The Muslim Curriculum...

Civitas in the UK has published a report on the challenges to social cohesion from muslim school...here's an article about their report...

The activities and lessons from which the Muslim Council of Britain wants the right to withdraw Muslim pupils include: mixed swimming; dance; sex and relationship education; music; drama; figurative drawing. On farm visits, touching or feeding pigs is prohibited, and staff are warned that pupils and parents may refuse to shake hands with a member of the opposite sex at prize-giving ceremonies.[7]

To achieve this, many Muslim educationalists and those responsible for what is taught in Muslim schools have put forward ideas about how to promote a curriculum consonant with Muslim demands, and how to Islamize existing curricula. This is a conscious process that threatens to derail the very notion of a shifting but fairly uniform body of knowledge that is passed on to each new generation.

In the case of a prohibition on sex education, the consequences may be severe. It may be argued that young Muslims often marry earlier and, willingly or not, observe a stricter moral code than non-Muslims, and that they do not, therefore, need sex education. This ignores the fact that Muslim girls do have boyfriends and do get pregnant, and that the consequences for such activities may be very severe indeed. Many Muslim women have been killed for even minor infractions of that moral code. Such "punishments" are not Islamic, but they do occur disproportionately within sections of the Muslim community. More information, not less, will surely make it easier for Muslim teenagers and young adults to straddle the challenges of living between two worlds. Given that several fatwa banks we have accessed through school websites provide extremely explicit sexual advice for adults, introducing sex education to Muslim schools should not be as hard as it seems.