Three years ago, on 25 March 2021, a teacher from Batley Grammar School (BGS) in West Yorkshire was forced into hiding after a religious studies class he gave led to protests from Muslim parents and to death threats. Today, that incident has been largely forgotten. Except by the teacher. He can’t forget it because, extraordinarily, he and his family are still in hiding. Equally extraordinarily, little is said about this.
The debate about the events at BGS, like many about Islam, blasphemy and offence, has been framed by two polarised arguments. Many on the reactionary right (and not just the reactionary right) view such confrontations as the unacceptable price of mass immigration and the inevitable product of a Muslim presence in western societies. Many liberals and radicals, on the other hand, think it morally wrong to cause offence, believing that for diverse societies to function, there is a need to self-censor so as not to disrespect different cultures and beliefs. Neither argument bears much scrutiny. The most comprehensive account of the events at BGS comes in a review published last week by Sara Khan, the government’s independent adviser on “social cohesion and resilience”. The lesson that sparked the controversy was designed, ironically, to explore issues of blasphemy and free speech, and of appropriate ways of responding to religious disagreements.
One of the images shown to pupils was, apparently, a caricature of Muhammad wearing a turban containing a bomb. Little wonder, some might think, that it caused controversy. Did it not occur to the teacher that showing such a caricature would inflame tensions?
Except that it is not so simple. The lesson had been approved by the school leadership team and had been taught for the previous two years without any problems. So why did it cause such a furore this time? Because this time the fury was instigated by outside activist groups.
Key among these, as Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens, an academic researching terrorism and radicalisation, notes in a recent report on “Blasphemy Extremism”, was the Muslim Action Forum (MAF). Founded in 2012 by a group of academics and activists, its goal is to prevent any depiction of Muhammad, “the worst kind of ‘Hate Crime’ that can be perpetrated on the 3 million Muslims in the UK and 1.7 billion Muslims worldwide”.
MAF helped organise the Batley school protests, claiming in an open letter to the then prime minister Boris Johnson that the religious studies class had been “inciting hatred and Islamophobia whilst pushing forward extremist white supremacist ideology”. It publicly named the teacher, which led to death threats, and forced him into hiding.
Also central to the Batley protests was Adil Shahzad, a leading British supporter of Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP), an organisation with a history of supporting violence against supposed blasphemers, in Pakistan and beyond. These individuals and organisations are part of what Meleagrou-Hitchens describes as “a new generation of UK-based anti-blasphemy activists”.
Blasphemy is not just about defending the dignity of the divine but also about protecting sources of secular power. As long ago as 1676, England’s lord chief justice, Sir Matthew Hale, observed, in a blasphemy trial, that to disparage Christianity would “dissolve all those obligations whereby civil societies are preserved”. The outlawing of blasphemy was seen as a necessary defence of secular political authority.
Today, Christianity no longer plays that role in Britain. In many Muslim majority countries, though, the charge of blasphemy remains a powerful tool for those in power to consolidate support, silence critics and target minorities. In the west, so-called community leaders – usually self-appointed gatekeepers – similarly use blasphemy claims to police Muslim communities and reinforce their power within them.
The authority of such gatekeepers derives not just from their roles within communities but also from their relationships to wider social institutions. From Whitehall departments to local authorities, from schools to businesses, organisations that anchor society often defer to them as authentic voices. In so doing, they privilege what are usually more conservative, religious figures and ignore the plurality of opinion within Muslim communities.
In Batley, the school immediately suspended the teacher, and “unequivocally” apologised “for using a totally inappropriate resource”, promising to review the curriculum with “all the communities represented in our school”. Both the local council and the local MP at the time, Tracy Brabin, welcomed the apology. The police, according to Khan, provided the teacher with little support, even after the death threats.
The willingness of key institutions to engage with “community leaders”, some of whom did not come from Batley, and to accept that it was wrong to offend them, while effectively abandoning the teacher, reveals much of what is misguided about the “take me to your leader” approach of managing diversity.
The problem exposed by cases such as Batley derives neither from the presence of Muslims in this country, nor from the giving of offence, but from the way that reactionary groups and leaders have come to be seen as representing those communities, an approach that serves to silence many Muslim voices and traditions. In the Batley controversy, as in many similar cases, there has been a widespread assumption that Islam forbids the depiction of Muhammad, a claim even to be found in West Yorkshire’s “agreed syllabus for religious education”.
Yet there have been many Islamic traditions, particularly in Iran, Turkey and India, open to depicting Muhammad. Today’s reactionaries, though, have seized on prohibition as a means of strengthening their control over Muslim communities. For schools and councils to accept blandly that “Islam prohibits depictions of Muhammad” is to accept only the most conservative views as being representative of the faith.
Some critics argue that the problem in Batley was not that the cartoon depicted Muhammad but that it was racist. Racist material, whether a cartoon or a book, can, however, be used in ways that heighten prejudices or in ways that allow students to think more deeply about the issue and reduce racial or religious tensions. What matters is the manner and context in which the material is approached.
That three years on, the Batley teacher should still be in hiding is an indictment of our institutions and of their failure to robustly challenge intolerance, whether coming from Muslims or directed towards them. If there is one lesson we should learn from this mess, it is that opposing anti-Muslim bigotry and challenging restrictions on blasphemy necessarily go hand in hand.
• Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist
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