Supporting BAME & Muslim Students
With all the challenges that are faced by the BAME students in England and especially Muslim students, this can have dire impact on their ability to educate, learn and become productive members of the society. Education is usually the first step in becoming self-sustaining in our World today. We have already discussed at length the biased faced by such students. Some of the limitations also are specific to religiously practising students. For example with lot of Muslim students, universities are now out of reach! However this is not common knowledge. As the university tuition fees have constantly gone up every year, most British students even with the help of their parents cannot afford to outright pay tuition fee. What most families do in this case is that they take out loans from either the government based schemes or banks. But with Muslims these loans are not an option as these are based on interest rates which means you pay back more money than your borrowed which is not allowed in Islam. Hence British Muslims can quickly lag behind in education compared to other students. This is particularly scary because statistics tell us 50% of Muslim households are in poverty compared to the national average of 18%.
However not all is lost! There are lots of charitable and business organisations that are doing fantastic work to support these disadvantaged minorities. What is sadly missing is any sort of government recognition around this issue. So we are starting this blog series to highlight organisations, businesses and even individuals who are working hard to change things for the better. We will start today with introducing a small privately run business that has done wonders for the Muslim community in UK.
Hidden Pearls has been at the forefront with us in leading the revolution in making our curriculum more accepting of differences amongst us all and embracing diversity and its beauty. Citizens for a Responsible Curriculum were approached by Hidden Pearls’s Director Abdullah in 2015 for joining forces for this noble cause. What does he say about it today? “This hasn’t been an easy journey but we believe we have done an excellent job in educating masses and making this a topic of national debate. We live in very difficult times. Post 9/11 era, where World has openly elected xenophobic and Islamophobic leaders & politicians like Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage and Marine Le Penn, Geert Wilders just to name a few famous ones in the last two decades, it is not easy to argue for diversity and openness but we owe it to our children and grand-children to leave a better, peaceful and open World for them. So we started our scholarship programme after long and intense discussions. Since we are a small business, it wasn’t easy and sometimes still isn’t but our leadership and employees agreed that we cannot stand by and do nothing as that is far more detrimental. We offered our first scholarship back in 2017 and have been going strong since then every year!”
We would strongly recommend you check out Hidden Pearls website for any trendy Hijabs or Islamic Gifts you would be interested in. Though they are based in London, UK but they have customers from all over the World. Their gifts for Muslims are very well loved by our Muslim members of staff. In fact every Ramadan, we look forward to receiving their Chocolate Dates! They also do personalised gifts for any of you who want to go that extra mile for a lovely gift. Their main line of business is Hijabs which includes different materials like Chiffon, Jersey, Silk and many others. Once again, check their online store out and let them know we sent you there!
Useful Links:
https://www.hidden-pearls.co.uk/hidden-pearls-bursaries/
https://www.mind.org.uk/information-support/tips-for-everyday-living/student-life/for-bame-students/
https://www.suffolkmind.org.uk/product/the-quran-emotional-health-an-introduction/