David QuinnAllowing Muslim girls to wear a headscarf respects their beliefs while in no way compromising the ethos of a Catholic school, says David Quinn
The population of Muslims in Ireland is on the increase. By one estimate, it now stands at around 80,000. Ireland has Muslim schools, but not enough to accommodate all the Muslim children. This means many Muslim children go to non-Muslim schools and in practice in most cases that means to the local Catholic school. This immediately poses a practical question: how should those children and their particular religious requirements be accommodated in non-Muslim schools?
One of Ireland’s most influential Muslims, Dr Ali Selim, has written a book addressing precisely this question. It is called Islam and Education in Ireland: An Introduction to the Faith and the Educational Challenges It Faces.
Dr Selim wrote an article summarising his book which immediately sparked a debate that expanded very quickly into a debate about the Irish educational system itself.
Requirements
Dr Selim pointed out some of the requirements of the Muslim faith that, he believes, Irish schools should accommodate. One of them is the requirement for Muslim women and girls to wear the hijab, a veil that covers the head and chest but not the face. This requirement can be compromised by PE class, according to Dr Selim.
He instances the growing trend of Muslim parents withdrawing their daughters from PE class. “In some schools under the guise of health and safety, Muslim girls are obliged to take off their headscarves for PE classes, which is not acceptable to them. This rule imposes an unnecessary hardship on Muslim girls,” he wrote.
Removing the scarf is not a problem if the PE teacher is a woman and so Dr Selim suggests that schools “should employ a female PE teacher and provide students with a sports hall not accessible to men during times when girls are at play”.
Dr Selim also has issues with the way relationships and sexuality education (RSE) is taught in our schools. Some of his concerns ought to be shared by Catholics but usually this is not the case in practice.
He criticises, for example, the fact that RSE “perceives sexual relations outside wedlock as part of normal practices”.
Islam, like Catholicism, teaches that sexual relations belong only in marriage. He also has issues with the admissions policies of our schools. A faith school is permitted to admit children of the faith of the school first. But where there is over-enrolment that can mean children not of the faith of that school, including Muslims, lose out.
The response to Dr Selim’s concerns was immediate and much of it hostile. ‘How dare he make such demands’ was the tenor of some of the criticisms.
Others have used his concerns as an opportunity to attack State-funded denominational schools. This is where the problem arises, they say – get rid of them and the problem is solved.
In this regard, Atheist Ireland and the Evangelical Alliance of Ireland were strange bedfellows.
Actually, the only ‘problem’ that would be solved by going down this route is the ‘problem’ of the admissions policy of faith schools which would be replaced more or less by a first-come, first-served policy.
The trouble with that is that it goes a long way towards defeating the very purpose of a faith-based school, which is to serve its own faith community.
A first-come, first-served policy would, for example, be a very big problem for Church of Ireland schools.
The majority of children who go to most Church of Ireland schools are not from that faith. But if those schools could not admit Church of Ireland children first, then we would be faced with the very strange situation of Church of Ireland schools turning away Church of Ireland children because they were not high up enough on the admissions list.
As for Dr Selim’s other concerns, a non-denominational school system wouldn’t come close to solving them and might exacerbate them. For example, whether a school is denominational or not, it still has to have a policy about head scarves that will either please Muslims or not. The same goes for RSE.
In fact, Dr Selim stresses that when faced with a choice between a faith school that is not Muslim and a non-faith school, most Muslim parents will opt to send their children to the faith-based school.
In Scotland, Catholic schools are popular with Muslim parents. Muslim parents particularly favour single-sex schools which obviously make it much easier for Muslim girls to abide by the Muslim requirement for modesty for the simple reason that boys are not present.
There is no magic solution to any of this. No policy will address all concerns perfectly. The key is reasonable accommodation which is to say, respecting the wishes of Muslim parents while also respecting the ethos of the school.
Allowing Muslim girls to wear a headscarf respects their beliefs while in no way compromising the ethos of a Catholic or Protestant school. It is only secularist ideology which has a problem here which explains why the head scarf cannot be worn in French state schools, for example.
In fact, Catholic schools are already very good at accommodating Muslims. In response to the controversy surrounding Dr Selim’s book, both the Islamic Foundation of Ireland (IFI) and the Islamic Cultural Centre of Ireland (ICCI) singled out Catholic schools for praise, saying that “Catholic school managements have made wonderful efforts to make their schools as inclusive as possible without losing their own ethos”.
In other words, Catholic schools are already very welcoming of Muslims.
