Press Release
Muscular Liberalism is ‘Encouraging the School Bully’

Just a couple of weeks since St. Stephen’s Primary School backed down from banning Muslims from fasting and young girls from wearing a headscarf, Britain's chief school bully, Amanda Spielman, is once again using her position to peddle her own brand of liberal extremism in British schools.

As the Chief Inspector for Schools, her comments were given front-page attention in British newspapers, with headlines such as “Religious extremists ‘trying to pervert education’”, designed to further rouse irrational hatred towards Islam and Muslims amongst the non-Muslim community, and to put pressure on Muslims to align themselves more with government agenda, out of fear of being labelled extremist. She said that “some community leaders see schools as vehicles to ‘indoctrinate impressionable minds’ - with ‘extremist ideology in some cases’” and “rather than adopting a passive liberalism that says anything goes, for fear of causing offence, school leaders should be promoting a muscular liberalism.”

The government recently appointed an extremism tzar, Sara Khan, who is primarily responsible for increasing similar pressure on Muslims and further defaming Islam and Muslims for the non-Muslim community. One has to wonder why the government felt it needed to make such an appointment when Ms Spielman already sees this as her primary task.

Her continual attacks on young Muslim school girls’ clothing are nothing short of bullying and are borne out of the government and secular elite establishment’s desperation to defend their failed ideology at all costs. Muscular liberalism is just a bully’s attempt to silence opposition, as he cannot face the challenge with intellectual arguments. It is truly a forced liberalism, not an intellectual liberalism.

Islam poses a significant challenge to secularism, which has no rational basis for its basic creed, whereas the Islamic belief in the Creator Allah, His Messenger Muhammad, and His Word the Quran, is rationally proven for all to see. Scaring people away from Islam and Muslims is all these mean-spirited bullies hope to achieve from their “muscular” tactics.

With no concern for the hateful agenda of the chair of governors and the head teacher who tried to ban the headscarf, Ms Spielman and the secular press blindly label as extremists anyone in the Muslim community who wants to hold onto their Islamic values.

The Evening Standard and the BBC both repeated the lie that young girls who imitate their mothers by wearing a scarf on their head are being sexualised. A secular feminist campaigner, who claims that she is proud to be the only woman in her family to not wear a hijab, wrote, “The hijab is meant to be worn to cover women in order to avoid tempting men. Don’t get me started on the issues I have with that as a feminist and as a Muslim woman. But putting children in a hijab is akin to dressing them in high heels and make-up. It is sexualised clothing.”

This, in fact, is a false narrative, a straw man argument, which contradicts Islam. Muslim men and women are required to adopt a particular dress code as an act of obedience to Allah, without rationalising the reason behind it. Although it is obvious to all that the Islamic rules of segregation and dress when applied in an Islamic society, go a long way to remove the sexual tension and unwanted attention that so pollutes Western societies, one must not make such benefits the basis for following the Islamic rules.

Allah says:

(وَمَا كَانَ لِمُؤْمِنٍ وَلَا مُؤْمِنَةٍ إِذَا قَضَى اللَّهُ وَرَسُولُهُ أَمْرًا أَن يَكُونَ لَهُمُ الْخِيَرَةُ مِنْ أَمْرِهِمْ وَمَن يَعْصِ اللَّهَ وَرَسُولَهُ فَقَدْ ضَلَّ ضَلَالًا مُّبِينًا)

“It is not for a believing man or a believing woman, when Allah and His Messenger have decided a matter, that they should [thereafter] have any choice about their affair. And whoever disobeys Allah and His Messenger has certainly strayed into clear error.” [Al-Ahzab: 36]

Thus, the criteria that Muslims use to decide their affairs, from personal worships and dress code, to societal, economic and political affairs, is that of obedience to the Creator:

(أَلَا يَعْلَمُ مَنْ خَلَقَ وَهُوَ اللَّطِيفُ الْخَبِيرُ)

“Does He who created not know, while He is the Subtle, the Acquainted?” [Al-Mulk: 14]

He decided for human, male or female, what is right and what is wrong; and on that basis He will question all of humankind on the Last Day; this criterion is what the secular liberal establishment fears the most.

The hyper-sexualisation promoted by the media and entertainment industries, tolerated and even promoted in some schools, is of no real concern to this selfish elite, despite its horrendous consequences for society and its countless victims. No, this does not worry them; yet a young girl who chooses to wear a scarf on her head leaves them petrified, lest it is an expression of her adopting Islamic criteria of obedience to Allah, above the whimsical liberal criteria of freedom.

When describing her ‘muscular liberalism’ Ms Spielman said “that sort of liberalism holds no truck for ideologies that seek to close minds or narrow opportunity,” yet rather than coming clean and debating the secular belief and its liberal values openly with adult Muslims who hold onto the Islamic belief and values, the secularists cowardly interrogate and terrorise young girls. One has to ask, “If there is no honest and open debate, just how open are the minds that the secularists seek to create?”

We as Muslims are ready to debate our beliefs and values, without the need for terrorising and bullying tactics, but the muscular liberal secularists clearly are not.

Yahya Nisbet
Media Representative of Hizb ut Tahrir in Britain