ENDNOTES

1 Genesis 11:1-9

2 This metaphorical association began in English in the sixteenth century. The entry for babel in the Bloomsbury Dictionary of Word Origins by John Ayto (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1990), p.47 points out, however, that that “the word has no etymological connection with ‘language’ or ‘noise’. The original Assyrian bāb-ilu meant ‘gate of god’ and this was borrowed into Hebrew as bābel.” The later Greek version of the name is Babylon. Popular etymology, however, links the word to a similar Hebrew root balal, ‘confusion’ or ‘mixing’. Chambers Dictionary of Etymology observes that the English word babble, which folk etymology has connected with Babel and thus probably influenced its sense of ‘meaningless or confusing chatter or prattle’, does have a direct connection with language, in that “the various forms of this word in Indo-European languages are all probably formed on the repeated syllables ba, ba,  or bar, bar, sounds typically made my infants and used to express childish prattle.” (See Chambers Dictionary of Etymology, edited by Robert K. Barnhart (Edinburgh: Chambers, 1988), p.70.

3 For a profound exposition of the Qur’anic basis for religious pluralism, see R. Shah-Kazemi, “The Metaphysics of Interfaith Dialogue: Sufi Perspectives on the Universality of the Qur’anic Message”, in Paths to the Heart: Sufism and the Christian East, ed. James Cutsinger (Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom), 2002.
  According to Mahmoud Ayoub, “Humanity began as one and must remain one, but it is unity in diversity. This diversity, moreover, is not due to the gradual degeneration of human society from an ideal or utopian state. Nor is it the result of a lack of divine guidance or human understanding. Rather, religious diversity is a normal human situation. It is the consequence of the diversity of human cultures, languages, races and different environments.” (Mahmoud M. Ayoub, “The Qur’an and Religious Pluralism” in Islam and Global Dialogue, Religious Pluralism and the Pursuit of Peace, edited by Roger Boase (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), p.273.

4 “Revelation is always an accommodation to the capacity of man. No two minds are alike, just as no two faces are alike. The voice of God reaches the spirit of man in a variety of ways, in a multiplicity of languages. One truth comes to expression in many ways of understanding.” ~ Rabbi Abraham Heschel, quoted by Prince Hasan Bin Talal in Talking to the Other : Jewish Interfaith Dialogue with Christians and Muslims by Rabbi Jonathan Magonet, (London: I.B. Tauris, 2003), p.vii.

5 Translations from the Qur’an in this article are from The Message of the Qur’an by Muhammad Asad (Bath: The Book Foundation, 2003). 

6 In his note to this verse from the Qur’an, Muhammad Asad explains how “unity in diversity” is frequently stressed in the Qur’an (e.g., in the first sentence of 2:148, in 21:92-93, or in 23:52 ff.).
‘The expression “every one of you” denotes the various communities of which mankind is composed. The term shir’ah (or shari’ah) signifies, literally, “the way to a watering-place” (from which men and animals derive the element indispensable to their life), and is used in the Qur’an to denote a system of law necessary for a community’s social and spiritual welfare. The term minhaj, on the other hand, denotes an “open road,” usually in an abstract sense: that is, “a way of life.” The terms shir’ah and minhaj are more restricted in their meaning than the term din, which comprises not merely the laws relating to a particular religion but also the basic, unchanging spiritual truths which, according to the Qur’an, have been preached by every one of God’s apostles, while the particular body of laws (shir’ah or shari’ah) promulgated through them, and the way of life (minhaj) recommended by them, varied in accordance with the exigencies of the time and of each community’s cultural development.’ Murad Hofmann regards this verse as a “virtual manifesto of religious pluralism” and “a structural guarantee for the survival of more than one religion and every Muslim should know it by heart”, and further asserts that it can be deduced from Qur’an 22:67 that “God has guaranteed the existence of more than one religion for as long as the world lasts.” (See Murad W. Hofmann, “Religious Pluralism and Islam”, in Islam and Global Dialogue, Religious Pluralism and the Pursuit of Peace, op. cit., pp. 238-239). 

7 Muhammad Asad notes: ‘Thus, the Qur’an impresses upon all who believe in God – Muslims and non-Muslims alike – that the differences in their religious practices should make them “vie with one another in doing good works” rather than lose themselves in mutual hostility.’

8 Muhammad Asad comments as follows: “know that all belong to one human family, without any inherent superiority of one over another (Zamakhshari). This connects with the exhortation, in the preceding two verses, to respect and safeguard each other’s dignity. In other words, men’s evolution into ‘nations and tribes’ is meant to foster rather than to diminish their mutual desire to understand and appreciate the essential human oneness underlying their outward differentiations; and, correspondingly, all racial, national, or tribal prejudice (‘asabiyyah) is condemned – implicitly in the Qur’an, and most explicitly by the Prophet (see Asad’s second half of note 15 on 28:15).

9 These phrases are used by Diana Eck, Director of the Pluralism Project at Harvard University, in arguing that “as a style of living together, tolerance is too minimal an expectation.” (Diana L Eck, Encountering God . Boston: Beacon Press, 1993, p.198). 

10 See Progressive Muslims on Justice, Gender and Pluralism, edited by Omid Safi (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2003), p.24.

11   ikhtilaf ummati rahmah. This hadith is quoted by Professor Fred Halliday as the penultimate sentence of his article “The ‘Clash of Civilisations?’: Sense and Nonsense” in Islam and Global Dialogue, Religious Pluralism and the Pursuit of Peace, op. cit., p.129. The final sentence is: “This sage hadith is a far cry from the incendiary banalities of Professor Samuel Huntington.”

12 In commenting on the above Qur’anic verses, Khalid Abou El Fadl makes the important point that “the classical commentators on the Qur’an did not fully explore the implications of this sanctioning of diversity, or the role of peaceful conflict resolution in perpetuating the type of social interaction that would result in people ‘knowing each other’. Nor does the Qur’an provide specific rules or instructions about how ‘diverse nations and tribes’ are to acquire such knowledge. In fact. the existence of diversity as a primary purpose of creation…remained underdeveloped in Islamic theology (my emphasis). Pre-modern Muslim scholars did not have a strong incentive to explore the meaning and implication of the Qur’anic endorsement of diversity and cross-cultural intercourse. This is partly because of the political dominance and superiority of the Islamic civilisation, which left Muslim scholars with a sense of self-sufficient confidence. Nevertheless, it is fair to say that the Islamic civilisation was pluralistic and unusually tolerant of various social and religious denominations. Working out the implications of a commitment to human diversity and mutual knowledge under contemporary conditions requires moral reflection and attention to historical circumstance – precisely what is missing from puritan theology and doctrine.” (Khalid Abou El Fadl, The Place of Tolerance in Islam (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), p.16. 

13 Eck, op. cit., p.192.

14 I have explored the difference between pluralism and plurality in more detail in my paper The Challenge of Pluralism and the Middle Way of Islam (Richmond: AMSS UK, 2002). 

15 C.S. Lewis, Perelandra (London: HarperCollins, 1943).

16 The three races are the Sorns, a tall race who live in the high places, are wise and have a knowledge of science; the Hrossa, who live in deep fertile crevices below the planet’s surface which can no longer support life, and the Pfifltriggi, small quick people who live in the deep places of the planet and are gifted artisans and metal smiths. They all live under the guidance of beings visible to the human eye only as a patch of intense light, and who themselves act under the direction of ‘The Old One’,

17 I refer to this exemplary story in a short article entitled “Diversity Provides Golden Opportunities for Learning” posted on the forum dedicated to contemporary issues in education on the website of the Book Foundation (http://www.thebook.org).

18 Nancy Kline, Time to Think: Listening to Ignite the Human Mind (London: Lock, 1999), p.97.

19   “No culture can live if it attempts to be exclusive.” ~ Mahatma Gandhi.

20 “For the Twain to Meet: Revisiting a Nineteenth-Century Proposal for Peace and Partnership Between Europe and Islam.”

21   Islam and Global Dialogue, Religious Pluralism and the Pursuit of Peace, op. cit., p.75.

22   Jalaluddin Rumi, Mathnawi, II, 3681 ff.

23 This applies particularly to the difficulty in capturing the web of associated meanings represented by the tri-literal Arabic root system.  An obvious example is the Qur’anic term taqwa, often translated as ‘fear of Allah’. Yusuf Ali, in his note to Qur’an 2:2 (“This is the Book; In it is guidance sure, without doubt, to those who fear Allah”), explains that “taqwa, and the verbs and nouns connected with the root, signify: (1) the fear of Allah, which according to the writer of Proverbs (1.7) in the Old Testament, is the beginning of wisdom; (2) restraint, or guarding one’s tongue, hand and heart from evil; (3) righteousness, piety, good conduct. All these ideas are implied: in the translation, only one or other of these ideas can be indicated, according to the context.” (my emphasis).
  Muhammad Asad translates the same verse as “This Divine Writ – let there be no doubt about it – is meant to be a guidance for all the God-conscious” and points out that “the conventional translation of muttaqi as ‘God-fearing’ does not adequately render the positive content of this expression, namely the awareness of His all-presence and the desire to mould one’s existence in the light of this awareness. The interpretation adopted by some translators, ‘one who guards himself against evil’ or ‘one who is careful of his duty’ does not give more than one particular aspect of the concept of ‘God-consciousness’”.
  However, it could also be said that Asad’s adoption of the term ‘God-consciousness’, while capturing the dimension of spiritual awareness and positive mindfulness which the term ‘God-fearing’ may fail to evoke, nevertheless in itself may fail to evoke the moral dimension of accountability and the positive sense of ‘fear’ (or awe) which motivates the mu’min to be vigilant in exercising self-restraint and in considering the consequences of all actions (including those of the tongue and heart). For just as the term ‘God-fearing’ may reify the term for those familiar with a Semitic conception of God derived from the religion of the ‘People of the Book’, so the term ‘God-consciousness’ potentially restricts the meaning in other ways by its associations with Eastern religions.
  Another example is the translation of the Qur’anic term ‘aql as ‘reason’, which, in the context of its restricted use in the Western intellectual tradition to refer to the purely logical, analytical, rational and intellectualising processes centred in the brain (Latin ratio, Greek dianoia) does not do justice to the multi-layered sense it carries in the Qur’an, where it refers not only to such rational processes but also to the higher human faculties of perceptive intellection or insight combining mind and heart (Latin intellectus, Greeek nous) and the moral intelligence capable of distinguishing truth from falsehood.

24   “We believe in the revelation which has come down to us and in that which has come down to you; our God and your God is one and the same and it to Him we [all] submit.” (Qur’an 29:46).

25   The word kafïr (“one who denies the truth”) from the root KFR, is commonly mistranslated as “unbeliever”, and often restricted even further (without Qur’anic justification) to denote non-Muslims.
See James Morris, “Ibn ‘Arabi’s Rhetoric of Realisation”. Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi Society, Vol. XXXIV, 2003, p.134, for further examples

26 On the problem of rising Islamophobia in Europe, see “The Future of Europe: Islamophobia?” (Turkish Policy Quarterly website, 18 March 2006) which points out that “in mainstream politics and media, Islamophobia sentiments are presented as natural.” See also “The Next holocaust” by Ziauddin Sardar (cover story in the New Statesman, 5 December 2005).
    Norman Cigar provides ample evidence that, “ by bending scholarship and blending it with political rhetoric” Serbian orientalists “defined Islam and the local Muslim community in such a way as to contribute significantly to…. making genocide acceptable”. And what allowed them to play such a role? It was “the extensive media exposure they enjoyed in Serbia”, as much as “their participation in official propaganda campaigns abroad” (Norman Cigar, The Role of Serbian Orientalists in Justification of Genocide Against Muslims of the Balkans, Islamic Quarterly: Review of Islamic Culture, Vol. XXXVIII, No. 3, 1994.
  As is true of virtually all of the people of Europe, including the English, today’s Bosnian Muslims are an amalgam of various ethnic origins. Yet what the Serbs did was, in Cigar’s words, to differentiate and isolate the Muslim community by creating “a straw-man Islam and Muslim stereotype” and “setting and emphasising cultural markers” which focused on Islam and the Muslims as alien, culturally and morally inferior, threatening and, of course, exotic, but in a perverse, negative way. The Serbs applied the label “Islamic fundamentalist” freely to all Muslims, who were seen as reflections of the “darkness of the past”. They claimed that “in Islamic teaching, no woman has a soul”; that “the tone of the Qur’an is openly authoritarian, uncompromising and menacing”; that the reading of the traditional tales in A Thousand and One Nights predisposed Muslims (in their words gave “subliminal direction” to the Muslims) to torture and kill Christians;  that the destruction of places of worship belonging to other faiths is an obligation on all Muslims; that the “banning of tourism and sports” in Islam inevitably led to “xenophobia” and “segregation”, and so on.
  In my paper, “The Language of Islamophobia” (presented at the Exploring Islamophobia conference at The University of Westminster School of Law, London, 29 September 2001) I referred in some detail to the work of the influential discourse analyst Teun van Dijk, Profesor of Discourse Studies at the University of Amsterdam, and in particular to his work on Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA).
According to Van Dijk,  “much of racism is ‘learned’ by text and talk”. CDA upholds that power relations are discursive, that is, that discourse is an instrument of ideology and is a means of perpetuating social and political inequality. Discourse analysis which unpicks the way such language works therefore has great explanatory power and is also a form of social action, because the discourse itself constitutes the society and the culture from which it emerges. I am reminded here of the words of the Prophet Muhammad, who said: “ Anyone of you who sees wrong, let him undo it with his hand; and if he cannot, then let him speak against it with his tongue, and if he cannot do this either, then let him abhor it with his heart, and this is the least of faith.” Critical Discourse Analysis, as a form of social action, is both undoing with the hand and speaking with the tongue.
  There is an excellent survey of CDA by van Dijk with an exhaustive bibliography which is accessible on the following website (http://www.hum.uva.nl/~teun/cda.htm). This article contains a rigorous exposure of the way discourse promotes and sustains racism, by promoting prejudiced social representations shared by dominant groups (usually white, European) and based on ideologies of superiority and difference. This is done by analysing some fragments of a book misleadingly entitled The End of Racism by Dinesh D’Souza (1995), a book which embodies many of the dominant Eurocentric supremacist ideologies in the USA, and which specifically targets one minority group in the USA:  African Americans.  This book is one of the main documents of conservative ideology in the US and has had considerable influence on the debates on affirmative action, welfare, multiculturalism, and immigration, and on the formulation of policy to restrict the rights of minority groups and immigrants.
  I emphasise here that the discursive moves and ploys used in D’Souza’s book are the same moves and ploys that are used in all such discourse, including Islamophobic discourse, and I hasten to add that we should also be very clear that the same tools of analysis need equally to be brought to bear on ‘Westophobic’ discourse and all forms of discourse which seek to foment strife, division, hatred and confrontation.
  In The Language of Islamophobia, I began to analyze in detail how the discursive moves and ploys identified in van Dijk’s analysis of just a few fragments of D’Souza’s book have been applied to Islamophobic discourse. These ploys include denial, mitigation, euphemization, explaining away, the use of academic jargon, and the appeal to “scientific” credibility, as well as the obvious ploys of self-glorification and derogation/demonisation of the “other”.
  Amongst van Dijk’s copious examples are these two striking examples of self-glorification from D’Souza’s book:
1.  “What distinguished Western colonialism was neither occupation nor brutality but a countervailing philosophy of rights that is unique in human history” (p.354) – and, “by the way, van Dijk adds, “colonialism is also legitimated in terms of scientific curiosity”.
2. “Abolition [of slavery] constitutes one of the greatest moral achievements of Western civilisation” (p.112) – notice here this extraordinary reversal used to enhance the positive characteristics of European civilisation, which sits oddly with D’Souza’s own justification and mitigation of racism as a “natural and all too human inclination”. 
  Other discursive structures and strategies identified by van Dijk include the rhetoric of repetition, emphatic hyperbole (exaggeration), ridicule, metaphor, condemnation by association, and blaming the victim. Typical examples of these rhetorical ploys are the repetition of keywords and phrases, such as “the civilised world”, “freedom and democracy”, “our way of life”; the contention that Muslims want to replace liberal democracies with a religious theocracy,  (hyperbole) – this fears that Muslims yearn to impose a worldwide Islamic caliphate are described by Eric Margolis as “lurid fantasies worthy of Dr. Fu Manchu”; the association of Islam with the “darkness of the past”, a metaphor favoured by the Serbs; and the blaming of victims even in such atrocious acts as those committed in Molln and Solingen where Turkish people were burnt alive (“Europe’s Islamophobia” by Sameera Mian in Muslim News, 28 November, 1997).
    Finally, van Dijk identifies the well-known argumentative ploy of casual reference to “scholarly” studies so as to give weight and authority to fallacious arguments; the use of presuppositions and premises which are taken to be held by everybody: “We all know that….”, “The reality is….”, “The truth is….”; the familiar disclaimer of the apparent concession: “Of course there is some prejudice, but….” and the number game of comparative statistics – always used in favour of the dominant group.
  C.S. Lewis has this to say on the subject of euphemization, one of the key ploys identified by van Dijk:  “All men at times obey their vices: but it is when cruelty, envy, and lust appear as the commands of a great super-personal force that they can be exercised with approval. The first symptom is in language. When to ‘kill’ becomes to ‘liquidate’ the process has begun. The pseudo-scientific word disinfects the thing of blood and tears, or pity and shame, and mercy itself can be regarded as a sort of untidiness.” (C.S. Lewis, “A Reply to Professor Haldane”, in Of This and Other Worlds, Collins Fount Paperbacks, 1982, p.109. (my emphasis).
    Elsewhere, Lewis writes:  “The belief that we can invent ‘ideologies’ at pleasure, and the consequent treatment of mankind as mere υλη, specimens, preparations, begins to affect our very language. Once we killed bad men: now we liquidate unsocial elements.” (C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1947, paperback ed. 1955. p. 85).
  George Orwell pointed out that, in order to defend the indefensible – “things like the continuation of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan” –  “political language has to consist largely of euphemisms, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness” Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic limber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.” (George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language”, in George Orwell, A Collection of Essays, Harcourt Brace, 1981, pp. 166-167).
  See also Sandra Silberstein, War of Words: Language, Politics and 9/11. London: Routledge, 2002, for a penetrating analysis of the “strategic deployment of language” and the “troubling underside of patriotic rhetoric” which fashioned a post-9/11 American identity.
  See note 30 below for a look at the latest repeated buzzword, “Islamo-Fascism”.

27 Released on 10 August, 2006; 1007 adults surveyed; margin of error +/-3%.

28 August, 2006.

29   See http://www.ericmargolis.com, 28 August 2006.  Margolis continues: “This ugly term”, like “the other hugely successful propaganda term, `terrorism’…is used “to dehumanize and demonize opponents and deny them any rational political motivation, hence removing any need to deal with their grievances and demands. Both the terms `terrorism’ and `fascist’ have been so abused and overused that they have lost any original meaning.”
  Margolis refers to former Colombia University Professor Robert Paxton’s “superb” book, The Anatomy of Fascism (2004) as giving “the best modern definition…of fascism”.  According to Paxton, the essence of fascism, which he aptly terms its “emotional lava”, can be summarised as follows: 1. a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond reach of traditional solutions; 2. belief one’s group is the victim, justifying any action without legal or moral limits; 3. need for authority by a natural leader above the law, relying on the superiority of his instincts; 4. right of the chosen people to dominate others without legal or moral restraint; 5. fear of foreign `contamination.’
  “Fascism”, continues Margolis, “demands a succession of wars, foreign conquests, and national threats to keep the nation in a state of fear, anxiety and patriotic hypertension. Those who disagree are branded ideological traitors. All successful fascist regimes, Paxton points out, allied themselves to traditional conservative parties, and to the military-industrial complex… In the western world, hatred of Muslims has become a key ideological hallmark of rightwing parties. We see this overtly in the United States, France, Italy, Holland, Denmark, Poland, and, most lately, Canada, and more subtly expressed in Britain and Belgium. The huge uproar over blatantly anti-Muslim cartoons published in Denmark laid bare the seething Islamophobia spreading through western society. There is nothing in any part of the Muslim World that resembles the corporate fascist states of western history. In fact, clan and tribal-based traditional Islamic society, with its fragmented power structures, local loyalties, and consensus decision-making, is about as far as possible from western industrial state fascism.”

30 See the paper “Confronting Islamophobia in the Education System” from the Insted consultancy, London, first published as a chapter in Confronting Islamophobia in Educational Practice, edited by Barry van Driel, Trentham Books 2004. It draws extensively on the report of the RAISE project, The Achievement of British Pakistani Learners, and on the 2004 report of the Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia. The paper starts by recollecting complexities and tensions in the
everyday life of schools. It then focuses on five main sets of issues: cross-curricular
review and development; teaching about Islamophobia; support for British Muslim
identity; explicit school policy; and school leadership.
    The paper expands on this as follows:
Cross-curricular review and development
The report of the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry, also known as the Macpherson Report (1999), contained 70 recommendations altogether. Of these, four were addressed to the education system. The report recommended that curricula throughout the UK should be amended with a view to their being ‘aimed at valuing cultural diversity and preventing racism’. The respective governmental authorities accepted the
recommendation in broad principle but did not tackle it with vigour or with rigour. The three greatest needs in the present context are for an overall framework of concepts and big ideas that should be taught, as appropriate, across all subjects and at all age levels;  guidance on teaching about racism and Islamophobia; and guidance on teaching about Islam. 
  With regard to the first of these needs, one interesting and potentially valuable approach
involves identifying themes that should permeate all teaching.
  One such list was developed in Derbyshire LEA and published in abbreviated form in a government guidance document issued in May 2004, Aiming High: understanding the needs of minority ethnic pupils in mainly white schools. A slightly different version appears in Here, There and Everywhere:  belonging, identity and equality in schools by Robin Richardson, Trentham Books 2004. In brief, the list identified the following themes:
“Shared humanity: issues of similarity, sameness and universality
All human beings, at all times in history and in all places in the world, have in common certain basic values, aspirations and needs – there is a shared humanity. Appreciating this is a crucial aspect of valuing diversityand is a necessary foundation for teaching about Islam and Islamophobia, as indeed about many other topics.
Difference and diversity: contrasting stories and ways of doing things
Through history and across the world, there are many different ways of
pursuing the same values and needs, and there are different points of view of the same event, based on different experiences and stories. Comparing and contrasting different ways of doing things, and different ways of seeing, viewing and interpreting, is a fundamental human activity. It is important to help pupils see diversity and difference as interesting and exciting, and indeed as valuable, rather than merely confusing and depressing.
Interdependence: borrowing, mingling and mutual influence
Countries, cultures and communities are not cut off from each other. On the contrary, there has been much borrowing, mingling and mutual influence over the centuries between different countries and cultural traditions. Events and trends in one place in the modern world are frequently affected by events and trends elsewhere. A recurring danger in teaching and learning about cultures is that pupils will get the idea that each culture is distinct from all others. The reality is that boundaries between cultures are porous and frequently unclear. Islam and ‘the West’ are not separate from each other but have developed, and continue to develop, in relation to each other.
Excellence everywhere
Excellence is to be found in all cultures, societies and traditions, not in ‘the west’ only. The ‘default position’ in the curriculum, however, can all too often be the
assumption that all significant human achievements arose in the so-called West – this is what is communicated, even though teachers do not consciously intend it.  The default position has the consequence of marginalising pupils who identify through their families with cultures and communities outside the West, and of miseducating everyone else.
Personal and cultural identity
Every individual belongs to a range of different groups, and therefore has a range of different loyalties. Also, and partly in consequence, all individuals change and develop. Pupils need to know and feel confident in their own identity but also to be open to change and development, and to be able to engage positively with other identities. Virtually all pupils currently in British schools will spend the rest of their lives in Britain. It is important that they should feel that they belong here and that Britain belongs to them. In this sense Britishness should be an important part, though not the only part, of their identity.
Concepts of race, racism and racial justice
Already at Key Stage 1 pupils need to appreciate that there is a single race, the human race, but that the world is full of ignorance, prejudice, discrimination and injustice. In the course of their time at school they should become familiar with theories about the sources and forms of racism; strategies, actions and campaigns to prevent and address racism, locally, nationally and internationally; equal opportunities in employment and the provision of services; the role of legislation; conflict, and the management and resolution of conflict; intercultural communication and relationships; and justice and fairness.
    The framework of key themes sketched above needs to be presented to pupils and students not only directly, as part of the explicit content of the curriculum, but also implicitly and incidentally in the exemplars, materials and cultural reference points that are used to illustrate abstract ideas; the texts, activities, materials and assignments that appear in skill-based subjects, for example ICT, design and technology, literacy and numeracy; the stories, subjects and situations explored in art, dance, drama and music; displays, exhibitions, signs and visual materials in classrooms and public areas; the use of visiting speakers, artists, musicians and storytellers; assemblies and collective worship; journeys and visits to places of interest; involvement in national projects; links with schools in other countries or other parts of Britain; and – not least – casual comments and conversations.”

31 The Citizenship component of The British National Curriculum requires teachers through its diversity strand to foster understanding and respect for cultural, racial, ethnic and religious diversity and provides well-developed principles and programmes of study to support this strand. The material provided by Derbyshire LEA and described in some detail in the previous note is a particularly fine statement of such principles.

32 For a detailed critique of prevailing educational “philosophy”, see my paper “Going Beyond Thinking Skills: Reviving an Understanding of Higher Human Faculties” presented at the 10th annual conference of the International Association of Cognitive Education and Psychology, University of Durham, England, July 2004. This paper is available on the website of the Book Foundation at http://www.thebook.org.

33 For example, a recent BBC radio 4 series on the Sikh community in the UK included a program in which an artistically talented Sikh student with talked about the prejudice she had experienced in secondary school from teachers and examiners who had devalued and even openly scorned her artwork because it was too “traditional” and “derivative” and did not conform to their Eurocentric modernist assumptions that all “creative” artwork must be “original” and “innovative”. In this example, the diversity strand of the Citizenship program of the National Curriculum is actively flouted through lamentable ignorance of other cultural traditions, although it may well be that this strand will more typically be simply given lip service in a curriculum overloaded with examinable content and taught by teachers deficient in inter-cultural knowledge and skills.
  I refer to a further example of poorly educated teachers in an article entitled “Why Teachers need to Understand the Benefits of Multilingualism” on the Contemporary Issues in Education forum on the Book Foundation website. This described research by the University of London Institute of Education, which brought together a number of studies on bilingual and trilingual children showing that children who speak at least two languages do better at school than those who speak only one. Why is it, then, that so many teachers still see multilingualism as a problem rather than an asset?
  Caroline Haydon, reporting these research findings in an article in the UK newspaper The Independent on 9/10/03, describes how a group of six-year-olds in a school in Hackney, London, proudly told her about their language skills. “And they were quite astonishing”, she says. “They speak Gujerati (and a little Urdu) to grandparents, they speak English and Gujerati to their (second generation parents), and a great deal more English to their siblings. And from age five they spend two hours a night studying religious texts in Urdu and the Koran in Arabic in the local mosque.”
  Haydon goes on to say that despite the assumption that children find it difficult to learn foreign languages, the fact is that at six they are quite capable of dealing with different scripts, and they enjoy learning to read in three languages from the age of five. “And they positively benefit from having their existing language skills recognised, and developed, by their schools. Most important of all, the consequent boost to self esteem helps them to work harder and do better in their school work.”
  Dr. Raymonde Sneddon of the School of Education and Community Studies at the University of East London has shown that, far from begin confused by different languages, the trilingual children she studied were accomplished speakers of English and performed better on a test of reading comprehension than children who spoke only English.
  Despite these findings, Sneddon’s study also showed that even where schools had positive attitudes about multilingualism, some teachers often persisted in underestimating the skills of multilingual children and wrongly believed that even bilingualism (let alone trilingualism) was a problem rather than an asset.
  Dr. Charmian Kenner, who researched six-year-olds growing up in London and learning to write Chinese, Arabic or Spanish as well as English, concludes: “The price of ignoring children’s bilingualism is educational failure and social exclusion.”

34 “As with biological species, languages and cultures naturally evolve and change over time. But just as with species, the world is now undergoing a massive human-made extinction crisis of languages and cultures. External forces are dispossessing traditional peoples of their lands, resources, and lifestyles; forcing them to subsist in highly degraded environments; crushing their cultural traditions or ability to maintain them; or coercing them into linguistic assimilation and abandonment of ancestral languages. People who lose their linguistic and cultural identity may lose an essential element in a social process that commonly teaches respect for nature and understanding of the natural environment and its   processes. Forcing this cultural and linguistic conversion on indigenous and other traditional peoples not only violates their human rights, but also undermines the health of the world’s ecosystems and the goals of nature conservation.”  ~ Statement on http://www.terralingua.org 
  Various studies have emerged in the last few years on the interdependence of linguistic and species diversity. See D. Nettle, Linguistic Diversity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) for an explanation of the fact that the map of language density in the world is the same as the map of species diversity - where there are more species per unit of area, there will be more languages too. See also Endangered Languages, edited by R.H. Robins and E.M. Uhlenbeck (Oxford: Berg 1991),  Endangered Languages, edited by L. Grenoble and L. Whaley (Cambridge University Press, 1998), Studies in Endangered Languages, edited by Kazuto Matsumura (Tokyo: Hituzi Syobo, 1998), and D. Crystal, Language Death (Cambridge University Press, 2000).

35 “It is a tragedy even more spectacular than the loss of plant and animal species,” says Professor Graham Furniss, Dean of the Faculty of Languages and Cultures at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London.  “Whole cultures are being wiped out. Language is the oldest part of human history - the original human capacity that differentiates us from animals. We set great store by maintaining our heritage in libraries and museums, but we’re seemingly happy to lose track of our human assets.” (See http://education.guardian.co.uk/egweekly/story/0,,825613,00.html). 
    According to James Crawford (Endangered Native American Languages: What Is to Be Done, and Why?) “the threat to linguistic resources is now recognized as a worldwide crisis…as many as half of the estimated 6,000 languages spoken on earth are “moribund”; that is, they are spoken only by adults who no longer teach them to the next generation. An additional 40 percent may soon be threatened because the number of children learning them is declining measurably. In other words, 90 percent of existing languages today are likely to die or become seriously embattled within the next century. That leaves only about 600 languages, 10 percent of the world’s total, that remain relatively secure – for now. This assessment is confirmed, with and without such detailed estimates, by linguists reporting the decline of languages on a global scale, but especially in the Americas, Africa, Australia, and Southeast Asia.”  (See Crawford’s article on http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/JWcrawford/brj.htm for a detailed bibliography, with special reference to the decline of Native American languages).

36 In discussing the rise of Islamophobia in Europe (“The Next holocaust”, cover story in the New Statesman 5 December 2005) Ziauddin Sardar makes the interesting point that “the ethos of the French revolution was never meant to be pluralistic. Its essential proposition was based on totalitarian uniformity – the scourge it unleashed as the ideological underpinning of modernity and European nationalism. It was also the bedrock of French colonialism which created parallel universes: the superior French and the inferior others.”

37 The word conformation is used by Muhammad Asad to translate the phrase fï ‘ahsani taqwim in Qur’an 95:4: Verily, We create man in the best conformation. Variant translations include We indeed created Man in the fairest stature (Arberry)  We created the human being in the highest station (Sells) and We have indeed created man in the best of moulds (Yusuf Ali).  Yusuf Ali’s note gives the various connotations of taqwim as “mould, symmetry, form, nature, constitution”. He adds:  “There is no fault in Allah’s creation. To man Allah gave the purest and best nature, and man’s duty is to preserve the pattern on which Allah has made him.” 

38 The notion of a ‘standard’ or ‘criterion’ is a key Qur’anic concept. Muhammad Asad translates the key term furqan as “a standard by which to discern the true from the false”. Asad’s note to Qur’an 2:53 advances Muhammad ‘Abduh’s interpretation (supported by 8:41) that this term, while describing “one or another of the revealed scriptures, and particularly the Qur’an itself”… can also be applied to human reason. Asad also claims that in 8:29, “it clearly refers to the faculty of moral valuation which distinguishes every human being who is truly conscious of God.” Such moral valuation, according to Asad, is ultimately provided by the “absolute criterion of revelation–and revelation alone.” In 2:53, the term refers to the “divine writ” revealed to Moses, but “since the Mosaic dispensation as such was binding on the children of Israel alone and remained valid only within a particular historical and cultural context, the term al-furqan relates here not to the Mosaic Law as such, but to the fundamental ethical truths contained in the Torah and common to all divine revelations.”

39 I am thinking here of relationship in the sense of contextualisation. To be sensitive to context is to relate to current needs and conditions and to reformulate concepts so as to make them accessible to the contemporary mind. This is not the same as the relativism which regards every level of reality as something “negotiated” and without any anchor in absolute truths or values.

40 Jefferson said that “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty”, and no doubt he would agree with Mark Perry’s critique of the “absurdity of John Stuart Mill’s assertion that ‘Liberty consists in doing what one desires’, an opinion which Hegel was to qualify as one of ‘utter immaturity’. Intemperance is not liberty but bondage.” (M. Perry, On Awakening and Remembering (Louisville: Fons Vitae, 2000), p. 285, note 109.)

41 The word doctrine is derived from Latin docere ‘teach’, from which the word doctor, originally meaning’ teacher’, and the word document, originally meaning ‘lesson’, also come. The word dogma comes from Greek dokein ‘appear, seem, think’, which also gives the element –dox in words like orthodox, heterodox and paradox. Both the Latin and Greek are descendants of the Indo-European base *dok-, (oldest form *dek) ‘take, accept’.  Latin decree, ‘to be fitting or suitable’, is also derived from the same root and gives us English decent and dignity.  These associated connotations derived from the underlying sense of what is ‘fitting’ can guide us in distinguishing the authentic notion of doctrine from that of its potential debasement in unyielding dogmas. It is instructive to note that the original sense of the English word fair (the Indo-European base *fag) was also “’suitable, fitting’. This connotation of something proportional or beautiful is still present in the multiple sense of fair in the English language (i.e. ‘just’ and ‘beautiful’) which closely parallels the meaning of ‘adl in Arabic. In short, authentic doctrine should foster the dignity and decency of man. Doctrine reduced to unbending dogma may no longer be ‘fitting’.

42 According to Thomas Jefferson, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be.”

43 The underlying sense of an ‘idea’ in English is that which is ‘seen’ or ‘perceived’, rather than that which is ‘thought’. It comes from the Indo-European root ueid-, meaning ‘look at, see’. This root gives us Sanskrit Veda, knowledge, as in the sacred books of Hinduism (vidya is ‘knowledge’ - i.e. ‘seeing’ in Sanskrit, and a-vidya is ‘ignorance’, or at best ‘imperfect knowledge’, literally ‘not seeing’ or ‘blind’). The same root ueid- gives us Greek eidos and idea, and Latin videre (‘to see’) from which our own English derivatives are legion.
  It is worth noting also that the original sense of the Greek word idea, used by Plato in the specialised sense ‘archetypal form’ or ‘ideal prototype’, is the ‘look’ ‘appearance’ or ‘image’ of something. The early English sense before 1398 was the Platonic ‘general or ideal form, type or model’.  The more general and abstract sense of ‘notion, mental conception’ is not found in English, as far as I know, before 1645.
  So, the underlying concept is that of ‘seeing’ not of ‘thinking’. As with so many words which had kept a measure of their original meaning in the medieval period, the sense of ‘idea’ as something ‘seen’ was reduced in the post-Renaissance world to something ‘thought’. A concrete experience, a ‘tasting’ (dhawq), was reduced to an abstraction.
  The word ‘ideology’, first appearing in 1796, further extends the degraded sense of ‘abstraction’.  Borrowed from French ‘idéologie’, it has the sense of the study or science of ideas; the political or social philosophy of a nation; and, later, the connotation of impracticable theorising and even visionary speculation. The meaning of a set of ideas, doctrines or beliefs was not recorded in English until 1909.

44 For more detailed discussion of this notion of universal primordial concepts embedded in the human mind-heart (‘aql) see my paper, “Going Beyond Thinking Skills: Reviving an Understanding of Higher Human Faculties” presented at the 10th annual conference of the International Association of Cognitive Education and Psychology, University of Durham, England, July 2004. This paper is available on the website of the Book Foundation at http://www.thebook.org.

45 The most obvious expression of diversity is the underlying elemental polarity in the whole of creation, for, as the Qur’an says,  “everything have We created in pairs” (51: 49), and “We have created you all out of a male and a female” (49: 13).

46 Qur’an 2: 31

47   “Together we must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose” (my emphasis) ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower, from his Farewell Address to the Nation, 17 January 1961.

48   The Mawaqif and Mukhatabat of Muhammad Ibn ‘Abdi ’l-Jabbar al-Niffari,  translated and edited by A. J. Arberry (Cambridge: CUP, 1935), p.111.

49 “I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.” ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower.

50 On 28 June 2005, a report aired on BBC radio highlighted the steep decline in applications from students to study Mathematics at higher level. The retreat from Mathematics is another symptom of the disillusionment with quantitative scientism, discussed in note 69, in relation to the report published by the joint Royal Society and Joint Mathematical Council working group in July 2000 which criticised the reduction in the teaching of mathematics to nothing but numbers.

51 The ‘A’ level standard in history is now regarded as such a narrow, limited and impoverished historical education that Cambridge University no longer requires undergraduate historians to have it.
Campaigners for a return to a more traditional History syllabus in British schools have branded as a “disgrace” for the state education system the results of a BBC poll (reported in The Independent of 5 August 2004)  which questioned 16- to 34-year-olds on their historical knowledge, and I expect that a similar poll might uncover even worse ignorance in the USA. History specialists have declared the results to be “really surprising” even if they do not necessarily share the apoplectic outrage of the traditionalists. We need not necessarily have sleepless nights at the finding of the poll that only half of all age groups knew that the marches of the Orangemen in Northern Ireland on 12 July mark the Battle of the Boyne. However, we perhaps ought to be seriously worried that 15 per-cent of 16- to 24-year-olds thought that these marches celebrated the victory at Helm’s Deep at the end of The Two Towers, the second book in Tolkien’s Trilogy, The Lord of the Rings. Furthermore, one in 20 thought it was Gandalf, the wizard, not Francis Drake, who had led the British fleet to victory against the Spanish Armada in 1588. One in 5, incidentally, thought it was Columbus. One in eight also thought Anglo-Saxon Britain had been overrun by Napoleon. We might want to concede that outraged traditionalists have an important point to make about the decline in historical knowledge, even if some of their concerns give undue prominence to facts over understanding and interpretation, and reflect dubious nationalistic obsessions.

52 Archaeology, so I understand, is the latest casualty in the UK, until now kept alive by only one examining board.

53 A Geographical Association survey has found that “geography has been dropped as a subject specialism by more than one quarter of initial teacher-training institutions”. Humanities simply do not have the status of core subjects such as English, mathematics and science, so “young teachers who want promotion will probably focus on core subjects” (Times Educational Supplement, 15 March, 2002). More recently, The Geographical Association has warned that pupils’ education is being damaged by teachers’ over-reliance on standard textbooks, (Times Educational Supplement, 2 May, 2003) largely because many of those teachers have not studied Geography themselves since the age of fourteen.

54 There is now growing panic over the freefall in the learning of modern foreign languages in the UK. A 2002 survey by the Association of Language Learning suggested that more than 1,000 schools in the UK were planning to drop foreign language lessons for pupils over 14 since the government decreed that it was no longer compulsory for pupils to take a foreign language at Key Stage 4, i.e. from age 14 (Times Educational Supplement, 25 May, 2002). In February 2002, the German, Italian and Spanish ambassadors had spoken out in an interview with The Independent about the “sad” standard of language teaching in the UK. Research from Sussex and Dundee universities, reported in The Independent of 6 August 2004 (“Monolingual Brits miss out on European study” by Dominic Hayes) found that among academics in the UK “the general feeling was one of exasperation, but also resignation, about the foreign languages scenario in the UK”. The report stated that “the problem of UK students’ generally poor and declining knowledge of foreign languages came up again and again”. The publication of this years’ (2006) GCSE results has confirmed the “spiral of decline” in the number of pupils taking modern foreign languages (particularly French and German) in British schools (See Guardian 25 August 2006, “A Tale of Many Tongues” by Professor Alan Smithers, Director of the Centre for Education and Employment Research at the University of Buckingham). The turnover of language teachers is higher than in any other subject because, as Professor Smithers reports, “they can be given a hard time”.

55 For further development of this theme, see my paper, “Going Beyond Thinking Skills: Reviving an Understanding of Higher Human Faculties” presented at the 10th annual conference of the International Association of Cognitive Education and Psychology, University of Durham, England, July 2004. This paper is available on the website of the Book Foundation at http://www.thebook.org.

56 Roland S. Barth, Improving Schools from Within (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1990), p.169.