The international pan-Islamist Hizb ut-Tahrir celebrated reports of adherence to hardline Qur’anic principles being socially enforced by students in Danish high schools.
Although Denmark has adopted stricter immigration policies than many of its counterparts in Europe, it has apparently not escaped radical cultural changes as a result of the influx of Muslim migrants to the country in recent decades.
A bombshell report this month from Copenhagen’s Berlingske, which gained access to documents and administrators from three high schools in the capital region, found that the formation of “parallel societies in the education sector” in which groups of predominantly Muslim students are enforcing behavioural codes from the Islamic tradition on their fellow classmates.
In one secondary school, VUC Lyngby, some students were found to be monitoring others and assessing whether they were a “good and or bad Muslim”. Stunningly, the report found that the same school saw “people unrelated to the school showing up to possibly monitor Muslim students.”
At Ørestad High School, pupils were found to be harassed if they were found to consume alcohol, smoke cigarettes, or wear supposedly inappropriate clothing. The same school recorded instances of students being bullied on the basis of their sexual orientation, while students were “sharply divided on the basis of ethnicity.”
Meanwhile, Copenhagen Open High School recorded instances of students being “nervous” about being photographed, while Ørestad reported students who began wearing headscarves “suddenly” requesting that their pictures be removed from the school’s website.
The head of VUC Lyngby, Jesper Skibsted Als, told the paper that most instances of such social control were being carried out by students “with a Muslim background.”
“I think you can take any school or high school in Denmark and say that this is happening. It happens in society, and then it will also happen in a school,” he said.
Kefa Abu Ras, a spokesman for the Sisters Against Violence and Control organisation in Denmark, said that she believes the phenomenon to be a nationwide issue, but admitted that it is most commonly associated with schools with heavily “skewed” demographics.
“It most often takes place in the schools where students from the MENAPT countries (the Middle East, North Africa, Pakistan and Turkey, ed. ) are most represented,” she said.
Although the report on the state of the Danish education system sparked widespread concern, it was hailed by the Islamist Hizb ut-Tahrir (Party of Liberation) group, which advocates for the establishment of a global unified Islamic caliphate that adheres to a strict understanding of Sharia law.
A spokesperson for the group in Denmark, Elias Lamrabet, wrote on his Facebook profile that attempts to push back against the Islamic social enforcement were motivated by a “desire to deprive the Muslim youth of their Islamic identity, among other things in the high schools.”
“It must give sleepless nights for the haters of Islam, that it is the young Muslims themselves who are putting a stick in the wheel of the assimilation project,” he wrote.
“To you, my young brothers and sisters: May Allah protect you and give you even more strength to continue to stand firm in your Islamic identity with pride and enjoin good and forbid evil as Islam obliges us to. You are a shining example to other young people and we are many who are proud of you!”
Researcher at the University of Copenhagen, Niels Valdemar Vinding, said that groups like Hizb ut-Tahrir — which is banned in fellow European nations like Britain and Germany — are seeking to capitalise on debate surrounding social control in Danish high schools by appealing to Western freedoms to claim that Islam is being unjustly persecuted by restricting their ability to follow their religion.
“They don’t have to convince all the Muslims. If they can push just a fraction of the most extreme Muslims, then they can score an incredible number of points on that,” he told Berlingske.
Similar social control mechanisms have been documented in other European nations, with a major French government report released last year finding that the Muslim Brotherhood, in its decades-long campaign to advance the cause of Sharia, has placed agents throughout various levels of society in Islamic migrant communities with the aim of ensuring traditional practices are maintained. Such efforts have apparently borne fruit, with a November survey finding that younger Muslims are significantly more radical than past generations in France.
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