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Troubles at Islamic Schools in the West

by Daniel Pipes
March 29, 2005
updated May 26, 2008

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In "What Are Islamic Schools Teaching?" I noted seven Islamic schools in North America, six American and one Canadian, which teach hostility to Jews and Christians or had suspected links to terrorism. This is a recurring pattern, and so important to document on a regular basis, which I shall do here. Other instances include:

Three graduates of the Islamic Saudi Academy were jailed after authorities found a letter written in Arabic inside one man's carry-on bag for a flight to Israel that appears to be a farewell note in preparation for suicide terrorism. Mohammed Osman Idris, Mohammed El-Yacoubi, and Abdalmuhssin El-Yacoubi (the latter two are brothers) are U.S.-born Muslims born and raised in Northern Virginia. The first two paid cash for their tickets to Israel, carried $2,000, had no checked baggage, no hotel reservations, and no pre-planned itinerary. Their passports were only three days old. The letter written by Abdalmuhssin El-Yacoubi to his older brother Mohammed reads (in its FBI translation):

When I heard what you are going to carry out, my heart was filled with the feeling of grief and joy. . . . I have no right to prevent you from your migration to Allah and His holy messenger, but it is incumbent upon me to encourage you and help you, because Islam urges Jihad for the sake of Allah. . . . I hope that this letter will arrive before you travel to Allah and His messenger.

FBI experts concluded that the language "indicates that Mohammed El-Yacoubi was going to place himself at grave risk of injury or death for the sake of his Jihad." (March 27, 2002)

The King Fahd Academy in Bonn under investigation
The King Fahd Academy in Bonn, Germany, a 14 million Arabic-language school opened in 1995 under the auspices of the Saudi government, is under investigation for ties to Al-Qaeda. A documentary on German public television's Panorama last week alleged the school, which has 600 pupils, one-third of them German citizens, has ties to a range of Islamist groups and he security agencies reported a significant influx of Islamists to the Bad Godesberg neighborhood where the school is located. The regional commissioner for North-Rhine Westphalia, Jürgen Roters, has threatened to shut down the institution. Chancellor Gerhard Schröder discussed this issue with Saudi authorities while in the kingdom on state visit last week. (Oct. 11, 2003)
Abrar Haque, 43, the volunteer administrator of Cleveland's Al-Ihsan School of Excellence, was arrested on money-laundering charges. To learn more about his business, federal agents seized school records. (Feb. 5, 2005)
The Islamic Saudi Academy helped shaped the views of Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, who presently sits in a Virginia jail accused of trying to assassinate the president of the United States. (March 1, 2005)

I will add other examples as they appear. (March 29, 2005)

I wrote today about the Universal School in Bridgeview, Illinois and described it as "an American madrassah …, replete with the alienation, resentment, supremacism, and isolation that feed the Islamist temperament. (June 20, 2005)

The cuddly Ali Asad Chandia. (Picture courtesy of the "Ali Asad Support Committee.")
Ali Asad Chandia, 28, was arrested on the accusation of aiding two terrorist groups, including the Pakistani group Lashkar-e-Taiba. He is a third-grade teacher at Al-Huda School in College Park, Maryland, a K-8 school in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. that specializes in teaching the Arabic language and the Koran. Also of note: he served as the president of the Muslim Students Association at Montgomery College in 1998-1999 and was a member of the "Virginia jihad network." (Sep. 17, 2005) Aug. 26, 2006 update: Chandia, convicted in June on three counts of providing material support to Lashkar-e-Taiba, was today sentenced to 15 years in prison. At the sentencing hearing, Chandia not only maintained his innocence but threatened to exact revenge against all those responsible for his conviction: "those who participated in making my children orphans ... should just remember that the day of judgment is on the way."
It's not a Western story, but a story on Indonesian madrassahs in today's Australian bears noting: Vice-President Jusuf Kalla has called for the compulsory fingerprinting of 3.5 million students in the country's Islamic boarding schools – a move that has sparked outrage across the archipelago. Attempting to deflect criticism, Mr Kalla told reporters the move was not related to terrorism. "Don't connect this with terrorism – this is only in relation to identification," Mr Kalla said. However, the move follows his decision to ask Indonesia's ruling Islamic body, the extremely conservative Muslim Council of Scholars (MUI), to monitor the curriculums of Islamic boarding schools and to publicise an anti-terror fatwa, or decree. There are about 15,000 Islamic boarding schools across Indonesia. Despite their numbers, however, they are on the defensive because so many extremists connected with the terror network Jemaah Islamiah are the alumni of certain Islamic boarding schools. (Dec. 6, 2005)
The Hawza Ilmiyya of London, a Shi‘i religious school, teaches from a text written by Muhaqqiq al-Hilli, a thirteenth-century scholar, that has this to say about kafirs ("disbelievers"):

The water left over in the container after any type of animal has drunk from it is considered clean and pure apart from the left over of a dog, a pig, and a disbeliever.

There are ten types of filth and impurities: urine, faeces, semen, carrion, blood of carrion, dogs, pigs, disbelievers.

When a dog, a pig, or a disbeliever touches or comes in contact with the clothes or body [of a Muslim] while he [the disbeliever] is wet, it becomes obligatory-compulsory upon him [the Muslim] to wash and clean that part which came in contact with the disbeliever.

In addition, a chapter on jihad, specifies conditions for Muslims to fight Jews and Christians. So strong are the Hawza Ilmiyya's ties to the political leadership in Iran, its 1996 memorandum of association says that "At all times at least one of the trustees shall be a representative of the Supreme Spiritual Leadership of the Islamic Republic of Iran." The last three years of the eight-year curriculum are spent at colleges in the Iranian holy city of Qom. (Apr. 20, 2006) April 28, 2006 update: For more on this school, see my article today, "Subsidizing the Enemy."

The Hawza Ilmiyya of London.

Islamitisch College Amsterdam.

The Islamitisch College Amsterdam will probably be shut down because of the incitement to hatred of Jews and other non-Islamists, not to speak of the sub-par performance of its students. (Dec. 5, 2006)
The East Preston Islamic College in Melbourne, Australia, receives about A$3.9 million in state and federal government funding each year. On a school expedition, 33 male teenage boys, in Year 7 to Year 10, were taken last week to a rural camp about 50 km to the west. According to a school report, late one night three students (with another two watching) decided to have some fun. "The main perpetrator, [a Year 7 student], urinated on the Holy Bible, tore some pages from the Holy Book and burnt them then finally spat on the Holy Book." The second boy, from Year 9, "tore pages from the Holy Book and burnt them." A third student, from Year 7, "tore pages from the Holy Bible and then he rolled it up like a cigarette and pretended to smoke it." Two students were immediately expelled.
The incident shook the school's teachers, about half of whom are non-Muslim, twenty-two of them signed a petition addressed to the principal, Shaheem Doutie. In it, they expressed "anguish and dismay at the grave incident of the desecration of the Holy Bible" and "grave concern" about an "inculcation of hatred and radical attitudes towards non-Muslims" at the school. "This whole incident implies a deep hatred inculcated in the students towards the Christians/non-Muslim teachers," they conclude The petition also notes "previous incidents of students misbehaving towards non-Muslim teachers" and calls on the school to ensure the safety of teachers by taking to "steps to rectify this explosive situation." (Dec. 6, 2006)

Abdur Raheem Green, banned from Australia but not from the East Preston Islamic College.

Dec. 7, 2006 update: A little more research reveals the rot at the East Preston Islamic College. A videotape in the school's library contains a lecture by the British Islamist Abdur Raheem Green, someone so extreme he was banned from entering Australia in 2005. In the video, which A teacher indicates has been shown to EPIC students, Green describes Australian non-Muslims as "evil people" and tells Australian Muslims to criticize Christianity and lure people to Islam. "If we leave [Muslims] in these [non-Muslim Australian] schools they will be destroyed. … You know very well what takes place in these schools ... it is all about evolution, Christmas, Easter, St Valentine's Day - a barrage. And you expect your children to survive? You think you live in a sewer and you come up smelling of roses? Merely living in the company of evil people will inevitably begin to rub off on us and we will begin to acquire their characteristics." Principal Shaheem Doutie said he was unaware of this videotape in the library.

Dec. 19, 2006 update: More research by Cameron Stewart, the Australian reporter who's been on this story, finds more problems. Peter Moxham, the (non-Muslim) principal of EPIC in October 2003-January 2005, says (in Stewart's paraphrase) that "the school was dysfunctional and dangerous, with a widespread culture of bullying and poor educational standards." Moxham calls it "a classic potential breeding ground for extremists. If any of these kids become radicals, it will be partly because the education is of such a low calibre and bullying is endemic."

Further, Stewart reveals that EPIC has had to repay "tens of thousands of dollars [of the A$3.9million it receives annually] in government funding this year after a federal government investigation found the school had overstated the number of its students."
The Australian Islamic College logo.

Following a months-long investigation, 28 fraud squad officers and 10 investigators from the federal Department of Education yesterday at 9 a.m. raided the three Perth-area campuses of the Australian Islamic College, carting off three truck-loads of computers and documents. The school, founded in 1986 by Abdallah Magar, received A$13.3 million in government funding in 2006 for its two thousand K-12 students taught by 250 teachers. The fraud unit suspects that the school swindled the federal government by inflating its rent payments or by overstating its student population (double counting students or ghosting students). Detective Inspector Arno Albrecht of the Commercial Crime Division said that, as far as he was aware, the Major Fraud Squad had not previously been involved in a raid on a school in Western Australia.

Abdallah Magar, founder and head of the Australian Islamic College.

Magar's outlook is evident from his goals for AIC: "full academic achievement, protection from social diseases coupled with success in the hereafter by being saved from the hellfire." Also, in November 2006, AIC signed a letter accusing the media of hysteria and sensationalism in reporting on Sheikh Taj Din al-Hilali's comments likening Australian women to uncovered meat. (January 31, 2007
The King Fahad Academy logo.

Children as young as five at the King Fahad Academy in Acton, UK, are taught to describe Jews as "apes" and Christians as "pigs." So reports Colin Cook, 57, a convert to Islam who taught English at the KFA for 19 years until he was fired. He reports hearing pupils say they want to "kill Americans," praising 9/11, and calling Osama bin Laden their "hero." Cook warns that "The school could produce a dangerous harvest," an allusion to its becoming a breeding ground for terrorists. When he questioned the school management about the curriculum complying with British laws, he was told: "This is not England. It is Saudi Arabia." The school, funded and run by Riyadh, opened in 1985 for the children of Saudi diplomats in London, though the great majority of its 520 pupils now come from British Muslim families (including those of Abu Hamza al-Masri and Abu Qatada). KFA, which receives more than £4m a year from the Saudi royal family, devotes around half of lessons to religious subjects and conducts almost all its classes in the Arabic language.

Cook says he was fired in December 2006 after blowing the whistle for the school's covering up cheating by students in GCSE exams; he plans to bring a tribunal claim for unfair dismissal, race discrimination, and victimization. The school denies his allegations and insists he was properly dismissed for gross misconduct connected to the exams procedure. (February 6, 2007)

Feb. 7, 2007 update: Appearing on BBC2's Newsnight, KFA's principal, Sumaya Alyusuf, admitted that the school uses textbooks that describe Jews as "apes" and Christians as "pigs," even as she refused to withdraw them. "We have these books in our school. These books have good chapters that can be used by the teachers. It depends on the objectives the teacher wants to achieve." Asked by the moderator, Jeremy Paxman, "Will you now remove this nonsense from the Saudi Ministry of Education from your school?" Alyusuf replied: "Just to reiterate what I said earlier, there are chapters from these books that are used and that will serve our objectives. But we don't teach hatred towards Judaism or Christianity - on the contrary."

Feb. 8, 2007 update: KFA's principal, Sumaya Alyusuf, denied that teachers assigned the offensive chapters that Cook had noted, saying these had been "taken out context" and had "lost some of their meaning." Further, those materials have literally been torn out of the schoolbooks in question "in the public interest." Finally, "The press interest in these unused chapters has shocked us.

Colin Cook standing in front of the King Fahad Academy grounds.

Feb. 9, 2007 update: Schools minister Jim Knight has ordered an inquiry into KFA, saying that "It would be completely unacceptable for any school to have material which makes the sort of inflammatory assertions that are being alleged. I have therefore asked the department to make enquiries in relation to the recent allegations surrounding King Fahad Academy, and to confirm whether the school complies with its statutory requirements on promoting tolerance and harmony."

Feb. 11, 2007 update: A Sunday Times reporter, Sian Griffiths, was invited to see KFA and wrote up her experience at "We don't teach hate." The atmospherics are interesting in themselves ("Awkwardly, I adjust my dress, wondering whether I should have donned trousers. But then, I remind myself, this is a school on British soil"), as is a bit more detail from the Cook statement:

"Pupils are asked to mention some repugnant characteristics of Jews," he writes. "Year 1 pupils are asked to give examples of worthless religions, such as Judaism, Christianity, idol worship and others . . . The teachers on the Saudi curriculum . . . presumably endorse this racist view-point or teach it without complaint."

Apr. 18, 2008 update: Colin Cook's trial has taken place, with an employment tribunal in Watford awarding him £70,000 for unfair dismissal. A panel found the school created a "smokescreen" to justify his dismissal. New information from the trial about the school included: (1) Cook telling the tribunal that pupils at KFA were taught from Arabic books that likened Jews and Christians to "monkeys" and "pigs". An Arabic textbook encourages students to see religions other than Islam as worthless. It refers to "the repugnant characteristics of the Jews" and it asserts that "Those whom God has cursed and with whom he is angry, he has turned into monkeys and pigs. They worship Satan." (2) Some pupils, according to Cook, "talked as if they did not live in London at all." (3) When he asked how Abu Hamza and Abu Qatada, both on social benefits, could pay the school fees, he was told to mind his own business. (4) The school serves as part of the Saudi Embassy, with Saudi nationals enjoying diplomatic immunity.

The Jameah Islameah School in Mark Cross (near Crowborough, East Sussex, UK) has been shut down because, the Department for Education and Skills announced, it had failed to fulfill an "improvement plan" to meet standards. The department issued a statement that "It is now illegal for Jameah Islameah to continue as an independent school and it could be prosecuted if it continued to do so." The school "continues to fail to meet the standards which all independent schools must meet ... concerning the quality of education provided; the welfare, health and safety of pupils; and quality of premises and accommodation." (February 9, 2007) Feb. 11, 2007 update: Jim Knight, the schools minister, said JIS is one of 45 independent schools closed on quality grounds over the past three years, and that the closing was unconnected to anti-terror police raids in September 2006. The £3 million building has 100 rooms and is surrounded by 54 acres of property. Oddly, the school had 11 students, well fewer than the 20 teachers and other adults living on the grounds.

Related Topics: Academia, Anti-Christianism, Muslims in the West, Radical Islam, Terrorism receive the latest by email: subscribe to daniel pipes' free mailing list This text may be reposted or forwarded so long as it is presented as an integral whole with complete information provided about its author, date, place of publication, and original URL.