he topic is extremely sensitive. Proof of this is the fact that the people who have agreed to make a statement have requested anonymity. ‘Any wrong move can be misinterpreted. I don’t want my child’s throat to be cut,’ said Alicia, a school headmaster. ‘We’ve gotten to the point where teachers are afraid to talk about certain things. There are topics that have become taboo.’
For some years now, teachers have been observing how scientific, historical and generally accepted concepts are being rejected: Limitlessness in maths, the theory of evolution, secularism, the equality of men and women, the human body… are said to be at odds with the values of an Islam. ‘All I hear in class is ‘C’est haram’ (meaning ‘it’s forbidden’ in Arabic),’ says Maud, who has been a history teacher for 39 years. ‘Some students tell me that I have no right to talk about Islam, that I’m not authorised to talk about religion.’
The university is not spared from this phenomenon either. Recently, the rector of the VUB (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) warned about the impact of religion on Muslim students: Refusal to support the principles of the democratic rule of law, wearing short-sleeved clothing within the Health degree programme, occupying rooms to pray without permission, etc.
‘It’s intense what you sometimes hear. During the terrorist attacks, pupils clapped in class and I found the name of the Tunisian who shot two Swedes on the blackboard. Some support the behaviour of Afghans towards women,’ continues Alicia, who was called a racist by a father after she made a comment to her daughter because she was wearing the abaya, which is forbidden according to school rules. ‘I end up having to explain how to live in Belgium, which is not my job.’ When she was a teacher, she also had to deal with parents who didn’t want to send their children to her because she is blonde and blue-eyed, and experienced pressure from older children who checked whether the little ones were observing Ramadan, and the murder of Samuel Paty in France for showing a caricature of the Prophet Mohammed in class shook the world of teachers to the core. ‘Teaching has become dangerous. Even if we know our students, there is a feeling of insecurity because we don’t know if they would tell a brother, an uncle or a cousin,’ Maud points out. “My relatives have already told me that there will be a bounty for me if I continue.”
The refusal to listen to certain teachings can go as far as threats and harassment. Bernadette, an economics teacher, experienced this four years ago. ‘Several Albanian pupils asked me if I had my husband’s permission to work. Once I took a pupil out because he was disrupting the lesson. There were five of them waiting for me by my car after class and one of them pulled out a knife. I don’t know what would have happened to me if the PE teacher hadn’t turned up,’ she sighs. ’I cried before and after school. The next year, I refused to go back to school.’ Religious education teachers are not spared either.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has added fuel to the fire. ‘There is ignorance and prejudice. As soon as it comes to Jews and Israel, everything is hyped up, everything is manipulated because they have no idea. When I tried to explain how the state of Israel came about, I was accused of proselytising and one student threw an uncontrollable tantrum. There is no way to have an objective discourse anymore,’ says Maud, who last year had to witness how a dozen Muslim pupils refused to go on a school trip to the Fort Breendonk concentration camp. ‘They are taught to hate Jews from a very early age. That’s anti-Zionism, as they call it, and not anti-Semitism.’
In contrast to France, there are no figures in French-speaking Belgium on radical behaviour by schoolchildren in connection with religious matters. At the end of 2023, Flanders looked into the issue and found that the number of reports, statements and radical behaviour by pupils had risen from three or four per year in 2019 to three or four per day in 2023. alibre.be