Islamia College was founded in 1984 and was located in Rylands Estate, Cape Town, South Africa as the Habibia Girls College under the leadership of the community-based board of directors. The school started with 2 grades and 47 students in the storeroom of Habibia Masjid and now the institute is based in Rondebosch East and has grown to a campus with five schools.

Islamia now has a joint student population of over 1699 students, with multiple successes in the fields of academia, sport, humanities and technology. Islamia College has been placed in the upper echelons of educational institutions in Cape Town.

School Structure

Islamia College is made up of 5 institutions; the pre-primary school, primary school, Girls’ High School, Boys’ High School, and a Hifth Academy. Each of these institutions has its own principal who forms part of the Islamia Governing Council (IGC) along with the CEO of Islamia College. The aim of the IGC is to make sure of the smooth running of the school and includes aspects of education, maintenance, development and communications. Reporting to the principals are the subject Head of Departments in the various institutions.

Mission and Vision

Islamia’s mission aims at promoting excellence through the provision of holistic education, compatible with Islamic principles and practices and empowering students to live harmoniously in multicultural society.

Islamia’s vision is to produce well balanced, enlightened, empowered, independent-thinking, conscientious human beings, subscribing to Divine guidance and emulating the ideals of prophetic examples who play a constructive role as compassionate, informed individuals in society.

Contacts

Address: 409 Imam Haron Road, Lansdowne, Cape Town, 7800, South Africa

Phone: +27 21 696 5600

Email: info@islamia.co.za

Website: https://islamiacollege.co.za

Umme Kalsoom, a 16-year-old student in Burnley, Lancashire, started the campaign after she felt “vulnerable” when expected to take off her hijab while playing sport at her school.

The young Muslim was struck by the attention her campaign achieved, said: “I did it to bring comfort to myself and the other girls. I didn’t know it would go this far.”

As the school has since changed its policy, Umme Kalsoom hopes her campaign will have a nationwide impact.

“(The hijab) makes me feel like myself,” she said. “Taking it off to do something I love didn’t enable me to feel my full self and I lacked confidence without it.”

Islam sees hijab as an obligatory code of dress, not a religious symbol displaying one’s affiliations. In general, Islam promotes good health and fitness and encourages both men and women to engage in physical activity to maintain healthy lifestyles.

Source: AboutIslam.net

Penny Appeal launched the Holiday Hunger program several years ago and has been serving food bags, which include meat packs, non-perishable food items to thousands of children.

The Wakefield-based charity donated the meals to children in Yorkshire and Humberside, the Northwest, West Midlands, and East and West London, during the school holidays.

“We have been working with Penny Appeal for a while now and the work it is doing regarding tackling holiday hunger is very important,” said Mohammed Azum, Head of Carlton Bolling, a secondary school in Bradford, Great British Entrepreneur Awards reported.

More information on: AboutIslam.net

In an effort to overcome that perception, the Council of Islamic Schools in North America, the nation’s only accrediting agency for Muslim schools, is changing its curriculum. It will ask its 78 accredited or member schools, located across 24 U.S. states, to arrange meetings between their own students and those at other, non-Muslim schools. “People in this country, they want to know about Muslims, they want to know what’s going on inside Islamic schools,” said CISNA Director Sufia Azmat.

The Council is asking its educators to launch more volunteer projects outside the Muslim community, attend local government meetings and create a database of alumni to track their graduates’ success. The move comes at a time when Muslims are under intense scrutiny, largely the result of extremist attacks carried out in the name of Islam in the United States and abroad.

A report by the Council on American-Islamic Relations released this month showed a 57 percent spike in the number of anti-Muslim hate crimes recorded in the United States last year compared with 2015. In the 10 days following U.S. Election Day on Nov. 8, physical and verbal attacks against Muslims ticked up 6 percent compared to the same period the prior year, the Southern Poverty Law Center said.

The details of the U.S. Islamic schools’ new curriculum are still being hammered out, but the purpose is clear, CISNA’s Azmat said: “Be open to outsiders.” A recent study of about a third of the nation’s Muslim high schools conducted by the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia found that the students did not vary much from their non-Muslim peers in terms of interests and sense of being American.

Many of the nation’s Islamic schools have kept a low profile since the first school opened in the United States roughly 30 years ago, partly to avoid harassment. The outreach efforts could face similar resistance to those of U.S. public schools that have attempted to teach about Muslims in social studies classes. Some parents in San Diego, California, and Chatham, New Jersey, recently objected to lessons about Muslims.

Continue reading at: Reuters

Catherine E. Lhamon, the department’s assistant secretary for civil rights, said the department plans to work with schools and communities to promote inclusive school environments for everyone. “Students of all religions should feel safe, welcome and valued in our nation’s schools,” she said in an announcement.

The news was welcomed by Muslim advocates. Terrorist attacks in Paris, San Bernadino, and Orlando by individuals who claimed allegiance to the Islamic State, and a presidential candidate who has proposed a ban on all Muslims entering the country have fueled a wave of anti-Muslim sentiment. Frightening headlines and rhetoric on the campaign trial are seeping into school lunch rooms and hallways and being felt by Muslim children, advocates said.

On December 31, outgoing US Education Secretary Arne Duncan and current US Education Secretary John B. King Jr. sent a joint letter to school leaders across the country enlisting their help to protect against discrimination and harassment of students based on their race or national origin and religion. The letter said that historic levels of refugees fleeing violence in Syria and other international and domestic events are creating “an urgent need for safe spaces for students.” It said students “especially at risk of harassment” include those “who are, or are perceived to be, Syrian, Muslim, Middle Eastern, or Arab, as well as those who are Sikh, Jewish, or students of color.”

The letter said educators have a chance to make a “real difference” in the way communities respond to these events, and it encouraged them to help “students grapple with current events and conflicting viewpoints in constructive ways, and not in ways that result in the targeting of particular students for harassment or blame.”

The department’s Office of Civil Rights enforces Title VI of the Civil Rights Act which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin in programs receiving federal funding. Discrimination based on religion is included when it is related to someone’s actual or perceived shared ancestry or ethnic characteristics. Last year the office received more than 10,000 complaints of alleged discrimination, including some relating to religion.  Those cases were typically not reported separately, as they will be in the future.

In districts found to have hostile environments, federal officials helped to improve harassment policies, training, and school climate surveys. A better understanding of the prevalence of religious discrimination will help policy makers and educators understand the scope of the problem and protect more students, educators say.

The California Chapter of CAIR found in a 2014 survey of youth that more than half — or 55 percent — of American Muslim students surveyed reported experiencing some form of bullying based on their religious identity while at school.

Continue reading at: The Washington Post