The government in Spain’s Catalonia region has decided to institute courses to help prevent the spread of Islamic radicalism among young people, among other reasons for the fact that there are no teachers of Islam or figures of reference for students in the Catalan school system.
Training courses will be offered to school administrators, teachers and personnel in neighbourhoods considered at-risk for youth radicalisation.
“In Catalonia there is a big problem with Islamic education in public schools,” said Ignacio Cembrero, a 30-year Magreb expert with Spanish daily El Pais.
“There are 77,000 Muslim students who don’t have Islam religion professors. Where do they learn it? Often on the internet, in the worst possible place,” he said.
Cembrero recently wrote the book “La España de Alá” (“Allah’s Spain”, Esfera de los Libros publishers), a journey through Iberian Muslim neighbourhoods, whose residents are estimated at around two million people.
Of those, 550,000 live in Catalonia - nearly 10% of the region’s total population.
“Only small elites from the first migratory wave of the Magreb in the 1970s are integrated,” Cembrero said.
“For migrants from the 1990s, only ghettos have resulted, such as that of Ca n’Anglada, a neighbourhood in Terrassa (in the province of Barcelona), where 17,000 Muslims live, and not one Catalan,” he said. “And there aren’t any teachers in the schools, despite the 1992 government agreements with religious minority groups that stipulate the requirement to provide Muslim religion classes when at least 10 students request them. This needs to be rectified, and moderate, secular Islam must be taught,” he said.
Cembrero’s book cites a recent investigation by journalist Ana Taixidor of the Catalan broadcaster TV3, which documented how hundreds of Catalan youth are sent by their families for long periods to madrassas (Islamic religious schools) abroad to learn the Quran.
“Before the civil war in Syria, they went there, but they’ve since moved to the Gambia,” Cembrero said.
“The investigation documented 120 students from the Magreb or Sub-Saharan Africa, who didn’t speak a word of Arabic because they were nearly all of Catalan origin by birth, who were sent to Quran schools in Serrakunda in the Gambia,” he said. “And with what money, who paid for the trips? The parents who were interviewed said it was cheaper to send them to the madrassas than to keep them at home in Catalonia”.
Cembrero said the qualitative leap in the attacks in Barcelona and Cambrils proves that the risk of radicalisation in the Catalan ghettos is high.
“Unlike the attacks in London, Paris, or Brussels, the attackers weren’t lone wolves, but a well-organised cell that worked secretly for almost nine months with the ambition of hitting a large target,” he said.
“And the radicalisation to jihad of these young Moroccans, in this case, didn’t happen in social networks”.