| IQRA school |
 | |
 | |
 | |
Vicar teaches in Muslim School (reprinted from The
Door)  I
have recently been quite disturbed by comments made by the chief inspector of
schools for England and Wales that faith based schools are in danger of turning
out inadequate citizens. I was disturbed because of the five schools immediately
surrounding our Vicarage three are faith based, and the pupils of all of them
use our front car-park and our churchyard as a short-cut to get to their respective
schools. I feel I know all these children and the vast majority of them will make
very good citizens indeed. I take assemblies or teach or I am a governor in all
but one of these schools and my impression is that that faith-based schools are
at least as good if not even better at turning out citizens with real values,
likely to be beneficial to the rest of society. And what is even more noticeable
the children of the faith based schools often have joy and openness in their faces
and demeanours that is lacking more widely in our socially rather challenged part
of Oxford. The schools around the Vicarage are: the fiercely secular Peers School,
the deeply caring Mabel Prichard Special School, the independent Emanuel Christian
School (occupying the buildings of the school that Newman originally built), the
new Iqra Muslim School for girls and finally the John Henry Newman Church of England
Aided Primary School, with 450 pupils one of the largest church primary schools
in the diocese.To my surprise and delight I found myself invited to teach some RE classes in the Iqra Muslim School. This school has recently started up as a result of the closure of Milham Ford School for girls. The head teacher of this new Muslim school had in fact been a senior teacher at Milham Ford. The girls are taught a normal curriculum plus quite a lot of Arabic and the Koran. They have a small prayer-room in the school where regular prayers are held. The 50 or so students come from all over Oxford and many different ethnic backgrounds. Some of the girls I recognised as previously having been in my Church of England School in Littlemore. And what was even more striking was that there were some, quite outspoken about their Muslim faith, who had converted to Islam from a previously church-going Christian background. My brief was to teach Christianity. It was on Wednesday in Holy Week that I taught my first lesson there: A presentation of the Christian faith followed by questions. I began by saying that it was likely that they already knew more about Christianity than I did about Islam, and I was right. They were extremely well informed about what Christians believed and especially they knew much about Jesus, whom they are taught to respect very deeply. It was a lively lesson covering Christian beliefs about Jesus Christ, the Bible as 'the word' of God ('Iqra' is the Arabic for 'word'), Christian life-styles, Christian worship and sacraments, differences in denominations and what it feels like for a Christian to live in our contemporary society.  I
have never before spoken to a group of 13-14 year olds who were so interested
and even passionate to engage with this kind of content! For me the most interesting
part was the discussion that followed. The girls were eager to understand what
'evangelical' meant, and I think it must have been in this context that they asked
what I thought of Christians actively targeting Muslims for conversion. I explained
that Christianity, perhaps like Islam, was a missionary faith, and that mission
involved an eagerness to share a love for Christ with everybody. But that personally
I felt more urgency to evangelise those who have no relationship with God rather
than those who already know God in another way, and I suggested that the majority
of Christians in Oxford probably felt the same way. All the girls at the school
wear a veil, which makes them look very much like Christian nuns, of whom we have
quite a number in East Oxford. They asked me why it was that when westerners saw
a veiled nun they appear to think to themselves 'what a holy and self-sacrificing
woman' but when they see a veiled Muslim woman they think to themselves 'Oh, look,
how the Muslims oppress their womenfolk'. Right at the end of my first 90 minute
session at the school one girl stood up and asked "what would you say - in one
sentence - the purpose of Christianity was?" As this session was held on Wednesday
in Holy Week I felt it was worth asking this of our own congregation. In Littlemore
we have a long liturgy of Maundy Thursday, starting with a meal and footwashing
in some room or hall in the parish which is generally only found booked a few
days in advance. The meal, though framed by Bible readings, is generally a rather
sociable occasion. I asked the fifty or so participants to discuss exactly this
question over their meals. After all Jesus died for it: what is at the heart of
our faith, what is the purpose that Jesus died for? Bernhard Schunemann (April 2005) | ||||