This is a book about multicultural Britain and its discontents. Some of the issues it raises were recently highlighted in the independent review by Dame Louise Casey into Opportunity and Integration. ‘Discrimination and disadvantage’, she wrote, is ‘feeding a sense of grievance and unfairness, isolating communities from modern British society and all it has to offer’. This is the general context for more specific concerns about underachievement in schools – most recently expressed about white working class boys, but also associated with ethnic minority pupils, especially those from Muslim religious backgrounds. Indeed, Dame Louise connected the issues, writing that she also found other, equally worrying things, ‘including high levels of social and economic isolation in some places and cultural and religious practices in communities that are not only holding some of our citizens back but run contrary to British values and sometimes our laws’.

This narrative about disadvantage being self-produced within some communities has grown over the last decade. It is argued to derive from segregation and a lack of commitment to ‘British values’ of opportunity, democracy, the rule of law and religious tolerance. It is a criticism that has been directed at Muslim communities, notwithstanding that they show a higher degree of commitment to those values than do other minorities, as we shall see in the next chapter. In part, this follows from a general anxiety following the 9/11 and 7/7 terror attacks in New York in 2001 and London in 2005, and increased emphasis on countering violent extremism, especially from groups operating in the name of Islam.

However, this narrative also received further impetus from events in Birmingham that came to the public attention in March 2014 involving an alleged plot by conservative and hardline Sunnis – ‘men of Pakistani heritage’, as one report put it – to Islamicise a number of state-funded schools where there were significant numbers of Muslim pupils. Attention was focused on one particular school, Park View Academy, and its associated Park View Educational Trust (PVET), incorporating two other schools, Nansen Primary and Golden Hillock secondary. The affair also drew in many others who were suspected of extremist activity – with 21 schools in Birmingham subjected to snap Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) inspections and included in the various inquiries into the affair.