Education and Extremisms

Rethinking Liberal Pedagogies in the Contemporary World

Farid Panjwani, Lynn Revell, Reza Gholami, Mike Diboll

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781315303093
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Education and Extremisms addresses one of the most pressing questions facing societies today: how is education to respond to the challenge of extremism? It argues that the implementation of new teaching techniques, curricular reforms or top-down changes to education policy alone cannot solve the problem of extremism in educational establishments across the world. Instead, the authors of this thought-provoking volume argue that there is a need for those concerned with radicalisation to reconsider the relationship between instrumentalist ideologies shaping education and the multiple forms of extremisms that exist.

Beginning with a detailed discussion of the complicated and contested nature of different forms of extremism, including extremism of both a religious and secular nature, the authors show that common assumptions in contemporary discourses on education and extremism are problematic. Chapters in the book provide a careful selection of pertinent and topical case studies, policy analysis and insightful critique of extremist discourses. Taken together, the chapters in the book make a powerful case for re-engaging with liberal education in order to foster values of individual and social enrichment, intellectual freedom, criticality, open-mindedness, flexibility and reflection as antidotes to extremist ideologies. Recognising recent criticisms of liberalism and liberal education, the authors argue for a new understanding of liberal education that is suitable for multicultural societies in a rapidly globalising world.

This book is essential reading for academics, researchers and postgraduate students with an interest in religion, citizenship education, liberalism, secularism, counter-terrorism, social policy, Muslim education, youth studies and extremism. It is also relevant to teacher educators, teachers and policymakers.

Part 1

State policies and educational practices

1 Challenging extremism and promoting cohesion

National policies and local implementation

Joyce Miller

Introduction

The chapter explores the relationship between community cohesion and ‘Prevent’ from the perspective of national policies and their local implementation. The focus is on the implications of this relationship for teachers, especially of religious education. The case study is based in Bradford, West Yorkshire, where the fieldwork for the research reported here was conducted.

Over the last 20 years, public discourse and legislation on racism and ethnic minority relations (for example, the Race Relations Amendment Act and the Macpherson report, 1999) segued into community cohesion (the Cantle reports, 2001,2004), then into preventing violent extremism (Home Office, 2008) and finally into what came to be known simply as ‘Prevent’ (HMG, 2009).¹ The changes in terminology are not mere semantics: each of these terms can be analysed, contextualised and critiqued and each has had significant impact on communities and on the schools that serve them. This chapter will explore some of these issues.

Background: Bradford and cohesion

For many decades, Bradford has been at the centre of interest and concern about immigration, cohesion and extremism. It has had ‘affairs’ attracting international attention, ‘riots’ attracting international opprobrium and complexities attracting considerable amount of academic research. Bradford, in the words of Charles Husband and Yunis Alam, is used as a ‘simplistic iconographic representation of Islam in Britain, being used in news, film and television drama as the quintessential expression of the problematic presence of Islam in Britain’ (2011, 6–7).

The ‘riots’ on 7 July 2001 were shocking. They were a result of wide-ranging complex socio-political factors that included a perceived threat by far-right extremists, earlier disturbances elsewhere, fear and rumours, all of which have been carefully analysed by two Bradford academics, Janet Bujra and Jenny Pearce (2011). It is sometimes forgotten that a major report on Bradford was published just five days later – the Ouseley report (2001). Commissioned by the local strategic partnership, Bradford Vision, the report presented an image of Bradford as a city of self-segregated communities, living in fear of each other. The riots, even though they were not between Asian and white youths fighting in the streets, rather were a standoff between Asian youths and the police, came to be seen as evidence of ‘community fragmentation along social, cultural, ethnic and religious lines’ (Ouseley, 2001).

The combination of these two local events – the riots and the publication of the Ouseley Report – influenced national policy and framed the debate that followed: ‘community cohesion’ was the answer that was offered to the perceived problem of ‘parallel lives’ (Cantle, 2001).

The year 2001 was a momentous for other reasons as well and the terrorist attacks on the United States helped to shift the debate from cohesion to one about preventing violent extremism, with a focus on Islamist terrorism. The following years saw considerable confusion as words such as terrorism, fundamentalism, extremism and radicalism were used inter-changeably, even though each is a contested and non-synonymous term. Furthermore, the meaning of ‘Cohesion’ and ‘Prevent’ also changed over the first decade of this century.

Academic debate on ‘social cohesion’ was underway at the beginning of the millennium and in one of its earliest definitions included the aim of ‘reductions in wealth disparities’ (quoted by Flint and Robinson, 2008, 4). This was later transmogrified in official, political definitions of community cohesion into ‘equality of opportunity’, which is very different (ibid.). In 2004, Ted Cantle took the view that community cohesion and race equality are ‘synonymous’ (2004, 57) but that focus, as Finney and Simpson suggest, was ‘relegated down the political agenda’ (Finney and Simpson, 2009, 168). The duty on Ofsted to inspect community cohesion in schools was removed only three years after it began, and the term itself ceased to be part of political discourse under the coalition government in 2010 and was replaced with ‘community relations’.

Similarly, ‘Prevent’ changed. In 2006, it had three aspects: tackling disadvantage; deterring those who facilitate terrorism; and, engaging in a battle of ideas to counteract extremist ideologies (Home Office, 2006). By the publication of Contest 2 in 2009, ‘tackling disadvantage’ had been replaced by ‘addressing grievances that ideologues are exploiting’ (HMG, 2009, 12, 80), the order had been reversed and challenging extremist ideology became paramount.

The term ‘extremist’ is also problematical. In Contest 2, the government for the first time moved its focus from violent extremism to ‘views which fall short of supporting violence and are within the law, but which reject and undermine our shared values and jeopardise community cohesion’ (HMG, 2009, 87). This is a very loose definition and yet it is one with which teachers and others have to work. There is also an unfounded assumption that (religious) extremism leads to terrorism, a view that has been widely challenged (e.g. Ramadan, 2016).

Criticisms of cohesion and prevent

Several – sometimes overlapping – criticisms of community cohesion and Prevent have been voiced over the last decade, including the (lack of) evidence on which policies were based and the charge of its tone being Islamophobic/anti-Muslim. Below I look at these criticisms in some detail.

The evidence base

Community cohesion as a national policy was predicated on the concept of ‘parallel lives’ with self-segregation dividing people of different communities. This premise has been subject to critique by two Bradford academics, Charles Husband and Yunis Alam, who found the Ouseley report ‘oddly uncontroversial’ (2006, 18) and ‘methodologically flawed’. They claimed that the report was based on ‘consultation rather than systemic research’ (Alam and Husband, 2006, 3). This critique is strengthened by the fact that even Ted Cantle admitted that no government office was able to provide adequate information on ‘concentration and segregation’ (2004, 16). A much later study challenged the premise of community fragmentation and self-segregation in a detailed analysis of Bradford’s demographics (Finney and Simpson, 2009). It argued that there was evidence for more, not fewer, mixed – ethnicity friendship groups (183), that minorities want to live in mixed neighbourhoods, that Bradford is ethnically mixed with no signs of ghettoes and that there is greater ethnic mixing in neighbourhoods across Britain (186–7). The study differentiated carefully between ‘concentration’ and ‘segregation’ and pointed to an ever-changing demographic pattern.

The evidence base of the current focus of Prevent has also been challenged, particularly in relation to ideology and the prevention of radicalisation. Ideology based on religion is integral to many forms of terrorism (Juergensmeyer, 2001) but as the government’s own agency MI5 has reported, there is no single pathway to terrorism. It seems therefore that focussing too strongly on ideology is misguided. This was one of the criticisms voiced by the Communities and Local Government Committee of the House of Commons (CLGC) in 2010. It commented on the government’s ‘pre-occupation with the theological basis of radicalisation, when the evidence seems to indicate that politics, policy and socio-economics may be more important’ (3). Eliza Manningham-Buller, the Head of MI5, had warned of the impact of the war in Iraq on international terrorism (Oborne, 2016, 118) and in her Reith lectures she called for a reduction in the causes of terrorism through political and economic initiatives (BBC, 2011). Overall, many voices argued that a multi-faceted approach was necessary to address terrorism and violent extremism – and one that avoided potential damage to civil liberties (Chakrabarti, 2014).

Anti-Muslimism

If the basis of community cohesion is questioned by some, its focus, explicit or implicit, on Muslims is also challenged: cohesion is officially about all communities but there has been a focus on the ‘Muslim community’ – a reified and homogenised idea. The charge of Islamophobia has been levelled against both policies. The CLGC stated unequivocally that the focus on Muslims in Prevent has been ‘unhelpful’, ‘stigmatising’ and ‘potentially alienating’ (CLGC, 2010: 3). Contest 2 has been strongly criticised by many, including Muslim organisations such as the City Circle: Siddiqui accuses the government of ‘categorising every Muslim as an extremist’ (Siddiqui, 2009). Even before the publication of Contest 2, Yunis Samad argued that terrorism legislation had the effect of criminalizing Muslim community. He noted that ‘There has been a blurring of the distinction between political activity, community networks, immigration issues and organized violence’ (2007, 21). Husband and Alam went further, claiming that ‘the state itself has promoted a programme of categorical stereotyping of Muslim communities’ (2011, 58), amounting to ‘institutionalised anti-Muslimism’ (207). They argued that ‘There is a pervasive sense that when it comes to Islam in contemporary Britain, being devout is in itself a suspicious act’ (ibid., 205). The results are deeply damaging because there is a ‘reification of religious difference as a vehicle for their ejection from the collective ethnos of the national body’ (ibid., 116). They conclude that:

Seeking to promote community cohesion, while presiding over an increasing polarization of the wealthy and the marginalised, is an act of political schizophrenia, which is almost admirable in its wilful ignorance and necessary suspension of disbelief.

(ibid., 56)

The danger of taking a single aspect of someone’s identity and using that as the only or main characteristic is the theme of Amartya Sen’s Identity and Violence in which he argues that the ‘odd presumption that the people of the world can be uniquely categorised according to some singular and overarching system of partitioning’ can easily foment intergroup strife (Sen, 2006, xii). This is an important corrective to the controversial work of Samuel Huntington (1993) and his thesis of ‘clash of civilizations’ which, for many, provided a simple phrase to summarise the complex nature of global religio-political relationships.² Muslims are identified as the ‘ideal enemy’, a group that is ‘racially and culturally distinct and ideologically hostile’ (Kundnani, 2014, 10). The satirical title of Kundnani’s book ‘The Muslims are coming!’ sums this up.

The charge of Islamophobia is linked to the perpetuation of socio-economic inequalities, the eradication of which, it is claimed, is neglected in community – rather than social – cohesion. There is clear evidence of the disadvantages suffered by ethnic minority groups including, for example, in a recent report from the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC, 2016). There is also resentment among many at the way in which Muslim communities have been ‘isolated and stigmatised’ (Husband and Alam, 2011, 178) and lack of any meaningful attempt to address the ‘systemic inequalities in British life’ (ibid., 187). These writers called into question the government’s strategies which created the danger of alienating those whose support was most needed to curb extremism.

National policy and local implementation

The above noted criticisms of government policy by Husband and Alam (2011) are from their study of interfaces between national policy and local implementation of social cohesion and counter-terrorism in five local authorities of West Yorkshire, one of which was Bradford. Their research included interviewing elected members and local officers and their conclusion, like that of the CCLG, was that social cohesion and ‘Prevent’ sat in tension with each other. These tensions left local officers with the task of making ‘sense of contradictory and ambivalent central government policy’ (2011, 134). Attempt to implement such policy was ‘associated with anxieties and tensions’ (ibid., 137) and at all levels, there is evidence of strong local disdain for the (lack of) expertise and (inadequate) working methods of their central government colleagues with little or no real knowledge of the circumstances on the ground (ibid., 138). Further, the study claimed, the Prevent policy had the effect of ‘polluting’ relationships with Muslim communities (ibid: 194). However, the study also noted that there was evidence that the Chief Executives of local authorities could be the channel ‘through which local knowledge and expertise was able to inform the development of government policy’ (ibid., 143).

Husband and Alam’s work combines the inter-connected elements that lie at the centre of this chapter: local and national, cohesion and ‘Prevent’. In the five years since their research was published there have been very significant developments. Appalling acts of terrorism and violent extremism have been committed across the world and governments continue to struggle to secure their citizens’ safety. Legislation is a means by which the governments try do this. Some of these legislations, for example, Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015, has had considerable impact on teachers as they attempt to balance promoting cohesion and preventing radicalisation, juggling national policy with local initiatives and their own professional and moral standpoints. For obvious reasons, religious education classrooms have been particularly significant in this context.

A national ‘Prevent’ project for religious education

The relationship between community cohesion, Prevent and religious education (RE) is complex. Many teachers embraced community cohesion believing that it provided RE with a raison d’être: the subject could provide the knowledge and skills that would help promote understanding of religious and ethnic minorities and thus make a contribution to community relations (e.g. Grimmitt, 2010). In actual fact, the relationship between RE and Prevent has been more problematic. In November 2007, for the first time in many years, the then Prime Minister Gordon Brown affirmed the importance of religious education in a speech, not on education, but on national security. The following year in a conference speech I joked that RE had become a form of counter-terrorism. I would not make that same comment now because that is precisely where RE finds itself.

‘Prevent’ has raised many concerns for RE teachers. Muslims have become a focus of negative stereotyping in public discourse: if RE joined in this, would it not be guilty of betraying them and the better world it was working to build? This was a dilemma that faced the RE Council of England and Wales in 2009, when I was its deputy chair, as its Board considered whether or not to bid for a tender from the Department of Children Schools and Families (DCSF) to run a project aimed at promoting community cohesion and preventing violent extremism. The REC made a successful bid (despite my opposition) and I was invited to chair the evaluation and monitoring group of the project that became known as REsilience/AtGyfnerthu (REC, n.d).

Initially the bid was worth £650,000 and allowed REC to work with teachers of RE. The amount was later reduced under the coalition government. The project sought four key outcomes regarding the capacities of RE teachers:...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• Part 1 State policies and educational practices
• Part 2 Perspectives on extremism
• Part 3 Reconceptualising liberal education and criticality
• Epilogue
• Index