‘A‐Part of the community'? The politics of representation and a Muslim school's application for state funding1

Abstract

This paper examines the case of an independent Muslim girls’ school which applied for funding from the state in May 1994. Established in 1984, Feversham College struggles to survive on the limited finance forthcoming from parents’ fees and the support of Muslim benefactors. The failure of even a single Muslim school in Britain to win state funding has in recent years become a symbol of many Muslims’ concerns about how equally they participate in the idea of the nation. Those against such Muslim schools argue that they exist only to keep children, and especially girls, ‘separate'from their peers in multicultural Britain. However, these arguments are not routinely applied to the many Christian schools that receive funding from the state. In Ais paper I examine the way in which governors’ representations of their school set out to contest constructions of Islam and Muslim schools as necessarily ‘separatist’ and fundamentalist’. They welcomed a wide range of visitors to the school and promoted it as a transformative space within ‘the Muslim community’ that had been opened up for girls who might otherwise have been denied an education. Thus the governors argued that Feversham College was ‘a part of, and not ‘apart from’, the local community in Bradford. Finally, I show that while the school's application was supported by the local state it was ultimately rejected by a central government intent on the erosion of local democracy in Britain.