The grandly-named Purpose of Life (PoL) is a charity based in
Batley, West Yorkshire. Its purposes, as approved by the Charity Commission, are “to help young people of all races and backgrounds while being particularly sensitive to the needs of ethnic minority communities”, especially through education and the relief of poverty. Nothing in its listing on the Charity Commission’s website indicates that it is a Muslim organisation. Indeed, PoL states on its own website: “We are all one family, irrespective of race, religion, colour etc.”
This week, PoL’s founder and CEO, Mohammad Sajad Hussain, published on Twitter the full text of a letter he had just sent in his charity’s name to Gary Kibble, the headmaster of Batley Grammar School. The letter named a religious studies teacher at the school. “We at Purpose of Life”, it said, had been “deeply hurt” by the teacher named because he had been “showing insulting caricatures”, which proved “what hatred people feel for the beautiful religion of Islam”. His behaviour was “clearly sadistic”.
“This to me is terrorism to Islam & Muslims around the world”, Mr Hussain added.
The letter demanded that the named teacher be “permanently removed” from the school. The school’s apology – already issued by Mr Kibble – “does not go far enough”, it said. “This is the stance Purpose of Life takes with any organisation who attacks our beloved prophet Muhammad (PBUH).” Therefore the school must “recognise its own shortcomings”, it concluded.
Outside Batley Grammar School, there was a protest in the same cause, addressed by Mohammed Amin Pandor, a local mufti. The crowd shouted: “Get the head teacher”. Mr Pandor also runs a charity (this one explicitly Muslim), called the Peace Institute.
He can be found on Twitter addressing a public rally, with the Corbynites Rebecca Long-Bailey and Laura Pidcock, in which he praises Black Lives Matter. In other tweets, the mufti attacks India, France, Israel, Hindus and Buddhists and supports the Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Yesterday he tweeted an Islamic fatwa from the Deobandi movement (of which he is a part) counselling Muslims against accepting Covid-19 vaccines.
It is reported that the religious studies teacher whom PoL’s letter named has now gone into hiding.
Some questions suggest themselves. Why should any charity claim the right to get rid of a teacher? Why would a charity which does not state in its legal governing document that it is Muslim feel it right to attack people for (as it sees it) attacking Islam’s prophet? Why would either of the charities involved here feel entitled to speak for the parents of Batley Grammar School, and
why should the school or public authorities recognise such an entitlement? Why would they and other protestors arrange a small mob to stand at the school gates? In a free and plural society, should such organisations be the gatekeepers of what Muslims can be taught?
There are other questions, too. Why did Mr Kibble, the headmaster, feel it necessary to apologise “unequivocally” for the lesson in question and to relay an apology from the member of staff accused? Why did he describe the use of a particular image as “totally inappropriate”? In a robust statement, the Department for Education said that the protests had been “completely unacceptable”. Why did Mr Kibble give in to them?
So far, all we know is that the teacher involved was giving a religious studies class about blasphemy. In it, he showed his middle-school pupils a cartoon of Mohammed with his turban rendered as a bomb, probably the one originally printed in Charlie Hebdo. There is a clear, easily justifiable educational purpose here – although of course it is possible that the teacher mishandled the use of the image. In religious studies, children should be taught about what blasphemy means and how different religions deal with it. One would expect such teaching – like all good teaching – to be accompanied by examples. Some pupils at the school seem to agree. They are bravely getting up a petition to support their beleaguered teacher.
There is also a free speech issue. Mr Hussain of PoL says: “We can’t use the expression, freedom of speech, to offend people.” Where does Mr Hussain get that idea? In Britain, we can, we do, and the law upholds this. If it did not, I could counter by claiming that Mr Hussain’s threatening intervention offends me – which it does – and have him arrested, and soon everyone would be claiming offence about everything and free speech would be destroyed. It was because of this danger that the senior members of Cambridge University recently defied their woke vice-chancellor and voted to insist that freedom of academic speech includes the right not to respect certain beliefs.
At Batley Grammar, an inquiry into the affair follows. We can already guess the likely results. The “offending” teacher will surely not return to teach at the school, even if he is exonerated of all wrongdoing. The authorities will not dare let him. They will tend to see him, rather than his Islamist critics, as responsible for chucking fuel on the flames. Nor, in all likelihood, will he be able to get another job in the state sector, for similar reasons. Purpose of Life has destroyed his purpose of life, in career terms.
It has also left him in fear. The phrases in Mr Hussain’s letter are rhetorically violent: they accuse the teacher of hating Islam, insulting its prophet, committing terrorism against Islam and Muslims. Mr Hussain equates the teacher’s behaviour with the great fire that recently burnt many Muslims in a Rohingya refugee camp. Murder, rape and being burnt alive, he says, “will only increase if we allow this [ie the teacher’s] kind of behaviour”, which he also calls “sadistic”. Not only are these uncharitable, horrible accusations to make against anyone, they also, in many cases, contain trigger words to incite anger. Mr Hussain and PoL presumably chose their words carefully. They are being said in a context in which the teacher’s home address has been put online. Why are all of us in the media referring to him as “the teacher” when normally, in a free country, people in news stories can and should be named? I think PoL knows why.
Where do such things lead?
We know the answer. Only six months ago, Samuel Paty, a teacher in a suburb of Paris, was also teaching pupils about the Charlie Hebdo cartoons (in his case, more in reference to free speech than to blasphemy). Even though he allowed Muslim pupils to leave the class or look away while he used the offending pictures, he was shopped by pupils and parents. One parent led an online campaign against him. This in turn inflamed a young Chechen Muslim, who turned up at the school gates. He asked a pupil to identify M Paty, followed him as he left his work and beheaded him. Then he posted a picture of the severed head online.
How easily could this happen here? It would be wrong to say that people like PoL actually want such a thing to happen, but I hereby exercise my increasingly threatened right to free speech and suggest that they want to frighten the teacher. By doing so, by naming him and by insulting him, they create a climate which can make violent attack more likely.
