle East where Islam first developed and has remained the dominant religion.

According to the Report, to make good what it identifies as being the most important shortfall in information about Islam that British universities currently provide, they need to devise and offer new study programmes specifically designed to fill what it has claimed to be this crucial gap in provision.

This is the Report’s most central recommendation. It takes priority over several other recommendations that it makes about what else British universities might do to improve the quality of information they offer about Islam, to ease the access of their students to the information about Islam that they do provide, and to better support their Muslim students in their endeavours to combine their studies with the demands of their religion.

To improve the quality of their support to their Muslim students, the Report makes three principal recommendations. First, universities should create and pay for a full-time and professionalised Muslim chaplaincy service. It claims they should have to pay for it themselves, rather than allow or require the Muslim community to do so, to ensure its independence from the local Muslim communities from which they will mainly draw their Muslim students.

Second, universities should provide halal food in their refectories, as they should, its third recommendation here, provide dedicated Muslim prayer-rooms to enable their Muslim staff and students fulfil their prayer obligations, especially on Fridays.

Additionally, so the Report recommends, universities should provide real study opportunities for all their students to learn about Islam. It claims these are needed because their knowing about Islam will enable even non-Muslim to deal and interact better with the Muslims with whom they will be increasingly likely to meet and have dealings in their post-university careers and lives.

In themselves, many of these recommendations are innocuous enough. However, they do raise several serious questions.

First, in connection with the Report’s most central recommendation -- namely that universities should make available study opportunities to enable students learn about how Islamic teaching applies to contemporary western circumstances -- just who is supposed to be the arbiter of what application Islamic teachings have to them? Doubtless Osama bin Laden and Sheikh Qaradawi each has very decided opinions on this matter, as will all other devout Muslims, even, and perhaps especially, the most moderate ones.

Who is to decide which of these contesting accounts of how Islamic teaching applies to contemporary western circumstances should be taught in British universities?

The Report leaves it entirely unclear how this crucial theological matter is to be decided. Since any proffered account cannot but be deeply contentious, it is something that is probably best avoided altogether in British universities. Students in need of such an explanation will just have to look elsewhere for it, or else work it out for themselves.

Second, so far as concerns the Report’s recommendation for the creation of a Muslim chaplaincy service paid for entirely by the universities themselves, it is by no means clear why anyone besides Muslims themselves should be expected to finance it, assuming it desirable and needed. As it stands, were universities to adopt the recommendation, they would be in danger of being open to the accusation of having privileged their Muslim students over those of other faiths, or of none at all. For these latter groups of students would be being called on by the universities to subsidise a service only of benefit to students other than themselves. It is unclear why, if only Muslim students are beneficiaries of a particular form of service, anyone but they should be expected to pay for it.

Third, the Report itself would appear to be guilty of a serious inconsistency by what it has omitted among the recommendations it made. It claimed that non-Muslim students should be given opportunity to learn about Islam. But what about the converse? Should not Muslim students be in even greater need to have opportunities to learn about the faiths of non-Muslims and how the teachings of their faiths apply to contemporary circumstances? For Muslims will be even more statistically likely to come into contact and have dealings with non-Muslims in their subsequent careers than non-Muslims will be to come into contact with Muslims.

If British universities should make available to their non-Muslim students opportunity to learn about Islam, how much more urgently is there need of them to provide their Muslim students with opportunity to learn about the faiths of non-Muslims, including that of atheists, each from a source sympathetic to that point of view?

Yet curiously, the Report omits to make any such recommendation in the case of Muslim students.

You may say its remit did not call upon it to concern itself other than with what information universities should provide about Islam and what ancilliary services they should provide Muslim students. But you would be wrong if you did say that.

The Report itself stipulates that, among its terms of reference, was that it should identify what measures universities should take to reduce the ‘gaps between the needs and aspirations of Muslim students and the programmes of study presently available at universities in England’ (p.4)

If the report could complain that non-Muslim students lacked opportunity to learn about Islam, because of their need to know about it in later life given their likelihood of having to come into contact with Muslims, then, by the very same token, it would have to acknowledge the greater need of Muslim students to have opportunity to learn about religions other than their own, given their still greater likelihood of having to have dealings with non-Muslims. Yet the Report was silent about this particular gap in the curriculum.

Finally, and most importantly of all, nowhere in the Report does Dr Siddiqui say anything about what British universities can and should do so as to reduce the chances of Muslim students falling victim to forms of radicalisation that would lead to their becoming open to believing themselves entitled or obligated by their religion to engage in acts of violent extremism. This is what Bill Rammell hoped above all to learn from Dr Siddiqui when he commissioned the report from him last year. On this vital matter, the Report remains altogether silent.


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