The Trojan Horse Affair: The Islamophobic hoax masquerading as Home Office policy

I don’t know why I felt so rageful after binging the Trojan Horse Affair podcast in two days, but I did. I’ve spent the last 20 years investigating the misconduct of governments all over the world, and so the idea that miscarriages of justice take place is nothing new to me.

After all, my own colleague at CAGE, Moazzam Begg, was tortured and placed on a rendition flight to Guantanamo Bay, all with the complicity of the UK government. Yet, I found myself deeply troubled by everything I listened to.

I was aware of the Trojan Horse case as it happened in 2013, largely because friends of mine lost their jobs at the Park View School that was at the centre of the fictitious suggestion that there was an ‘Islamist’ takeover of the school. Yet, the Serial podcast spelt out what many of us felt all along, that the suggestion of a Muslim plot was easy to consume for the wider public, because no matter how ludicrous the suggestion, they were prepared to receive it.

"The Serial podcast spelt out what many of us felt all along, that the suggestion of a Muslim plot was easy to consume for the wider public, because no matter how ludicrous the suggestion, they were prepared to receive it"

Having now listened to the podcast a second time in order to prepare to write this piece, I think that it is one of the things that stands out most – how utterly easy it was for the narrative of the enemy within to take hold.

When the first leak of the Trojan Horse plot arrived in the mainstream media, it was through Richard Kerbaj and Sian Griffiths, writing for The Times.

They centred a letter that was written from an anonymous source, that ostensibly set out a plan to take over schools in Birmingham in a five-step process, citing examples of actions taken in other schools. At the time of publication, the public reaction to the story was visceral and wall to wall.

The letter’s authenticity was taken for granted and the notion that Muslims were involved in some contrived effort to ‘Islamise’ schools was taken as fact.

Neither Kerbaj nor Griffiths provided any indication they checked the authenticity of the letter, rather the letter’s existence was given a national platform by virtue of their leak.

The Trojan Horse Affair podcast, hosted by journalists Hamza Syed and Brian Reed, centres their investigation into a seemingly important but somewhat missed question: who authored the so-called Trojan Horse letter? Hamza Syed was still a journalism student when he started asking questions about the authenticity of the letter. He understood the impact this entire story had on Muslim communities not only in Birmingham but across the UK.

The consequences that flowed from the narrative of an ‘Islamist’ plot resulted in people losing their jobs, a school with an exceptionally good reputation for producing outstanding students starting to fail again, and significant changes in policy and law through the UK government’s counter-terrorism and counter-extremism strategies.

Syed was only a student when he started investigating the letter’s origins, and it is commendable that Brian Reed was interested enough, and trusted in Syed’s instincts, to team up with him for a platform such as Serial.

There is a great deal going on in each episode, but it is the careful way in which Syed and Reed take the listener on a journey through the layers of complicity and cupidity that one gets a full picture of how a system of power coalesced to protect those who did wrong, but who also simultaneously protected a convenient state-led narrative of subversive Muslims plotting behind closed doors.

At the centre of the investigation, rests the character of Rizvana Darr, the Muslim headteacher of Adderley Primary School in Birmingham. A long-term conflict she had with four of her teaching assistants (three Muslim and one non-Muslim) resulted in a bizarre situation in December 2012, where Darr received the resignation letters of all four assistants in her mail – the three Muslims in one go and the other one (Hilary Owens) separately beforehand.

Darr called Owens into her office and explained that she had accepted her resignation and that she was to leave. Owens and the other teaching assistants, all tried to explain that they never sent in their letters of resignation, but despite their protestations, Darr continued to expel them from the school.

"All of these consequences flowed from a plot that never existed except in the minds of a bigoted nation that was ready to believe that Muslims pose an existential threat"

Syed and Reed pore through documents and conduct interviews to get to the heart of what has taken place at Adderley Primary School. From everything they can tell, and from what Birmingham City Council officers and the police believe from that time, Darr was the most likely originator of those letters.

Darr is told by the Council that she must reinstate the teaching assistants and that if she does not, they will not cover the legal expenses incurred from any litigation brought against the school. Soon after, not only is an audit conducted by the Council that finds Darr at fault but also the police begin investigating the headteacher of criminal wrongdoing.

It is near the end of the process, when Darr faced the final stages of the investigation into her, that the Trojan Horse letter arrived on the desk of the Birmingham City Council chief, Sir Albert Bore. This letter changed everything. From that point onwards, the anonymous letter – which the police, Birmingham City Council, and those who were alleged to have been behind the plot all decried as a fake – was systematically used in order to vilify Birmingham’s Muslim population.

Darr went from being the subject of an investigation to being seen as a victim of the plot. While officials kept on reiterating that they placed little to no stock on the Trojan Horse letter behind the scenes; publicly, in the media, in policymaking circles and within the courts, the letter was treated as absolutely crucial.

Hamza Syed refers to the instrumentalization of the letter by Rizvana Darr as being a form of ‘racist judo’, knowing the community’s weakness, and using the power of that weakness against them. The Trojan Horse letter emerges at a very convenient time for Darr, and it is precisely that timing that gives Syed and Reed the impetus to investigate further.

While there is enough evidence presented that there was never any plot to take over schools in Birmingham, officials still act as if there was something to be concerned about. The journalists do one very effective thing over the course of their interviews, they asked simple questions like “what actual evidence did you have” of whatever x, y or z suspicious behaviour was being alluded to.

From Sir Albert Bore to Detective Bannister, they are all very light on actual wrongdoing beyond a suspicion that is founded on there being too much Islam going around in Birmingham and its schools. This is best exemplified by Sue and Steve Packer, who played an important role in confirming the suspicions of those in power by complaining about their former colleagues at Park View School.

"Sue Packer, in particular, is exposed as living an Orientalist fantasy of being the white woman who is attempting to save brown women from dangerous brown men"

They had brought a complaint to the British Humanist Association, an organisation with a long history of Islamophobic discourse, who then passed on their complaint to the Home Office.

When the Packers were interviewed about what they had actually seen, it turned out to be little more than their own prejudiced interpretations of Muslim life. Sue Packer, in particular, is exposed as living an Orientalist fantasy of being the white woman who is attempting to save brown women from dangerous brown men. Her defence of, my best friend is Muslim, does little to offset the highly bigoted views she held of her colleagues and the way Islam was practised by those around her.

Ultimately there is so much going on that it is hard to keep track of who has been harmed as a consequence of this fake letter.

Students found that a school they loved and that had done its best to give them the best opportunities in life was dismantled. The governors of their school were given lifetime bans, and their teachers sacked.

Of the four teaching assistants from Adderley school who were accused of being involved in some orchestrated Salafi plot to remove Rizvana Darr, only Hilary Owens (the non-Muslim) was found to not have been involved in the plot – this was despite all four having been accused based on the Trojan Horse letter.

The UK government tightened its Prevent laws, ultimately using the Trojan Horse hoax as a means of bringing about the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015, a piece of legislation that would make it mandatory for all public sector workers (including healthcare workers and teachers) to effectively report on children they felt susceptible to radicalisation. This in turn would lead to the reporting of thousands of Muslim children each year.

All of these consequences flowed from a plot that never existed except in the minds of a bigoted nation that was ready to believe that Muslims pose an existential threat.

Rather than placing their trust in what they actually knew of the Park View School governors and teachers, as a matter of fact, politicians from Prime Minister David Cameron, his Home Secretary Theresa May, through to the Education Minister Michael Gove, deployed the full extent of the machinery of the state against Birmingham’s Muslims, sending the message that their belonging is forever conditional – that no amount of success and achievement will ever be enough to assuage the fear and loathing that is the foundational block of contemporary British racism.

If Hamza Syed and Brian Reed did any service from this podcast, it was to make this invisible hegemonic truth, very much visible again.

Dr Asim Qureshi is the Research Director of the advocacy group CAGE and has authored a number of books detailing the impact of the global War on Terror.

Follow him on Twitter: @AsimCP