They taught us it was OK for a wife to be raped
A FORMER pupil at Jamia al-Hudaa school in Nottingham says she was taught that women can be raped and beaten by their husbands and that music is the voice of the devil.
Sara Adam – not her real name – says the girls’ boarding school was ‘like a prison’ where girls are ‘entirely isolated from the outside world’ and simply ‘trained to become subservient housewives’.
She said: ‘We were not taught geography, history or music and in art we just did knitting. We were banned from drawing anything with eyes.
‘There was no sex education and we were taught that evolution was a belief of devil worshippers and atheists. Most of our day was spent doing Islamic studies.’
Miss Adam, who does not want her face pictured for fear of retribution from within her community, left Jamia al-Hudaa more than a decade ago. But the school, which has 237 pupils, continues to operate under the same leadership, despite whistleblowers repeatedly raising concerns.
Last month Aliyah Saleem, now 27, told the Mail how she was expelled from the school for owning a disposable camera.
She said she was taught that Jews and Christians ‘make God angry’.
Miss Adam recalled how when she was a pupil, two girls aged 14 and 16 were put into solitary confinement for three weeks after teachers suspected they were lesbians.
When she was 13, Miss Adam fell and broke her collarbone but no doctor was called and her parents were not informed. She was given paracetamol and told to ‘sleep it off’. This, she claims, was because her teachers did not want outsiders in the school.
Teachers would carry out regular spot-checks of the girls’ dormitories, and ‘lift up our mattresses and look underneath like they do in prisons’.
‘They found my personal diary,’ Miss Adam said. ‘I was told off by teachers because in the summer holidays before I joined the school, I wrote that I fancied a boy I saw on the Disney Channel.
‘The teacher said it was forbidden to like boys at my age – especially if they are “kuffars” [a derogatory term to describe non-Muslims].’
Her diary was eventually returned with a third of the pages torn out.
Miss Adam said: ‘We were basically trained to be mindless zombies who submit to their husbands. I was lucky because, after calling my parents every night in tears, they eventually pulled me out of the school.
‘It is disgusting that a school like this is still open – and my fear is there are many more.’