At the Jamia Mosque on Victor Street in this racially and religiously tense town, Idris Watts, a teacher and convert to Islam, tackled a seemingly mundane subject with a dozen teenage boys: why it is better to have a job than to be unemployed.“The prophet said you should learn a trade,” Watts told the students arrayed in a semicircle before him. “What do you think he means by that?” “If you get a trade it’s good because then you can pass it on,” said Safraan Mahmood, 15. “You feel better when you’re standing on your own feet,” offered Ossama Hussain, 14. The back and forth represented something new in Britain’s mosques: a government-financed effort to teach basic citizenship issues in a special curriculum intended to reach students who might be vulnerable to Islamic extremism.Written by a Bradford teacher, Sajid Hussain, 34, who holds a degree from Oxford, the new curriculum is being taught in some religious classes here in a city that is increasingly segregated between South Asians and whites. The pilot effort in Bradford has the backing and the financing from the Labor government as part of a hearts-and-minds campaign that it hopes will eventually spread to other cities and help better integrate the country’s mainstream Muslims into British culture. Approximately two million Muslims, mostly of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin, live in Britain.Since four British Muslim suicide bombers attacked the London transit system in July 2005 and two other major terrorist plots were uncovered last year that British Muslim men were suspected of planning, British officials have been struggling with how to isolate the extremist Muslim minority from the moderate majority.One of the virtues of the curriculum in Bradford in applying PM Gordon Brown’s vision, according to his aides, is that it is taught by forward-leaning imams and is based on matching messages from the Koran to everyday life in Britain.But as much as the government likes the curriculum, it has faced opposition from some Muslims. Some of the specifics of the curriculum met with disapproval, too. In lesson plans provided to imams by Hussain, the teachers were asked to pose questions to their students based on recent events in Britain. After a heated meeting with the critics in Bradford, Hussain agreed to remove the examples from the curriculum. “They were perhaps a little too frontal,” he said. But the important point, Hussain said, was to show Muslim students that their religion provided some answers to issues they confronted every day.
