Muslims living in Britain in the twenty-first century represent an increasingly substantive and yet ethnically and culturally diverse community. At the centre of public and political debates around cultural diversity, there has been a sustained focus on Muslim communities and their relationships with the state. Following the advent of the first state-maintained Muslim schools in 1998, the emergence of Islamic schools in the state sector represents one of the key ways in which Muslim communities have been enfranchised in terms of polity. Whilst the emergence of these schools represents a step towards clearer institutional partnerships with the state, concerns around Muslim communities in contemporary Britain have been sustained at the centre of public political debates. Discussions around Islam in the public space have been positioned against a backdrop of media narratives around global events such as the attack on the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, and at the national level, the London bombings of 7 July 2005 and more recently the death of drummer Lee Rigby in May 2013 (Bignall 2013) and the knife attacks at Leytonstone underground station (London) in December 2015 (Dodd and Addley 2015). Furthermore, tensions around Islam in the public space in Europe have recently been fuelled by anxieties following a series of terrorist attacks including those on the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris in January 2015 (Henley and Willsher 2015) and a series of coordinated attacks in the French capital in November of the same year (Henley and Chrisafis 2015). The following year saw media reports of two suicide bombs being detonated at Brussels Airport, Belgium in March 2016 and also the ‘truck attacks’ (Borger and MacAskill 2016) in Nice (July 2016) and Berlin (December 2016) and most recently the Westminster attack (March 2017). Alongside this sustained political and media attention, at the national level we have seen the rise of the British National Party and the English Defence League in the UK—political organisations which are both openly sceptical of the ability of Muslim and British/English communities to coexist peacefully. Within these political discourses Muslim communities are viewed as responsible by proxy with regard to anxieties around Islamic extremism and terrorism articulated in the tabloid media. Thus, the development of state-funded Muslim schools in England and Wales has taken place against a backdrop of public anxiety around the appropriateness of Islamic schools, particularly in the state sector.
In the light of the above, this monograph will explore the realities of Muslim schooling in both independent and state-funded contexts as a means of providing a counter-narrative which challenges anxieties around Islamic schooling in contemporary Britain. Specifically, this work will offer distinctive insights into the ways in which Critical Race Theory (CRT) can be used in the analysis of British state-funded Muslim schools. Existing bodies of work on Islamophobia will serve as a starting point for exploring the social conditions around Muslim communities in the British context. However, the book will set out the rationale for using CRT as a means of gaining a more nuanced analysis of the conditions around the emergence of British state-funded Muslim schools. Primarily, ethnographic research conducted inside Muslim schools will inform the original contribution of the book. This will allow for a critical analysis of the lived experiences of key stakeholders in both independent and state-funded Muslim schools in an unrivalled depth. Whilst debates around Muslim schools remain at the centre of public, political and academic debates around faith schooling, these exchanges have not yet been informed by ethnographic research in any substantive way. Thus the monograph will be the first of its kind to apply CRT in the study of Muslim schools, whilst drawing on in-depth ethnographic research to inform the analysis. The book will primarily draw on the author’s PhD thesis, which comprised a comparative case study of Muslim primary schools. The doctoral research from which the book is derived took the form of a comparative ethnographic case study of an independent Muslim primary school and a voluntary-aided Muslim primary school. In addition, interviews were also carried out with a key informant to offer historical narratives of two further Muslim schools which had made the transition from independent to voluntary-aided status. The historical narratives of these two schools provide a context study and a point of reference for findings in the comparative ethnography. Whilst publications are currently available which draw on qualitative research with stakeholders in Muslim schooling, there is no existing published monograph which draws on ethnographic research carried out inside these institutions. It is worth noting that there are currently only 21 state-funded Muslim schools in England and Wales, with 12 being voluntary-aided, eight being free schools and one operating as an academy. With such small numbers, the comparative case study (including an ethnographic case study in a voluntary-aided Muslim school) offers an opportunity to gain insights into the lived experiences of stakeholders in unrivalled depth and detail. This approach to researching the lived experiences of key stakeholders in both maintained and independent Muslim schooling has not been demonstrated in a monograph elsewhere. Furthermore, the proportion of Muslim schools in the independent sector relative to the maintained sector also indicates a need for a critical enquiry into outcomes regarding the state funding. Whilst the are 21 state-maintained schools, the number of independent Muslim schools is far higher at approximately 158 (AMS 2014). These figures demonstrate that, whilst Muslim communities are clearly engaged in developing faith schools, the proportion which have actively pursued and/or been successful in securing state funding have been relatively few. As a means of offering an explanation for the trend in outcomes detailed above, the first-hand ethnographic research informs a critical analysis of institutional changes, specific to Muslim schools, which occur in the transition from operating in the independent to the state-funded sector. Furthermore, the narrative of one Muslim school making the transition from the independent to the state-maintained sector is documented in real time.
The ethnographic research also gives critical insights into the ways in which provision is manifested specific to independent and state-funded contexts. These insights have important implications for understanding the relationships between the state, the school as an institution, staff and the parent body. Highly qualitative accounts of how these relationships are manifested will inform critical debates around the position of British Muslims as stakeholders in the emergent partnerships between communities and the state, which are manifested in the development of state-maintained Muslim schools. The key focus of the monograph is to marry first-hand experiences of Muslim schooling with a critical consideration of debates around the enfranchisement of Muslim communities in terms of polity and the nation state. Within this context, education serves as a key site within which Muslim communities have made some objective economic gains. It is the synthesis of these wider debates around the position of Muslim communities in contemporary political context and highly qualitative insights from within Muslim schools which will constitute the distinctive and original contribution of the monograph. Further to the above, the conceptual contribution will also provide an analysis of emergent policy frameworks and associated pathways which shall inform the future of state-funded Muslim schools. Specifically this includes exploring the implications of the Academies Act 2010, and the regulations around free schools , as likely frameworks for the future of state-funded Muslim schooling in England and Wales.
CRT and British Muslims?
The insights offered from the ethnographic research that informs this monograph is situated within a CRT framework. A key objective that this monograph sets out to achieve is to make a contribution to developing CRT which allows a meaningful application of the theory to Muslim communities in Britain. This is achieved through drawing on established work on Islamophobia as a quasi-intersectional theoretical framework. CRT is increasingly emergent in British academic discourse. However, traditionally the roots of CRT lie in American legal discourse and have been centred on the position of African Americans in the wider American social context. Thus, CRT emerged out of concerns around the historical, political and socio-economic position of African Americans relative to wider white American society. Within this tradition, CRT has developed as a critical analysis of the historical relationships between white and black people and is therefore fundamentally concerned with issues of ‘race’ and power. Central to its purpose is the core objective of providing counter-narratives to challenge, undermine and expose the implicit and explicit forms of racism manifested in the everyday acceptance of power relations between black and white people as they function in contemporary context. As documented by Ladson-Billings (1998: 15), contemporary American society was founded on white European concepts of status which related power and influence directly to property. Not only were black people absent in decision making in the founding of the American nation state, but African slaves were actually part of the property used to identify the status of white settlers (Ladson-Billings 1998: 15). American CRT theorists have traditionally been fundamentally concerned with the implications of this historic relationship between African Americans and white American society. Therefore, at its very roots, CRT was fundamentally concerned with the plight and purpose of a very specific ‘racial’ minority in a very specific historic, social, economic and political context.
As CRT has become more informed and developed as an academically (rather than legal) centred discourse over time, there have been insightful applications which go above and beyond solely focusing on the position of African Americans. Although less prominent, variations of CRT have indeed been applied in the analysis of inequalities across various ‘racial’ identities. This has happened most notably with the development of LatCrit theory as a mechanism for drawing on themes manifested in CRT but with a view to analysing the marginalisation of Latin Americans (see Delgado 1997; Solorzano and Delgado-Bernal 2001). The emergence and continuing development of LatCrit theory indicates that applications of CRT do not necessarily need to be confined to the analysis of African Americans. Furthermore, the ways in which CRT has been used to address issues of inequality which apply to political rather than ethnic ideas around ‘race’ will be considered in more detail in Chap. 2. The real question at the centre of the discussion is the extent to which CR...