DAR AL HARB - U.K.: ISLAMIC STUDIES IN UNIVERSITIES ARE NOT FOR THE PURPOSES OF 'RELIGIOUS ENGINEERING'

Islam academics wary of conditional funding
· Government accused of imposing on academics
· Bursaries and fee waivers most needed for research
by Anthea Lipsett

Academics have warned against the government tying its extra funding to improve Islamic studies teaching and research too tightly to the recommendations in the recent Siddiqui report.

The Siddiqui report, published earlier this month, said that university courses should focus less on the Middle East and more on the realities of life in Britain.

The higher education minister, Bill Rammell, announced that the higher education funding council for England (Hefce) would get £1m to develop a long-term project to address gaps in Islamic studies teaching and research. Hefce said it would reply to the recommendations this autumn.

But Robert Gleave, executive director of the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies and Arabic studies professor at Exeter University, warned against a "rush job" in response to the Siddiqui report.

"The report mixes up specific care for Muslim students with the teaching of Islamic studies. If that's the basis on which money is distributed then there's reason to be concerned," he said.

"We do need more research into British Islam and we do need it to be part of Islamic studies curricula in universities but it's best understood within the context of the Muslim world generally, and the indications of the report are that [Dr Siddiqui] recommends that British Islam can be treated in isolation. It can't."

"If the point is to produce future generations of Muslim leaders, that's a completely different purpose to Islamic studies in universities where the aim is not religious engineering, which the government seems to think is a good idea, ie to get lots of Islamic studies departments to encourage one sort of Islam and discourage another."

"That's not the aim of academia. It's not our job to try and tell them what to think. We have academic standards that we are very loathe to compromise on."

"You don't ask a Polish department to solve the problem of the numbers of Polish immigrants in the UK. It wouldn't be the natural place to go," he said.

Experts in Islamic studies comment on and analyse movements in the Islamic world, rather than attempting to change opinion to suit government tastes, said Prof Gleave.

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