French politicians attack UK Ofsted chair with unfounded 'Islamist takeover' claims
When Sir Hamid Patel was appointed interim chair of the UK's school regulator Ofsted last week, few in the country thought it would become international news.
Patel, a distinguished British school leader who was knighted in 2021 for services to education, was not an unusual choice for Ofsted chair.
He is chief executive of Star Academies, a hugely successful multi-academy trust that runs 36 schools across the country, largely in deprived areas.
Yet almost immediately a barrage of racist and anti-Muslim posts began attacking him on social media platform X, formerly, but still commonly, known as Twitter.
Most criticism of his appointment has come from anonymous far-right accounts, focused purely on his Muslim faith and Arab-style clerical clothing.
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Over the weekend, a flurry of news reports revealed that Patel had encouraged Muslim students at his faith-based schools to read the Quran and wear hijabs, and had allowed a school visit in 2010 from the chief imam of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Sheikh Abdul-Rahman al-Sudais.
Despite online attacks, British politicians have not been among those criticising Patel. Politicians from a neighbouring country, however, have unexpectedly joined the criticism.
French far-right attacks
Over the past several days, politicians and media commentators in France have expressed outrage over the British Muslim educator's appointment.
Francois-Xavier Bellamy is a member of the European Parliament and vice-president of the right-wing Les Republicains party.
In a post in French on X last Saturday, Bellamy promoted a false conspiracy theory that Patel is part of an "Islamist project" to take over British institutions.
'The Islamist project involves taking control of institutions, starting with schools'
- Francois-Xavier Bellamy, French MEP
"Ofsted, the public body responsible for inspecting schools in the United Kingdom," Bellamy wrote, "is now chaired by Mufti Hamid Patel, a religious leader and advocate of avowed Islamism.
"As a school principal, he required his students to recite the Quran, wear the hijab, and make them listen to violently antisemitic preachers."
He added: "The Islamist project involves taking control of institutions, starting with schools. Our democracies have turned against themselves. Europe must finally emerge from its naivete."
There is no evidence that Patel has ever advocated a religious or political ideology.
Jean Messiha, a prominent figure on the French far right and the former spokesperson for 2022 presidential candidate Eric Zemmour's Reconquete party, added his voice to the mix.
Messiha, who has nearly 300,000 followers on X, posted a photo of Patel, captioned: "I present to you the Inspector General of National Education of Great Britain."
Major French news publications waded in. Jules Torres wrote in Le JDD, a French weekly, that Patel promotes "radical Islam" and is implementing an "Islamist project".
Another paper, Le Figaro, questioned whether Patel is an Islamist. And a barrage of French social media posts hurled racist abuse at the Ofsted chair.
Muslim schools in France
In France, Muslim denominational schools are increasingly under attack from the government.
According to the National Federation of Private Muslim Education (FNEM), there are 127 Muslim denominational schools in France, but only 10 are fully or partially under contract.
In comparison, 7,045 Catholic schools are under contract, enrolling two million students each year (one out of six).
Since a 2021 law consolidating the principles of the republic pushed forward by President Emmanuel Macron to fight "separatism", 11 schools have been closed due to "radicalisation".
The legislation has been accused by its detractors of being discriminatory against Muslims by broadening the grounds for closing mosques and dissolving community organisations, restricting home schooling and introducing an offence of "separatism" punishable by up to five years in prison.
The administrative court in France's Lyon recently refused to reinstate the contract of a state-funded Muslim high school, Al Kindi, accused of "undermining the values of the Republic".
About a year ago, similar reasons were given by the Nord prefecture to sanction Averroes, the main private denominational Muslim high school under contract in the country, located in the northern city of Lille.
Despite several appeals, the school has not managed to reverse the decision.
While Ofsted has defended Patel's appointment as chair, attacks on him have persisted in the press.
An opinion column in The Times by Melanie Phillips on Sunday asked if Patel believes that he should "enforce Islamic precepts and practices on the rest of society" - purely on the grounds that "religiously conservative" Muslims supposedly generally "view it as their duty".
Phillips also attacked Patel for his assertion in 2022, reported by Middle East Eye on Friday, that there was no evidence of a "systematic strategy to assume control of schools" in the now-debunked Birmingham Trojan Horse affair.
The episode saw a number of successful Muslim teachers wrongly targeted and smeared, before misconduct cases against them collapsed in 2017.
In 2022 a podcast investigation revealed that then-education secretary Michael Gove was told by officials that counter-terrorism police had decided the original letter claiming there was a takeover plot was a hoax.
But Gove, it was reported, "used the letter to sanction numerous high-level investigations into potential extremism in Birmingham schools anyway".
In England, unlike in France, there is no such thing as a secular state school.
All publicly funded schools, including academies and free schools, have a statutory duty to provide a daily act of collective worship and provide compulsory religious education.
In practice this is unenforced and collective worship is rare in state schools.
Patel, however, is an avowed champion of the practice: "Collective worship has been a mainstay of British education for many years and remains crucially important in all schools," he wrote in 2022, "irrespective of which faith is at their foundation, or whether they are secular in nature.
"Giving young people opportunities to explore the healing that faith brings is an important part of our work."
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