Sectarian Muslim school causes conflict in Bolton

A state-sponsored Muslim school in Bolton has restricted its entry to girls from the Deobandi branch of Islam – to the fury of “faith leaders” from Sunni, Shi’ite and Sufi mosques.

Senior figures at the non-Deobandi Masjid E Ghosia Mosque and the Noorul Islam Mosque say they helped establish the school in 1987, but that now it has state-funding (since 2007) their children can’t get places.

In a letter to town hall chiefs on behalf of both mosques, Bashir Shama said: “Having provided that support, the girls from our congregations are now being refused entry because the school’s management have chosen to provide priority to the Deobandi community. The wider Muslim community therefore feels that the actions of the school’s trustees have been dishonourable and they are seen as having used the wider Muslim community to establish the school and then discarded us once they had no further use for us.”

But the school claims its admission policy had been subjected to a consultation and is fair. The Council supported this, saying that the school can set its own entry requirements and what it was doing was legal.

On Monday, members of Bolton Council’s Executive agreed to expand the school from 450 pupils to 600 pupils, with a Year Seven increase of 30 pupils per year from 2012. The school is also to move to a new building as part of the £80 million Building Schools for the Future programme.

Head teacher Mubaaruck Ibrahim said: “Prior to the school becoming a local authority voluntary-aided school, we were supported by a small section of the community in Bolton as well as Bury, Rochdale, Oldham and Manchester who demonstrated that support by sending their daughters to an Independent fee-paying school. Since joining the local authority family of schools the school has formulated its admissions policy in consultation with a wide range of stakeholders. It is no different to any other Faith School Admission Policy which relies on faith as an oversubscription criterion.

Keith Porteous Wood, Executive Director of the National Secular Society, said: “Sectarianism in Islam is no different to that in Christianity. Catholic, Protestant, shia, sunni – and now this. We’ve already had a dispute about a Hare Krishna take over at a Hindu school. It seems the number of ways children can be separated from each other on these dangerous religious lines are infinite. The Government seems incapable of realising the seeds of discontent it is sowing in these communities.”