Such was the system devised and established throughout Muslim domains to cover the status of religious minorities. They were rayas, literally “flocks”, organised into millets, or nations, self-governing communities preserving their own laws and usages under a religious head responsible to the central power for the administration and good behaviour of his people… Now this was to apply to all Christian communities throughout the former Byzantine Empire. As a conquered people they were no longer to have the privilege of first-class citizenship or the ultimate sanction of political freedom. But within such limitations their opportunity to enjoy the benefits of peace and prosperity was to remain unimpaired and indeed, in the expanding commercial field, to become greatly enhanced. In these terms Mehmed now required that, side by side with the ulema, the Islamic authority, there should reside within the walls of Istanbul the Greek Orthodox patriarch, the Armenian patriarch, and the Jewish chief rabbi.1
This is how Lord Kinross sets out the method by which the Ottoman Empire governed its diverse communities from the time of the conquest of Constantinople by Mehmed. The millet system endured to end of that empire.
Katharine Birbalsingh has been in the news lately. Darling of the containment Right, “Britain’s strictest head teacher” undoubtedly runs a successful school, the Michaela Academy in London (as measured by exam results).
A problem has arisen. Michaela runs a policy of “strict secularism”; stopping all any form of school prayers throughout the school day. Unsurprisingly, this has led to problem coming from school’s Muslim children, and as a consequence the school finds itself subject to a High Court challenge that the religious rights of those pupils are not being upheld.
The “right-wing” commentariat has come out strongly in favour of the school. Fraser Nelson (editor of the Spectator and Daily Telegraph columnist) leads with “The ‘trial” of Katharine Birbalsingh is a battle for the future of Britain”. Spiked comes to her defence, stating that “Michaela’s focus has always been on integration”. And, of course, UnHerd runs an interview with (repeat the mantra) “Britain’s strictest head teacher”.
Perhaps we should be starting to be wary?
Of course, I don’t expect anybody on “our side” to be against a more disciplinarian approach to education. Good; although let’s not forget that the broad standards required by the school would have been thought commonplace in British schools a couple of decades ago. And it’s not as is such standards are not also lacking in schools all around the country; the liberalisation of the teaching environment is a very real problem.
The reality is this: Michaela has formed a successful disciplinarian regime precisely because of its diversity, not in spite of it. To paraphrase Empson, it has learnt a style from a despair.
Multiculturalism is enforced, because it has to be, in order for the natural religious and ethnic groupings not to assert themselves. This is particularly apparent with the arrangements for school lunches. Children eat in deliberately mixed groups. According to Nelson, “At first, meat was served. But Hindus avoided the beef and Muslims the pork; pupils started to segregate. To avoid this, lunch at Michaela is now all vegetarian. Cohesion is crucial, as is equality before the rules.”
What other outcome could be expected under the asymmetry of intolerance? What of course is completely understated here - an argument that is just not made - is the possibility of a school lunch policy that simply asserts the norm of Englishness (albeit with a vegetarian option for those not willing to conform).
As if this was not enough, Birbalsingh goes further. This is from her statement in the Telegraph:
At Michaela, those from all religions make sacrifices so that we can maintain a safe secular community. Some Jehovah’s Witness families have objected to Macbeth as a set GCSE text. Some Christian families have asked that we do not hold our GCSE revision sessions on a Sunday. Some Hindu families have objected to dinner plated touching eggs. And our Muslim families have signed up to the school knowing that we do not have a prayer room. We all eat vegetarian food so that we can break bread together a lunch where children are not divided according to race or religion. We all make sacrifices so that we can live in harmony. 2
Emphasis mine.
Let’s leave aside the fact that she uses explicitly Christian imagery (“break bread”) to normalise this rhetoric. Of course, it is welcome (and surely not an accident) that she is being allowed to speak about the costs of diversity (“sacrifices”) in a frankly open way - a way indeed that was the first thing to strike me about this tale. But note this is not an argument for a “secular” community, but a firmly multicultural one.
The entire mainstream Conservative press has, it seems, come out in favour of Michaela multiculturalism: all shall be vegetarian, and none shall pray to whatever god. And when we read that the Muslim families challenging the school’s prayer ban are funded by legal aid, we are made to feel even more self-righteously that Katharine is in the right.
I think something else is going on. I think the Michaela case is at the vanguard of a shift in how the state seeks to deal with the cost of diversity crisis that I call: from multiculturalism to milletisation.
First, note again that Birbalsingh is open about “sacrifices”. (Of course, these sacrifices have been imposed on, not consented to by, the British people - that is another story.) Second, note that her method of negotiating these costs is a multiculturalism of compromise: a sharing of the costs which can only result in a lowest common denominator basis of interaction, perfectly summed up in the school’s vegetarian lunches. And finally, note the vocal support of this Michaela multiculturalism by the mainstream right, even as it ships in unprecedented levels of immigrants and looks to opposition.
My guess is that we’re in the dying days of this pretence of integration, and that (whichever way it goes in the courts) the Michaela case will be seen as a forerunner of a new, much more separate method of dealing with diversity. The change of regime from Tory to Labour dovetails neatly with this; the (losing) voices of the likes of Fraser Nelson will be supplanted in time by a political and social consensus that keeps communities apart rather than forcing them together.
This, of course, is the more traditional way of dealing with diverse communities in an empire (and not just the Ottoman empire). It has not happened to date for a very good reason: modern Britain is not an empire that has been won be conquest from outside, but has been betrayed from the inside. Michaela’s pupils are now roughly half Muslim. London is of course now famously majority-minority. Milletisation could not have been attempted before the forces of diversity were strong enough to build communities numerous enough to make the strategy work. As analogy I like to run is: if you owe the bank a thousand pounds, its your problem; if you owe the bank a million pounds, its theirs. Perhaps this explains the insane levels of immigration we have seen over the last few years: it may be a last push before real crackdowns happen under the next Labour government. Remember, only Nixon could go to China.
I also can’t help but wonder in this regard how the “15 minute city” agenda ties in with this. There are plenty of reasons why it suits the climate agenda, of course, but one I don’t see talked about is that is promotes the physical separation of different communities into convenient demarcated areas. We’ve seen this very clearly in Leicester. We can all use the granular mapping tool from the census to plot how divided communities are by race and religion, by the street. (Who is that person on mine whose first language is Welsh?) Now, add in the erection of moveable barriers and immovable wooden planters. Come times of tension, such as the next India-Pakistan World Cup match, routes could be closed at short notice, at least to cars.
It’s also worth thinking about how all this (if I am right) meshes with what we call, after Academic Agent, “putting away the woke”. It seems clear that many of the more visible aspects of “woke” arise exactly because of Michaela multiculturalism, and the more milletisation we get, the less it will be of issue. Frankly, there are probably not a huge number of (English) English teachers lining up to apply for jobs in Batley schools right now. I predict the separation will continue under the next administration. Increasingly separate schools will lead to reduced tensions across the board. Michaela will fragment into a Muslim variant and a post-multicultural Indo-Christian one, and both types of parent will be happier under it.
It’s not that this vision is necessarily a better one for our society, although the benefits may be pushed in in short term. Remember the outcome of the millets of the Ottoman Empire: up to one and a half million Armenians dead (proportionately more than European Jews killed in the Holocaust); the burning of Smyrna and large scale population exchanges between Greece and Turkey. There’s no way of stopping ethnic and religious tensions; just better and worse ways of managing them, from time to time.
“The Ottoman Empire”, Lord Kinross, p. 101 (Folio Society, 2003)
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/01/17/katharine-birbalsingh-stop-muslim-prayers-racial-harassment/