Left-wing media types risk playing the Trojan Horse extremists’ game

It’s a dangerous fiction to suggest that there was no plot by Islamist hardliners to take over state schools

The imagery could not be clearer. A schoolgirl looks startled. A white hand grabs at her jumper. Another pulls at her hijab. Well integrated – she wears pink nail varnish – and hard working – she clutches her exercise book – she is none the less under attack by a powerful, white adversary.

This photograph, published by the Guardian and the BBC, and used to market a play shown this week at the Edinburgh Festival, conveys exactly the message the writers of Trojan Horse want. The Trojan Horse affair, they seem to suggest, was no plot by hardline Muslims to convert secular state schools into austere Islamic faith schools, but a government campaign, motivated by “institutionalised racism”, that “demonised” Birmingham’s Muslim community.

This is a fiction, and a fiction that has been contradicted by multiple investigations. At one school, Park View, loudspeakers broadcast the adhan, the Muslim call to prayer, while children who did not participate in Friday prayers had “pressure” put on them to attend. One member of staff used a “microphone from a high window” to “shout at students” who did not pray. Worksheets told pupils that if a woman refuses sex with her husband, she will be struck down by the Angel Gabriel and condemned to hell for eternity.

It was alleged that, at one school, Anwar al-awlaki, the al-qaeda terrorist, was praised in assembly. Shady al-suleiman, described by one official report as “a preacher known for his extremist views”, was invited to address students at Park View. Children were allegedly told by one school’s acting principal that “white teachers do not have your best interests at heart because they’re non-believers”. At a primary school, children were warned about the dangers of “white prostitutes”.

Ofsted investigated and found an “organised campaign” to target secular schools “to alter their character and ethos”. Successful head teachers were forcibly removed, they said, and governors imposed “a narrow faith-based ideology in what [were supposed to be] non-faith schools”.

Birmingham city council asked Ian Kershaw, a school leader from the north of England, to investigate. He found “a determined effort to change schools, often by unacceptable practices, in order to influence educational and religious provision for the students they served”. The Trojan Horse Review Group, set up by Birmingham council and containing head teachers, council officers, local councillors, a Labour MP, a Tory MP, a representative from Birmingham Central Mosque, and the Bishop of Birmingham, endorsed the Kershaw report. They called it “a powerful, hard-hitting and credible exposition of inappropriate activity in a small number of schools in east Birmingham”.

Peter Clarke, a former assistant chief constable of the Metropolitan Police, was asked to investigate by the government. He found “clear evidence that young people [were] being encouraged to accept unquestioningly a particular hardline strand of Sunni Islam” which raised “concerns about their vulnerability to radicalisation in the future”.

School inspectors, an education expert and an experienced police investigator all reached the same conclusions about Trojan Horse. So did the then government – a coalition between Tories and Lib Dems – and Birmingham’s Labour council. As Brigid Jones, its deputy leader, says: “Kershaw and Clarke made clear what happened.”

Helen Monks, one of Trojan Horse’s writers, says she hopes to overcome the “assumed truth”. Instead, the play appears to be nothing more than an attempt to rewrite history. To counter the conclusions established by the official reports, Monks and her partner, Matt Woodhead, rely on interviews with, they claim, 90 witnesses. But they not only seem to ignore the conclusions of the inquiries, but the many testimonies included in each. They are also selective in what they take from their own interviews.

Senior education figures have told me that, when their accounts did not suit the play’s narrative, their interviews with Monks and Woodhead were terminated early.

The newly constructed history of Trojan Horse makes much of the fact that 14 of the 15 teachers and staff banned from schools by the Government later won their appeals. But this fact changes nothing: the case against the teachers and staff was not disproved but rejected because of procedural errors made by the now-disbanded National College of Teaching and Leadership.

In fact, Tahir Alam, the chairman of governors at Park View and alleged ringleader of the Trojan Horse campaign, remains banned for life from involvement in English schools. His appeal was rejected by a specialist tribunal in December. In March, Razwan Faraz, the deputy head of another of the Trojan Horse schools, had his case for unfair dismissal rejected by the courts.

Describing him as “evasive” and “not a credible witness”, the judge ruled that his homophobic behaviour meant his sacking was legal. This should hardly be a surprise, since Faraz had declared to 54 other members of the “Park View Brotherhood” Whatsapp group that gay people are “animals” and “satanic”.

The “Park View Brotherhood” group was established by Monzoor Hussain, the former acting principal of Park View. According to Peter Clarke, the conversations between its members give a “clear and disturbing insight into the attitudes” of teachers at the Trojan Horse schools.

There is plenty more evidence that proves Trojan Horse involved a campaign to transform, illegally, secular schools into austere Islamic faith schools. Telling the affected communities – poor, isolated and vulnerable to extremism – that it was instead an Islamophobic plot by government is wrong. Doing so will cause division, undermine faith in the authorities, and promote behaviour that is antithetical to British values. Deliberate or not, Left-wingers in the arts and media risk playing the extremists’ game.

Any attempt to rewrite the history of Trojan Horse must not be allowed to succeed.