Lycée-Collège Averroès is éeCollègeAverroèa private Muslim junior and senior high school/high school and sixth-form college in Lille, France. It contracted with the state and receives government subsidies, doing so since 2008; it is the only Islamic secondary school in France to do so. The Lycée is located in adjacent to a mosque.
History and mission
Opened in 2003, it is the first Muslim secondary school established in France. The school originally had 11 students.
The school was named after a 12th-century Andalusian-Arabian philosopher Ibn Rushd (also known as Averroes 1126-1198). The school's origins date back to 1994 when the Al-Imane Mosque began teaching 19 Muslim girls who were expelled from their public school for refusing to remove their headscarves. The school was officially established in 2003. It now has several hundred students and has been ranked as one of the top schools in the country.
The school aims to provide Muslim students with an alternative to the French public school education in the same way that French Catholics, Protestants and Jews do. In 2008, the school was granted the status of "sous contrat" meaning the French government pays teacher salaries and the school is required to follow the national curriculum. It began receiving government subsidies in 2008.
it had 340 students; the majority are low income and/or are of immigrant ancestry. Tuition differs depending on how much money a student's parents make, but it is about £1,000 British pounds annually.
By 2013 the school had a 100% pass rate in the French Baccalaureate. David Chazan of The Times wrote that this caused "soul-searching" in a country which emphasizes secular education.
Leadership
The first headmistress of the school was Sylvie Taleb who later resigned in 2006.
The school's current director is El Hassan Oufker. Its deputy director is Makhlouf Mameche, who also serves as the vice president of the Union of Islamic Organisations of France (UOIF), which has been criticized for its connections to the Muslim Brotherhood.
The president of the association that manages Averroes High School, Amar Lasfar is also the president of the Union of Islamic Organizations of France and the rector of the Lille-Sud mosque.
Funding
Before being granted the "sous contrat" status, the school relied on donations from the Muslim community of Nord-Pas-de-Calais.
The school relies upon large donations to expand its capabilities. While students do pay a small fee to attend the school, this is not enough to cover its expansion. The school's teachers are paid for by the state under the "sous contrat" designation.
Much of the school's funding comes from wealthy patrons such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The Saudi Development Bank paid 250,000 euros and Qatar Charity paid 800,000 euros for the school's most recent expansion.
Connections to the Muslim Brotherhood and UOIF
The opening of the school raised concern in secular France where even private religious schools are required to use the same core curriculum, can only teach religious subjects as electives, and where prayer must be optional. There was particular concern that the Al-Imane mosque is affiliated with the Union of Islamic Organizations in France, a powerful group that promotes a strict interpretation of Islam that includes grass-roots proselytizing, personal purification, and seeks to influence every aspect of a Muslim's life. The UOIF has been described as inseparable from the Muslim Brotherhood. In a report commissioned by the French government, the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe, as represented by the UOIF are the source of half of the institutional projects in France aiming to re-Islamize the younger generations and maintain their cultural specificity while creating a Muslim citizenship.
The school's leadership consists of the president and the vice president of the UOIF thus creating an inevitable tie between the ideologies of the UOIF and the school.
Controversies
In the wake of the 2015 Charlie Hebdo attacks, French citizens grew increasingly concerned about the risk of fundamentalism in their schools. This, of course, turned an eye towards Averroes High School, as the only "sous contrat" Muslim school in France. An investigative story by France 2 found that the school regularly presented opportunities for open dialogue advocating freedom of expression and discussion of terrorism, particularly in the philosophy class of Soufiane Zitouni.