Shukri Hassan was 10 years old when she arrived in London from Somalia. Her father had died, and her mother stayed at home to look after her siblings: Shukri arrived in her new country, speaking no English, in the care of an older sister, who was 20.
London was a strange, complicated and very different world for her. And then – on top of having to learn English, master new subjects, make new friends and survive without her mum – she became a teenager, and had to cope with all that entails. “What I desperately needed,” she says, “was a place where I could go and hang out, and talk to Muslim girls who were maybe a few years older than me, who understood something of what I was going through, and who could help me make sense of it all.”
But there were few youth groups for young Muslims. Where they did exist, they catered mostly for boys – and sessions for girls tended to be run by much older women, who didn’t have the same life experiences as her. “What I really needed was someone who’d had the experience I’d had, who’d been born here or moved here as a child – someone who was juggling both cultures in the way I felt I was.”
Difficult issues
Today, Hassan is 26, and she’s a youth worker at the Froud Community Centre in Manor Park in east London, providing today’s female Muslim teenagers with exactly the sort of support that wasn’t there for her. “And the thing is that it’s a lot harder for them than it was in my day,” she says. “There are so many issues for young people today – sex, abortion, drugs, alcohol. All issues it’s very, very hard for Muslim teenagers to sort out, girls especially. So I think youth workers like me are more needed than they’ve ever been.”
Hassan has worked at the Froud Centre for the last three years, but over the last year, her work has been enhanced by a level 2 certificate (equivalent to GCSE) in youth and community work. To get that, she took part in a course designed specifically for Muslim women, believed by its organisers, the east London social action charity Aston-Mansfield, to be the first of its kind in the UK.
The six-month course, which is partly funded by Barclays Capital and aimed at Muslim women over the age of 21, involves three hours’ tuition a week, delivered at the YMCA George Williams College in Canning Town, east London, and a minimum of 80 hours at a placement in a youth setting, which students have to find for themselves. “By the end of the third course next year, we hope to have provided around 50 new youth workers, all Muslim women,” says the course tutor, Firzana Khan. “Almost all of them will go into or remain in youth work – and for some, the qualification will lead them to go on to a degree, and to perhaps eventually train other youth workers.”
Khan estimates that around a quarter of Newham’s residents are Muslim, yet Islamic youth workers are seriously under-represented – women especially. “It’s to do with social and cultural pressures, and it’s a real tragedy that there aren’t more Muslim women youth workers, because it means there aren’t enough role models for Muslim teenage girls, and that’s what we’re hoping our course can change. Many teenagers in Newham have mothers who grew up in Asia, in very different cultures, and with very different aspirations. We want to help today’s Muslim youngsters through a set of choices that’s very different from the set of choices their parents had.”
Sharifah Aliyah, 24, who did the youth and community work course last year, currently works for Redbridge Council in their highways and engineering service, but is committed to carrying on her voluntary youth work at a community centre, where she helps to run sessions during weekday evenings and on Saturday mornings. “The young people have music, they can play table-tennis, they can use the computer, there’s a quiet area where they can work,” she says. “And often, they just want to talk. And that’s important, because they’ve got a lot to deal with, and it’s very different for them from the way it was for their parents – just as growing up here was very different for me from the way growing up in Bangladesh was for my parents.”
Radically different
By the time both Aliyah’s and Hassan’s mothers were their ages, they were married with children. “Many Muslim girls today are living such radically different lives from their mothers: even 10 or 15 years ago, Muslim women tended to get married very young, to have children, and to see their lives as centred on the domestic scene,” says Hassan.
“When you do the sort of work we do, and you’ve had a different experience, you’re showing young people that there are other ways forward. I get youngsters who say, how did you do it? And it’s not just the girls either – it’s important that the boys see that women can have different roles from the ones their mothers maybe have.”
The course offers opportunities to discuss differences between one Muslim group and another – but on the whole, says Khan, Muslim people identify with their faith first and foremost, so the issues that arise in youth work tend to be across the board.
It’s not only in east London where female Muslim youth workers are thin on the ground. “We’ve had interest from Bradford, from other parts of London, and from other parts of the UK,” says Khan. “The course could be rolled out in many other areas – and the hope is that it will be pan-London, with other centres offering it in other areas of the city, by 2012.
“The feedback we’re getting from the youth workers we’ve trained, and from the teenagers they’re working with, is that they’re much-needed,” says Khan. “And while we’re seeing lots of cuts in youth services, we’re really hoping that we can convince people that our trainees are filling a vital role, and that more of them are urgently needed.”