Government blocks secular school that would teach all world views

Anushka Asthana reports in the Observer that senior government officials have blocked attempts to create the first school without an act of collective worship branding it a ‘political impossibility’.

“Dr Paul Kelley, head of Monkseaton High School in Tyneside – the first to join the government’s flagship ‘trust school‘ scheme – wanted to challenge the legal requirement in all state schools for pupils to take part in a daily act of worship of a broadly Christian nature. There are only a handful of exceptions at faith schools where the daily worship can be based on a different religion.

He also wanted to change the way that religious education was taught, introducing tuition about a number of world views, some that involved faith and some that did not. He intended to follow a ‘third way’ that neither banished religion from the classroom completely nor had children attending daily worship.

According to the Observer “One senior figure at the then Department for Education and Skills, told Kelley that bishops in the House of Lords and ministers would block the plans.”

Humanist of the month?

The Observer Magzine’s regular column “This much I know” interviews Harry Gabriel this week, a 72 year-old stage door keeper from London. And what a guy!

It was shocking to arrive in Britain in the early Sixties and experience the hostility towards immigrants, which was almost everywhere.

I found theatre people more forward-thinking in their acceptance of different people. This environment enables me to be without unhappiness, anger or frustration.

My reaction to seeing – on my security camera – women urinating in the doorway is to think, ‘It’s already happening, so it’s not something I can do anything about.’

One advantage of wearing a silk suit and tie to work is that you don’t have to go home and change before a party. You’re prepared.

I opted out of eating meat 20 years ago when I realised it was being contaminated by chemicals. I say contaminated because it is unnatural and unnecessary. It is poisoned.

The actor I’m most happy to have met is Jack Lemmon, who made the film Missing, about American involvement in Chile. He said that when you know people and you see what bad things they do, you puzzle why, terribly. And he had the opportunity to ask Reagan directly, ‘How could you do these things in Chile?’ But Reagan just laughed.

The best way to move on someone who is stalking an actress is to go out to him and ask, ‘Is there any particular person you are always coming here to see?’

I can’t resist intervening anywhere to beseech people not to fight. If I see a lady’s bottom slapped, I will say, ‘How would you feel if someone slapped your sister in such a manner?’

I love parties and get invited to a lot. The most lavish and enjoyable was for Miss Saigon. I rarely leave before the music stops and I’m often first on the dance floor. Luckily I’ve never, ever, smoked or drunk alcohol, so I have the health and energy to dance until 5am.

I love the rhythms of Nigerian music but ignore the words, which mainly praise politicians or God, or both. My parents were high-church Christians. When I revisit Nigeria it’s difficult for my family to reconcile that I relate to people in a Christian manner yet opted out of a belief in God.

Accidents occur during high-speed costume changes because actresses forget they’re wearing high heels on stairs. Nine times out of 10 they land on their bottoms.

Choosing years ago not to own a car put me at an advantage money-wise, but also meant I no longer had to have contact with the police, who stopped me frequently for being a black man.

The most difficult thing for me to think about is the unnecessary, tragic Nigerian civil war, which meant I lost many friends and close relations.

Rather than give money to a gym in order to exercise and lose weight, one can eat well and walk.

When your tailor retires, you can find a new one who follows instructions and does everything perfectly – except there’ll be one little problem, like a zip that’s noisy or threatens to trap your willy.

I don’t believe there would now be extreme poverty if Africa had co-operatively become a United States of Africa, as envisaged by Kwame Nkrumah. So I call myself an African, with Nigeria as my place of birth, Britain as my home and the world as my country.

I’ve never missed a day’s work through illness in 20 years on the door. But I’ll ask for a day off to attend any lecture by Noam Chomsky.

Muslim scholars must come forward with an understanding of a “Land of Co-existence”

In the wake of heighened security across the UK, ex-Islamic extremist Hassan Butt writes in the Observer that “foundation of extremist reasoning rests upon a dualistic model of the world. Many Muslims may or may not agree with secularism but at the moment, formal Islamic theology, unlike Christian theology, does not allow for the separation of state and religion. There is no ‘rendering unto Caesar’ in Islamic theology because state and religion are considered to be one and the same. The centuries-old reasoning of Islamic jurists also extends to the world stage where the rules of interaction between Dar ul-Islam (the Land of Islam) and Dar ul-Kufr (the Land of Unbelief) have been set down to cover almost every matter of trade, peace and war.

What radicals and extremists do is to take these premises two steps further. Their first step has been to reason that since there is no Islamic state in existence, the whole world must be Dar ul-Kufr. Step two: since Islam must declare war on unbelief, they have declared war upon the whole world. Many of my former peers, myself included, were taught by Pakistani and British radical preachers that this reclassification of the globe as a Land of War (Dar ul-Harb) allows any Muslim to destroy the sanctity of the five rights that every human is granted under Islam: life, wealth, land, mind and belief. In Dar ul-Harb, anything goes, including the treachery and cowardice of attacking civilians.”

He argues that a “reasoning that has struck me and a number of other people who have recently left radical Islamic networks as a far more potent argument [which] involves stepping out of this dogmatic paradigm and recognising the reality of the world: Muslims don’t actually live in the bipolar world of the Middle Ages any more.

The fact is that Muslims in Britain are citizens of this country. We are no longer migrants in a Land of Unbelief. For my generation, we were born here, raised here, schooled here, we work here and we’ll stay here. But more than that, on a historically unprecedented scale, Muslims in Britain have been allowed to assert their religious identity through clothing, the construction of mosques, the building of cemeteries and equal rights in law.

…If our country is going to take on radicals and violent extremists, Muslim scholars must go back to the books and come forward with a refashioned set of rules and a revised understanding of the rights and responsibilities of Muslims whose homes and souls are firmly planted in what I’d like to term the Land of Co-existence. And when this new theological territory is opened up, Western Muslims will be able to liberate themselves from defunct models of the world, rewrite the rules of interaction and perhaps we will discover that the concept of killing in the name of Islam is no more than an anachronism.”

Doesn’t this suggest then that for secularism to succeed  in the UK it requires theological justification as well as traditional non-religious arguments?

Plans for compulsory volunteering to foster cohesion

The Observer reports that the Darra Singh, the Chair of the Commission on Integration and Cohesion (the body created by Tony Blair after the 7 July bombings in 2005 to promote more unity) as saying ‘We need to have a debate about the possibility of a national community service – and we should not be afraid of asking whether this should be compulsory.’

“Singh said that, having spoken to hundreds of people over the past years and listened to the views of many groups, he would like to take the idea further and see ‘a communities week that puts the local (community) centre stage – marking what makes our area unique’.”