From the London Evening Standard, the Daily Mail and the Sunday Times
One of the best rated primary schools in the UK has banned girls aged under eight years old from wearing hijabs.
St Stephen’s primary school, in Newham, east London, has also forbidden Muslim pupils from fasting on school days during Ramadan.
Arif Qawi, chairman of governors at St Stephen’s, which topped the Sunday Times school league tables in 2017, said the Department of Education should “step up and [take the issue] out of our hands”. He told The Sunday Times: “We did not ban fasting altogether but we encouraged them to fast in holidays, at weekends and not on the school campus. Here we are responsible for their health and safety if they pass out on campus…it is not fair to us.”
A campaign led by Amina Lone , of the Social Action and Research Foundation, is fighting for young Muslim girls not to have to wear the hijab in primary schools.
The Department for Education said: ‘It is a matter for individual schools to decide how to accommodate children observing Ramadan, and to set uniform policies. We issue clear guidance on uniform and to help schools understand their legal duties under the Equality Act.’
Mr Qawi claimed some students were fasting when they were as young as eight years old, despite Muslim clerics typically advising they not start until they have reached puberty. The school had to deal with a “backlash” from parents, especially after it outlawed fasting, a ritual that lasts about 18 hours a day in the summer, on school premises.
He said that, although some parents had been critical of the new rules, it had received broad approval from many Muslim parents.
The headmistress, Neena Lall, said the school had made the changes to help pupils integrate into modern British society. “A couple of years ago I asked the children to put their hands up if they thought they were British,” she said. “Very few children put their hands up.”
Qawi said that despite the criticism from a few families, some parents were thrilled at the school’s stance on fasting.
He said he had met some mothers with children at the school: “I could not see their faces because they were fully veiled. But I could see their eyes — which were sparkling. They were pleased we had taken it out of their hands.
“I always ask, ‘Do you want your daughter to grow up to be like you or like Neena?’ They say, ‘Like Neena.’ When I hear that I think we have done our job.”
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One Response
They should not be allowed to wear hijab of any kind until after they turn sixteen (sixteen being, if I recall correctly, the age of consent according to UK law?). That would be a way of forcing out into the open the reality that the Muslim female slave rag is not about devotion, not about God (except insofar as muslim females are told allah doesn’t hear their prayers unless their dirty female bodies are covered up), but about sex. That it involves the assumption that a nubile female’s entire body – sometimes even her face and eyes – is awrat, “c**t”, like a naked pudendum, and must be covered up from puberty on. Refusing to let them wear the Slave Hood or Slave Mask until they are sixteen would force the mohammedans to recognise that the laws of Britain state that a woman is NOT nubile when she is eight, or ten or twelve, but after age 16.