Muslims and Monsters

It is always interesting to see what children are thinking – and they are often thinking something completely different to what you think they should be thinking. I had been accompanied by my youngest child Amaani the previous year, but realised that was a bad idea only when I was asked at the end of my talk if my baby girl was in fact baby Jesus.

The 5 and 6 year olds voted as to whether God was the same as or different to Allah, and listened happily to stories of various Prophets. They enjoyed watching a portion of SoundVision’s Adam’s world video, watching the wonders of creation and empathising with the child puppets reluctantly learning to share. But after all the talking and listening came the questions: ‘Where do Muslims go to school’, asked one (a particularly bizarre choice of question, given there were 5 Muslims in the class). ‘What do Muslims wear?’ asked one girl, unable it seemed to make sense of my current choice of clothing or the regulation uniform of her Muslim peers. ‘Are all Muslims brown?’ asked a little boy. The teacher suggested that the boy look at the colour of the speaker to help answer this…he responded ‘Well, she is brown too, she has just drunk a lot of milk this morning’ – clearly I must have drunk pints of the stuff! And my favourite: ‘what is the weather like in their world?’ I think the class thought that Muslims live in a little bubble somewhere outside the M25. The Muslim children did not fare much better, suggesting the Qur’an was written in Pakistani (sic) and that you need to wear shilwar khameez to be able to attend the mosque. I left thinking all these children are in need of a severe dose of cultural diversity training.

So I headed back home only to discover this was a problem within my very own four walls. 3 year old Asim seems to have divided the world into Muslims and Monsters. As he was poised with an empty yogurt pot in his hand by an open window, he stopped to ask if it was the right thing to do to throw rubbish out of a window (personally, I’m just glad he asked), and I was pretty swift to respond. So he reached his own conclusions: Muslims don’t throw rubbish out of the window, Monsters do. In addition to his theory on rubbish, I noticed Asim has also developed a similar theory relating to toilet habits (don’t ask!). I felt Asim was ready for the next stage of cultural understanding, so I taught him about a third category of people called Christians, and now he has sorted out his friends and relatives into Muslims, Christians and Monsters, I am pleased to say the third category is in fact currently empty, but my gut feel is that he wants to fill it with all of those baddies whom Spiderman and Mr Incredible are attempting to combat. This cultural division is certainly an improvement but I am hoping he will get a slightly more balanced and complex sense of the British population as he matures.

My daughter Safiyya, age 7, has always had a much more integrated view of people. She had been told a couple of years back that that she was black by a young school friend of hers so had a look in the mirror then had a good long look at the rest of us. She happily declared that her friend was wrong – actually, she was a bit white and a bit brown. Daddy was a bit brown and a bit black and Mummy was a bit white and a bit yellow. Despite her rather surprising conclusions, I do think having such a multi-coloured outlook on life must be the way forward – and that we could do with ditching the ‘Monsters’ category altogether.

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