Ilm by Rote

The eight-year-old is off to school; to school after school, that is. Back home about 3.30 pm from the first school, the regular school Britain offers all children, she changes from school uniform into burqa, picks up her copy of the Quran and heads off to the second school. This is the madrassa by the side of the Jam-e-Mosque just off Asfordby Street in Leicester, some 100 miles north of London. It's time for that daily switch from secular to Islamic education.

"I'll be learning the Quran, and I'll be learning Arabic," she says. It's vacation time in schools these days, but "I'm going to our school," she says. She'll be there till 8 pm.

Just short of 5 pm when the madrassa classes begin, a couple of hundred children have come down the streets around to head for class. The girls are all in burqa, the boys in a long dress and white Islamic cap. These are the uniforms of the second school.

The madrassa at the Jam-e-Mosque is only one of about a dozen in Leicester city. Virtually every mosque in Leicester, and across Britain, now has a madrassa attached to it. The Muslim Directory lists close to 800 mosques across Britain, and it indicates that just about every one of them runs a madrassa. That is besides more than a hundred Muslim schools where the national curriculum is taught alongside Islamic studies. With close to a thousand madrassas effectively across Britain, Muslim leaders say the overwhelming majority of Muslim children in Britain are receiving a strong education within the madrassa system.

"The children are conditioned to the madrassa system," Abdullah Patel, education secretary of The Islamic Centre that runs two madrassas in Leicester, told Outlook. "Parents do not have to force them, they see their brothers and sisters and other children coming, so they also come. Children have this psychology of copying."

Reading the Quran is clearly at the heart of madrassa education. "By the time children from our madrassas are 13 or 14, they will have read the Quran many times over, all 6,666 sentences of it," Patel says. "It is obligatory for our children to read the Quran, even if they don't understand it."

The children seem keen on evenings at the madrassa. "The evening school is better because there's religion here and because there are more friends here," says 10-year-old Muazzam. "I should learn what Allah has taught because that is the most important lesson. It's good to learn here with Muslim brothers." Would he skip the madrassa if his parents let him? "I don't want to leave, I like to come here every day."

But there is more to the second school than reading the Quran. "We teach Urdu as a language, but Urdu based on Islamic thinking," says Patel. "We teach Arabic as a language, and we teach Islamic history and jurisprudence—deeniyat—and we teach children how to offer namaaz and perform their prayers. Every year we run a mock exam and then a regular exam, and children get prizes for doing well, and certificates they can keep in a nice frame." The second school is working the children hard.

A grounding in Islamic lifestyle goes with formal Quranic teachings. Girls are taught to cover themselves fully through the madrassa course, which usually runs from age four to 14. "We have races at the annual sports event but girls have to keep their traditional dresses," Patel says. "Girls need to wear a large, loose dress that does not reveal the size of their body parts, otherwise you may look at them with the devil's eye."

Most madrassas have a mix of Pakistanis, Indians, Bangladeshis, Somalis and others. The madrassas follow the philosophy of the Khilafa movement that sought to present a single Muslim Ummah (community) around the world, with no national barriers. And that is how Islamic history is taught, with a clearly strong 'hate India' syllabus.The madrassa directory is laced with pictures only from Kashmir; one shows the Dal lake whose "serene surroundings are occupied by 6,00,000 Indian troops!"; another shows an "Indian soldier, weapon ready and watching high street shops!", the next a funeral—"another 'number' added to the genocide!". Yet another frames a soldier apparently searching somebody, with the caption: "Palestine? Chechnya? Burma? Algeria? Tunisia? Iraq?... No, Kashmir—Indian soldiers harassing the civilian population. Muslims the world over are being subjected to occupation, oppression and torture." And that's just the directory, which is produced with support from the Muslim Council of Britain, the main contact point for government dealings with Muslims here.

Despite the strong political colouring to madrassa education, Muslim leaders portray this education as humanitarian sympathy and political support that stops short of active endorsement of militancy. But that distinction has not always been as clear as the leaders project or the teachers at madrassas might want.

None of the suicide bombers in London's 7/7 had achieved much by way of regular education. But they were regulars at the Masjid-e-Umar on Stratford Street in Beeston, Leeds, and the madrassa attached to it. This is a mosque with a capacity for 2,700 males and 200 females. That scale means a well-meaning elder can go only that far to stop the political sympathies taught at the madrassa from tipping over into extremist activity.

In a study of places of religious worship in Leicester, Prof Richard Bonney of the University of Leicester points to the discovery of a small Al Qaeda cell in Leicester in 2002. It says: "Brahim Benmerzouga and Baghdad Mezaine were sentenced to 11 years each after conviction for using credit card fraud to raise thousands of dollars for Al Qaeda. They were accused by the Crown Prosecution Service of working together to make military equipment, false travel documents and recruitment material. The two had details of nearly 200 different bank accounts in their possession and Benmerzouga had some 60 films covering suicide bombings and martyrdom, including videos of Osama bin Laden, the jury heard during the eight-week trial in Leicester."

"The key organiser was Algerian Djamel Beghal, who, according to The Independent, apparently cultivated young Muslims through a local mosque in Leicester. He also quietly built up the network of supporters among foreign emigres, who used the local Indian and Pakistani communities as cover. Specifically, Beghal is accused of recruiting both British 'shoe-bomber' Richard Reid and would-be September 11, '01, hijacker Zacarias Mousaaoui." Reid was reported to have been in frequent attendance at a madrassa at the Finsbury Park mosque in London.

The overwhelming majority of young Muslims led through a madrassa education will clearly not head the militant way. But, as Bonney points out, "that there is, and has always been, a connection between religion and politics is clear". And there is little doubt either that it is among the madrassa products that terrorist groups are likely to search for recruits, given their religious and political grounding. To the more angry among them, Lahore and Rawalpindi can begin to appear the Oxford and Cambridge of the world of madrassas.

Extremism is only the extreme end of the problem. There's the everyday issue of how much education a child can cope with in a single day. "Some younger girls get tired by the end of the day, you'll see them yawning," says Patel. "But most find the Quran easy, because it is a miracle of Allah. And so, after a long day at school, it is not stressful."

Nor is madrassa education stopping the children from doing well at school, he says. "Their hard work is not going waste, it helps them do the national curriculum better.It increases their talent to learn more at day school." Not necessarily so, the overall pattern suggests. Pakistani and Bangladeshi children are by far the lowest performing at school. There are no studies to indicate whether this could at least in part be due to time spent at madrassas. But several teachers think it could.

"These madrassas are disrupting the education of children, and parents do not realise under what pressure they are putting their children," says a primary school teacher in Leicester. "When are children going to do the work that will give them the competitive edge? What they are learning at madrassas will not help them in school results or in their careers." On the contrary, the influence of madrassas shows through at day school. A report by Sir Herman Ouseley, former chairman of the Commission of Racial Equality, showed that the two subjects in which Pakistani students around Bradford did well at regular school were religious studies and religious education. Arabic is offered in the national curriculum, but it's not likely to take anyone nearer a job.

"I discussed the under-achievement of a child with one father," the teacher said. "He told me the children should have both educations, our education and your education. I talked about time, and he said they will find the time."

Patel says children are told they must take national education seriously "to earn one's bread, be successful and have a decent life. You cannot rely on social security all the time. But it is important to be successful both in this life and the life after. If you neglect Islamic education, you will not be successful in the life after. The deeds of this life will mean reward by the garden or punishment by fire. So both are important, and we teach this concept at the madrassa".

The young are in any case being drawn more and more to madrassa education, he said. "Why 90 per cent, at least 97 per cent children come to the madrassa." Next term, he says, his madrassa is beginning a Saturday morning class for senior students.

All regular schools now have compulsory courses in citizenship. By day, Muslim children learn what it is to be a good British citizen, and in the evening what it is to be a good Muslim. The results are not always a happy combination of both. After the 2001 riots in north England, the local authority in Bradford introduced an "enhanced citizenship curriculum". Institutions in Birmingham and Leicester have developed programmes to develop more links between madrassas and regular schools. If you cannot bring madrassas mainstream, you can take a little of the mainstream to the madrassas, or try to. For children finding their way through both, the choice is difficult and sometimes dangerous.