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Episode: The Trojan Horse Affair - Part 1
Author: Serial Productions & The New York Times
Duration: 00:59:38
Episode Shownotes
A strange letter appears outlining a plot by Islamic extremists to infiltrate Birmingham schools. Hamza and Brian visit the supposed mastermind of the plot, and he tells them he did take over a bunch of schools – just not for the reasons in the letter.To get full access to this
show, and to other Serial Productions and New York Times podcasts on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, subscribe at nytimes.com/podcasts. To find out about new shows from Serial Productions, and get a look behind the scenes, sign up for our newsletter at nytimes.com/serialnewsletter. Have a story pitch, a tip, or feedback on our shows? Email us at [email protected]
Full Transcript
00:00:03 Speaker_00
These first two episodes of The Trojan Horse Affair are free. But to hear the whole series, you'll need to subscribe to The New York Times, where you'll get access to all the serial productions and New York Times shows. And it's super easy.
00:00:15 Speaker_00
You can sign up through Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And if you're already a Times subscriber, just link your account and you're done.
00:00:25 Speaker_05
This is my first story as a journalist. I hadn't planned for it to be my last story, but it probably will be, given what's happened in the years I've been working on this.
00:00:36 Speaker_05
It's about a letter that surfaced in my city and had huge consequences for Britain. This letter launched four government investigations, changed our national policy and ended careers. It's hurt some of the country's most vulnerable children.
00:00:52 Speaker_05
A letter that many people who've seen it agree is ridiculous. It's unsigned, undated.
00:00:58 Speaker_17
Doesn't it look like a serious document? It just seemed comical. What the hell is this? I remember looking at it for some time thinking, what on earth is this?
00:01:05 Speaker_14
The infamous letter. Was it written on parchment? In blood?
00:01:09 Speaker_13
So you're presenting me with a document that turned our lives upside down.
00:01:16 Speaker_05
I first learned of the letter in 2014. I wasn't a journalist then.
00:01:21 Speaker_05
I was a doctor who'd quit medicine, living in Birmingham, England, making my breakfast at 1pm, listening to the news, when I heard about the discovery of a secret communique between Muslim extremists.
00:01:33 Speaker_05
They were discussing a plot to infiltrate our city schools and run them on strict Islamic principles, potentially with the aim of radicalising students.
00:01:42 Speaker_05
Someone had forwarded the letter anonymously to the local government, the Burma City Council, but it was missing the first and last page, so it was unknown exactly who wrote it or who they were sending it to.
00:01:53 Speaker_05
According to the intercepted pages, the plot had a codename, Operation Trojan Horse. I have to admit, when this story about Muslims in Birmingham first broke, as a Muslim in Birmingham, I was alarmed. It sounded possible.
00:02:11 Speaker_05
Kids across Britain, across Europe, were flying off to Syria to join this group called ISIS. And Birmingham has been home to quite a few terrorists. My neighbour was a terrorist.
00:02:20 Speaker_05
The guy who killed five people and then tried to run into parliament with a knife. He did his planning in a flat above the Persian restaurant across the street from me.
00:02:28 Speaker_05
So I wasn't surprised watching as over the next several months Operation Trojan Horse snowballed into a huge national story.
00:02:34 Speaker_10
A number of schools in Birmingham have been infiltrated by hardline Muslims.
00:02:39 Speaker_05
Headlines like Islamist Plot, Jihadist Plot, and the government responded with full force. The Prime Minister got involved, convening his cabinet to discuss the threat.
00:02:51 Speaker_05
The national government sent in a bunch of investigators, including Scotland Yard's former head of counter-terrorism, to look into two dozen schools in majority Muslim areas of Birmingham. Like I say, it was all very frightening.
00:03:05 Speaker_05
Until a few months later, when the various investigators finally started reporting their findings, they'd found no plot called Operation Trojan Horse. They'd seen no signs that anyone had been radicalized, no evidence of violence or planned violence.
00:03:22 Speaker_05
They didn't bring any terror charges against anyone working at the schools they'd looked into. But despite all of that, despite finding no plot, investigators still concluded that something terrible was happening in Birmingham schools.
00:03:36 Speaker_05
The letter helped them uncover that Muslims had influenced the schools in a dangerous way. Government officials snapped into action.
00:03:44 Speaker_10
Things that should not have happened in our schools were allowed to happen. Our children were exposed to things they should not have been exposed to.
00:03:51 Speaker_02
The fallout has been huge. Prime Minister David Cameron, as we said, is calling a special meeting of the government's extremism task force.
00:04:00 Speaker_05
Officials removed educators, revamped schools and renamed them. They mandated all schools in the country start teaching what they termed British values to make kids less susceptible to extremist ideas.
00:04:12 Speaker_05
They beefed up Britain's counter-extremism laws by making public sector workers like teachers and doctors part of the state's surveillance apparatus to now inform on their co-workers and students and patients.
00:04:24 Speaker_05
Today, if you stop someone on the streets of Britain and ask them what happened in Birmingham schools in 2014, if they follow the news, they'll likely tell you that a bunch of Muslims were up to no good.
00:04:40 Speaker_05
There is another version of this story though. It's one less told and far less popular. That version of the Trojan horse affair is that nothing happened. That these bearded brown educators were set up and the nation fell for it.
00:04:58 Speaker_05
But it's always seemed to me that there's a simple way to figure out what really happened here. The letter. Even with all the government inquiries, no authority, none of the investigators, ever figured out who wrote it.
00:05:11 Speaker_05
Remarkably, none of them even tried. And that, to me, seemed like a pretty glaring oversight. The reason a country was looking at these schools with suspicion, the reason they were investigating them at all,
00:05:24 Speaker_05
was because this dodgy letter showed up portraying the people who worked there as nefarious plotters, claiming they were sneaking Islam into schools like a Trojan horse. The letter is what put the idea in authorities' heads.
00:05:37 Speaker_05
So I didn't see how you could know what Operation Trojan Horse was or wasn't unless you got to the bottom of the Trojan Horse letter, who wrote it and why. A few years later, I decided to go to school for investigative journalism.
00:05:54 Speaker_05
But my professor wasn't completely sold on a story I wanted to report for my student project, Operation Trojan Horse. This was investigative journalism. He wanted me to unearth something new, not rake over some years-old story.
00:06:08 Speaker_05
As a doctor, though, I'm familiar with the concept of a second opinion. So the night before my master's was set to start, I went looking for one.
00:06:19 Speaker_16
A doctor came to see me for a second opinion. One night in fall 2017, I'm in a theater in Birmingham. After my podcast S-Town came out, I went around doing some Q&As. Afterwards, people sometimes come backstage to chat.
00:06:34 Speaker_16
And so this guy comes in, introduces himself as Hamza Syed. He said he was changing careers to become a reporter. He was beginning a master's program in investigative journalism the next day, actually. And he wanted some advice.
00:06:47 Speaker_16
He was speaking fast, like I might walk away at any moment.
00:06:50 Speaker_05
To be fair, I was told that I had five minutes with Brian Reid, after which I'd be squirted out the building.
00:06:55 Speaker_16
I did not know that. Anyway, Hamza ran through the Trojan Horse story for me, elevator pitch style. I'd never heard of it, but a guy I was with backstage, a producer I know from the BBC, he had. And he jumped in as Hamza was talking.
00:07:08 Speaker_16
Yeah, yeah, Trojan Horse, he said. That was a big thing a while ago. Some bad stuff went down. Muslim educators have been up to no good. But it was cleared up. Old story.
00:07:17 Speaker_16
There was something Hamza said, though, which afterwards I couldn't get out of my head. He kept talking about a letter which had set off this whole cascade of consequences, whose origins were still a mystery.
00:07:31 Speaker_16
So when I got home to New York, I read the letter. It looked like a caricature of a missive between two terrorists, filled with Islamophobic tropes about conniving and scheming Muslims. It's missing pages.
00:07:43 Speaker_16
Parts of it are too dark to read, like it got jammed in the Xerox machine. It instructs the recipient to destroy it after reading.
00:07:50 Speaker_16
It struck me as a funky document for a government to take seriously, especially because from what I read, the government hadn't even looked into who wrote the letter or why. There was a strange lack of curiosity about this instigating document.
00:08:04 Speaker_16
I thought to myself, it seems like somebody should try to figure out who wrote that thing. And then I thought, well, wait, this journalism student's doing that. Maybe I ought to give him a hand.
00:08:13 Speaker_16
And here we are, years later, at the end of a dizzying, farcical, and enraging investigation. in which one mystery led to another, led to another, tracing this letter's path of destruction across multiple continents.
00:08:26 Speaker_16
In defiance of many unhappy officials and some aggressive attempts to shut our reporting down. From Serial Productions and the New York Times, I'm Brian Reed. I'm Hamza Sayed. Presenting to you the most elaborate student project ever.
00:08:40 Speaker_16
This is The Trojan Horse Affair.
00:09:01 Speaker_05
I got the call from Brian while I was in class. My phone started ringing from a New York number. I asked my professor if I could take it. He said no. I asked if I could go use the toilet. He said yes.
00:09:14 Speaker_05
I answered, and Brian told me he wanted in on my investigation, but that I would need a producer. I said yeah, sure, all casual. I had no idea what a producer did. Soon, he started getting in touch with missions for me to complete.
00:09:29 Speaker_05
First one, he'd secured a recorder for me in Birmingham and said there was something I had to do.
00:09:37 Speaker_16
It was supposed to be a basic bread and butter assignment. Go record a meeting. Hamza had seen an event advertised called Trojan Horse The Facts, where some of the educators who'd been accused of carrying out the plot would be speaking publicly.
00:09:51 Speaker_16
They insisted the Trojan Horse affair was just an Islamophobic stitch-up. The event hashtag was TrojanHoax, and they were trying to clear their names. They'd never gotten their lives back on track after the story died down.
00:10:03 Speaker_16
They'd lost their jobs and been made into pariahs by the national media. But afterwards, Hamza calls me and says when he showed up at the spot, a community center, at 5 p.m., the receptionist told him,
00:10:13 Speaker_05
It's been cancelled. The event's been cancelled.
00:10:16 Speaker_16
Did they give you any, well wait, did they give you any other information?
00:10:19 Speaker_05
No, they just said it's been cancelled and that was it. I said, no, this is, you know, I spoke to the event organiser a few days ago. They said, yeah, it got cancelled today.
00:10:28 Speaker_05
So I felt like an idiot, to be honest, because I stand there with this big, you know, mic stand that looks like a fishing rod. I got my box of equipment. This can't be a good omen, I thought, to mess up your first journalism assignment.
00:10:41 Speaker_05
But then, more people started showing up, confused, like me. Until a man in one of those safety vests swings around the corner, tells us to follow him, and takes us up the street to a wedding hall, where everyone was gathering instead.
00:10:53 Speaker_05
It's a lot of people, maybe over a hundred. And as I explain to Brian, while I'm setting up the microphone, I start catching all the whispers in terms of what happened. And it turned out that the original venue
00:11:07 Speaker_05
had received phone calls from the national newspaper, specifically this guy, Nick Timothy.
00:11:12 Speaker_16
He's like a reporter or a publisher? What is he?
00:11:14 Speaker_05
He's a columnist, I think, for The Telegraph. and not just any old columnist. Nick Timothy used to be the Chief of Staff to the Prime Minister. He was essentially Theresa May's right-hand man.
00:11:26 Speaker_05
I spoke to the guy who ran the community centre, who told me Nick Timothy had actually emailed, not called.
00:11:32 Speaker_05
He wouldn't let me see the email, but according to others at the meeting, the implication was, if you hold this event, I will associate you with extremists in the newspaper. And the community centre pulled the plug.
00:11:43 Speaker_05
Nick Timothy denies contacting the community centre and says he doesn't know who did or what they said.
00:11:49 Speaker_05
But he wrote a triumphant column about the planned meeting, which I'd missed because I was on YouTube all day watching instructional videos and had to use my recorder, in which he noted, quote, when the Daily Telegraph discovered this and contacted the owners of the venue, they rightly cancelled it.
00:12:04 Speaker_05
He went on to suggest the event organizers were extremists and described the proposed meeting as, quote, a shocking attempt to deny the Trojan horse scandal, and quote, the people behind Trojan horse are trying to do it all over again.
00:12:18 Speaker_05
And right under our noses.
00:12:21 Speaker_04
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Trojan horse or hoax, the discussion and debate.
00:12:29 Speaker_05
So here they were, the teachers and school volunteers, allegedly behind Operation Georgia Horse, along with their defenders, academics and activists and an educational barrister and a union leader, packed in this wedding hall instead.
00:12:43 Speaker_01
I am really, really concerned that simply holding a public open meeting like this becomes controversial. Just the fact we are holding this meeting seems to be an act of resistance right now.
00:13:01 Speaker_05
The people at this meeting called for an inquiry to correct the record on the Trojan horse affair. They believed the government had set them up.
00:13:08 Speaker_05
So the fact that a former chief of staff to the prime minister, Nick Timothy, went out of his way to attack a grassroots event at a community centre, years after the Trojan horse affair, it just reinforced their suspicion, and mine quite honestly, that there was something dodgy that authorities were still keen to hide.
00:13:25 Speaker_15
And then it was like a witch hunt.
00:13:28 Speaker_16
Heads were rolling this way and that way. Hamza sent me the recording of the meeting.
00:13:32 Speaker_16
I listened to it and I was interested to hear that one of the people who got on stage and spoke was the man named repeatedly in the Trojan Horse letter as the mastermind of Operation Trojan Horse, the plot's alleged ringleader, a longtime school volunteer named Tahir Alam.
00:13:49 Speaker_13
I've never been a danger to anyone. I've never hurt anyone. I've never have any police case against me or anything of the kind. I wasn't running a plot. You know, we are very proud of what we did.
00:13:58 Speaker_13
I do not regret nor apologize for anything that I've done. There was nothing clandestine, hidden or sinister about what we were doing. We were very open and very transparent.
00:14:08 Speaker_16
So when I landed in Birmingham to begin reporting, that's who we decided to go to first, to hear Alam. We figured, we're looking to find the source of this mysterious letter. Might as well start with the guy it outed as an extremist plotter.
00:14:22 Speaker_16
Is this about to be the first radio interview you've ever done? Yeah. I need to be schooled beforehand, man.
00:14:30 Speaker_05
What do you mean? Like, how so? Well, I mean, if this was me flying solo, I'd be like, well, whatever. I'll just do it my style, you know? But this is, this is, you know. And what is your style? Do you have a style? I don't know.
00:14:40 Speaker_05
I feel like I'm a lot... How many of these have you done? None. But I have an idea in my head of what my style could be. I think you're a lot more sensitive than I am, put it that way. Do you know what I mean? Like, you're... I'm the more sensitive one?
00:14:53 Speaker_05
So don't you think so? I don't know. I don't know you that well.
00:14:57 Speaker_16
I wonder what we'll be wearing.
00:15:07 Speaker_04
Hello. Hello.
00:15:09 Speaker_16
Ill-fitting button-down shirt, khakis.
00:15:11 Speaker_13
Welcome. Thank you. We're going to be in that room there. This room?
00:15:15 Speaker_16
We kick off our shoes. He shows us to a room at the front of his place.
00:15:18 Speaker_13
Sorry, you have to sit on slightly uncomfortable chairs there.
00:15:21 Speaker_16
Hamza and I squeeze behind two school desks meant for children. There are protractors lying around, a whiteboard with sketches of geometric shapes, a creative writing workbook titled Descriptasaurus.
00:15:32 Speaker_16
Tahir's converted this room from his garage into a tiny makeshift classroom, where it appears he tutors students quietly.
00:15:39 Speaker_16
Because one result of the Trojan horse letter is that the government has banned him from ever volunteering or working officially in schools again.
00:15:47 Speaker_16
Tahir's in front of us in his office chair, confident, erudite, framed by his bookshelf filled with texts about Islam and British history. I pull a copy of the letter out of my backpack.
00:15:57 Speaker_13
You know, it's a completely anonymous letter, undated, claiming that there is a plot to take over and Islamize the schools in Birmingham led by Tahir Alam, which is myself. But I speak from a vantage point where I actually know the truth.
00:16:16 Speaker_13
I know the reality.
00:16:19 Speaker_16
Tahir denies being an extremist. He denies engineering a plot.
00:16:23 Speaker_16
He says the reality is that rather than corrupting schools as a radical conspirator, he, a first-generation immigrant from a poor Pakistani family, was responsible for one of the most miraculous school turnarounds in British education.
00:16:38 Speaker_16
Until, he says, the letter arrived and destroyed him.
00:16:44 Speaker_05
The story of this turnaround is not a secret. It's one Tahir shared with journalists before, not that it's done him much good in terms of clearing his name. But this backstory does explain why the Trojan horse letter was so persuasive.
00:16:58 Speaker_05
Because, Tahir told us, some of what was in that letter was true. The hair begins a story one night in 1993 when he's watching TV and a show caught his attention.
00:17:11 Speaker_13
I just happened to be just lying on the sofa really and the program came on. It was a documentary, part of the BBC series Panorama. Nine times out of ten I would switch to something else. But I was just sitting there and I started watching.
00:17:26 Speaker_12
Britain's new underclass is Asian and it's Muslim. A once tight-knit community is now in crisis with drug abuse, crime and a family breakdown on the increase.
00:17:36 Speaker_13
And the title of this documentary was Underclass in Perda.
00:17:40 Speaker_12
In tonight's panorama, we investigate an underclass in Perda.
00:17:45 Speaker_13
Perda meaning, you know, cover. Meaning a veil, if you like. Underclass in the veil, yeah.
00:17:53 Speaker_12
In tonight's programme, we lift the veil on this new underclass.
00:17:59 Speaker_05
The documentary opens with shots of brown men skulking around dark, cobblestone streets in a Muslim neighbourhood in what the correspondent calls the Muslim ghetto.
00:18:09 Speaker_12
At night, it doubles as the local red light district. It's a seedy world of vice and illicit drug dealing. Lurking in the shadows is a new Manningham phenomenon, the Pakistani pimp.
00:18:25 Speaker_05
He's like a regular pimp, but in a kurta. Part of the documentary takes place in Tahir's neighbourhood in Birmingham, called Alum Rock, on the east side of the city. It's one of the poorest areas in England and is majority Pakistani and Muslim.
00:18:40 Speaker_05
If you're not from Birmingham and you're not brown, you may have heard that Alum Rock is a great place to find a terrorist. If you're not from Birmingham and you are brown, you'll have heard Alum Rock is a great place to find a wedding dress.
00:18:53 Speaker_05
Admittedly, this BBC documentary is racist in a 90s TV kind of way, but it had a big impact on Tahir, because amidst the awkward brown-gazing, some truly sobering facts emerge.
00:19:04 Speaker_05
The presenter reports that Pakistani Muslims are incarcerated at disproportionately high rates.
00:19:09 Speaker_05
She says they have some of the highest rates of joblessness, they're suffering from devastating health issues, terrible housing, domestic violence, with one underlying cause of it all, a lack of education. This is a number I found most shocking.
00:19:24 Speaker_05
About 20% of white students were leaving school without any qualifications, meaning they failed to pass the exams that would essentially be the equivalent of a high school diploma in the US.
00:19:33 Speaker_05
And that rate, 20%, was roughly the same for most people of colour as well.
00:19:38 Speaker_12
But for Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, an astonishing 50% hold no qualifications whatsoever.
00:19:47 Speaker_05
50%, half of us were basically failing school. That hit the hair hard.
00:19:52 Speaker_13
That the extent of education failure was so bad that we were at risk of creating an underclass of Muslims who were basically uneducated, prone to crime and unemployment. So I kind of sat there and it made me feel guilty, actually.
00:20:11 Speaker_13
Guilt because I was one of the few people who made it from my family, one of the first ones to make it into to university and to have a good job and so on. But there was also a sense of humiliation, really, because I was from this community.
00:20:28 Speaker_05
Tahir's family brought him to England in the 70s when lots of people from Kashmir would move in here, largely because the British designed this huge dam that flooded swaths of land and displaced tens of thousands of people.
00:20:39 Speaker_05
And one solution the Brits got behind was to invite displaced Pakistanis over to England so they could improve the British economy by working in British factories and mills, which is what Tahir's dad did.
00:20:49 Speaker_05
Tahir arrived in England as a nine-year-old who didn't speak any English and wouldn't become fluent for several years.
00:20:56 Speaker_13
I knew one word of English only, which was F-O-R-D. I mean, I don't know X, Y, Z, but I know F-O-R-D. That's it. I can relate. I couldn't speak any English when I first came here. All right.
00:21:10 Speaker_05
I couldn't even speak Ford. I was just like mute. Football. That's what I knew. Football.
00:21:15 Speaker_13
That's right. So that's how you arrived here. And the first school, when I came here, we, we, we arrived.
00:21:20 Speaker_12
In the country is growing up angry and alienated from white society.
00:21:25 Speaker_05
Now the Hare watched as a documentary captured the next generation. Pakistani kids who were born in Britain, being educated in state schools, still struggling to read, not able to recall basic English words. The camera cuts to a park in Birmingham.
00:21:40 Speaker_05
It looked at the Hare like Ward End Park, which is right across from where he went to school in Alamrock.
00:21:46 Speaker_13
I recognised the park because we used to go and play there. And then I saw some children and I said, oh, that's our neighbour's children. I recognise the kids, yeah, even though he's from a distance, but I recognise who the kids are.
00:21:57 Speaker_12
We filmed an encounter with two Asian lads in a park in a Muslim quarter of Birmingham.
00:22:03 Speaker_05
These Asian lads, we use Asian to mean South Asian, by the way, they're skipping school, and Tahir knew which school they were skipping.
00:22:10 Speaker_05
It was the one he'd gone to as a kid, right next to that park, Parkview School, another majority Muslim school with miserable academic results. It's a secondary school, ages 11 to 16.
00:22:22 Speaker_05
It was a school where the hero had done well enough to make it to college and then university before getting a good job in telecommunications. The documentary made him realise how rare his success was and how little he'd done with it.
00:22:36 Speaker_16
So Tahir decided to do something. He started a tutoring program for kids in the neighborhood. But what he was really interested in was volunteering at his old school, Parkview, on what's known as their governing body.
00:22:48 Speaker_16
In England, a governing body oversees how a school is run, like a corporate board does a company. It's sort of like a school board in the U.S., except it's specific to one school. They can have a lot of influence.
00:23:00 Speaker_16
So anyway, Tahir says one afternoon, a couple of Parkview parents he didn't know knocked on his door. We hear you're interested in becoming a governor, they said. It was like they'd read his mind.
00:23:10 Speaker_16
Though actually, Tahir had been talking about wanting to be a governor at a recent wedding, and these parents got wind of it.
00:23:15 Speaker_16
Resentment and frustration had been festering for years among parents in Alum Rock, who'd been trying and trying to get the authorities to do something about the dismal schools.
00:23:25 Speaker_16
These parents at Tahir's door had joined the Parkview Governing Body in an attempt to make a change, but they didn't speak fluent English and hadn't gone to university. Tahir was a professional with a degree who still lived in the neighborhood.
00:23:37 Speaker_16
We'd love to propose you, they told him. And with that, Tahir found himself at the next governing body meeting of Parkview School, being voted in not only as a member, but as the chair.
00:23:50 Speaker_13
So that's when I became a governor on the 7th of January 1997. Do you remember the date? Yeah, well, I was to remain there for 18 years.
00:23:59 Speaker_16
When Tahir started, Parkview was one of the worst secondary schools in the country. Only 4% of students were passing. The National School Inspection Agency had recently placed the school into special measures, the lowest possible ranking.
00:24:14 Speaker_16
An emergency status, basically, meaning Parkview was in danger of being shut down. There were brawls breaking out in the schoolyard. On a tour of the building, Tahir saw vandalized bathrooms with stalls missing locks and toilets missing seats.
00:24:27 Speaker_16
But where Tahir really trained his focus was on the complacent teachers and administrators.
00:24:33 Speaker_13
We initially just started by saying that obviously children should be achieving higher, that the achievement was not acceptable. And the fact that the school was to blame for the failure.
00:24:44 Speaker_16
This statement, so obvious to Tahir that the kids in Alamrak were as capable as kids anywhere, was met with massive resistance.
00:24:52 Speaker_13
It was very difficult getting the school to accept that they were the problem. People didn't want to accept that because they'd been blaming the community for maybe two decades. They had such a low expectation of children.
00:25:07 Speaker_16
One thing Tahir noticed early on was that the staff of this school, with nearly 90% Pakistani students, had only one full-time Pakistani Muslim teacher. So Tahir began searching for more Muslim staff and governors.
00:25:20 Speaker_16
He gave presentations, held workshops. He became a fixture at events around East Birmingham, standing behind his little table or booth, evangelizing for people to get involved in their local schools.
00:25:31 Speaker_03
I loved it. I loved it with the children because I felt that I could make a difference.
00:25:38 Speaker_16
This is Maz Hussain, the first Muslim teacher Tahir hired. He taught math.
00:25:43 Speaker_03
I could use my language, my background, my understanding of where they come from to make a difference. I knew their families.
00:25:50 Speaker_16
Maz can point to a specific moment, by the way, when he decided to go into teaching.
00:25:54 Speaker_03
There's a panorama program. It's called an underclass in Parda. powerful segment. He's calling us pakis, he's doing it in a jokey way, but we find it offensive.
00:26:21 Speaker_03
They're not able to tell anyone else, but they're telling me that look, he's swearing at us.
00:26:26 Speaker_05
That's a slur in any context, but especially shocking for a teacher to say to Pakistani students. Master Oldham, I think the best thing to do, have your parents write the score.
00:26:36 Speaker_05
He talked them through the procedure for doing that, in case their parents don't know. He says eventually the school looked into the teacher's behaviour.
00:26:43 Speaker_03
And while you're investigating, he resigned and he gave his final leaving speech in the staff room and goes, it should be our culture dominant in this school, not the kids. And he finished off with the words, the West is the best.
00:26:59 Speaker_03
And all teachers clapped.
00:27:02 Speaker_16
All teachers clapped. The racism was pervasive.
00:27:06 Speaker_16
Razwan Faraz, a former governor and math teacher, says at one of his first governing body meetings, he was shown a list of places the students had been given work placements through a program at the school, and it was all restaurants, supermarkets, clothing stores.
00:27:20 Speaker_17
There was no surgery, doctor surgery, or law firm, or anything like that. And I said, how is it that Like, did the children decide these? And Rizwan says the vice chair told him.
00:27:32 Speaker_17
Well, their parents want them to go and become doctors and engineers and etc. But reality is these kids will become taxi drivers, shopkeepers. So we've got to prepare them now. And for a good while I was struggling to process what he was saying.
00:27:50 Speaker_17
This is me, a brown person, a Muslim, and he's saying to me that they deserve to have these kind of jobs. This is this community's role in society basically. That's right.
00:28:03 Speaker_11
We just filed the kids. We just filed the kids and didn't even feel bad about it. Didn't even, we didn't, we didn't even feel guilty.
00:28:12 Speaker_16
John Brockley was one of the non-Muslim teachers at Parkview. He was a math teacher who'd been there since the 80s. He was frank with us about the bigotry that he and his colleagues held towards the students and their families.
00:28:25 Speaker_11
We thought that we were a superior culture and we looked down. We looked down on these people who didn't know about education.
00:28:39 Speaker_16
You're talking about yourself here?
00:28:40 Speaker_11
I'm talking about myself, but I'm also talking about, you know, many of the people that I work with.
00:28:44 Speaker_16
The teacher's attitudes are documented, by the way.
00:28:47 Speaker_16
A former head teacher of Parkview, a head teacher is what we Americans call a principal, did a master's thesis while he was at the school for which he collected opinions from the staff, including from John, as to why Muslim children were drastically underperforming compared to their peers.
00:29:04 Speaker_16
In the thesis, teachers say the kids' parents are ignorant, wrongly claim the students don't speak English. The teachers try for a while, one teacher said, but end up feeling like, who gives a damn? That's a quote.
00:29:17 Speaker_16
It makes John cringe to think back on it.
00:29:19 Speaker_11
It's only when you move away from a situation like that that you can realize how awful it is. I don't normally think about this sort of thing because it's too embarrassing.
00:29:35 Speaker_13
Once we created the shift in the belief of the teachers, then the job became much easier.
00:29:43 Speaker_05
Tahir says, by the early 2000s, Parkview was changing.
00:29:47 Speaker_05
The school began taking basic but transformative steps, setting individualized achievement targets for each student that followed them from year to year, and preparing students for qualifying exams, which amazingly hadn't happened before.
00:30:00 Speaker_05
Schools started awarding trophies for good marks, inviting parents to ceremonies when their kids did well. The hair and the governors hired a new headteacher, a non-Muslim woman from a girl's school, who embraced Parkview's new aspirations.
00:30:12 Speaker_05
Test scores started to rise, students were heading to college, Parkview's reputation was turning around. But there were other changes at the Hare Institute at Parkview, which later, officials would view as suspect.
00:30:25 Speaker_05
Changes that investigators would point to as the trademarks of Operation Trojan Horse.
00:30:32 Speaker_09
That's coming up.
00:30:40 Speaker_16
You don't get labeled the leader of an extremist conspiracy simply by raising test scores at your neighborhood secondary school.
00:30:47 Speaker_16
The main accusation against Tahir Alam, the overarching assertion of the Trojan Horse letter, which the government supported and which has defined Tahir's reputation since then, is that he was Islamizing schools.
00:30:58 Speaker_16
This is not a word I'm particularly fond of, Islamize, because Islamize in relation to what? Some assumed non-Islamic baseline? Has this story been Islamized by Hamza's involvement?
00:31:09 Speaker_05
Yes.
00:31:10 Speaker_16
It's a word that isn't inherently negative, but gets used that way. Anyway, that's what the letter said Tahir was doing, Islamizing schools. And funnily enough, it's also what Tahir says he was doing.
00:31:21 Speaker_13
We were valuing the cultural and the faith background of the children. And we were allowing that to be expressed, if you like. We catered for children. so they could perform their daytime prayers if they wanted to.
00:31:37 Speaker_13
We made a prayer facility available for them in a room.
00:31:40 Speaker_16
Religious accommodations like this are legal in British schools, by the way, whether they're explicitly designated as a religious school or not, which Parkview wasn't. It was the equivalent of a regular public school in the US.
00:31:51 Speaker_13
And since 98% of the children happen to be of the Islamic faith background, we obviously are catering for the constituency that the school serves. in line with the regulatory requirements."
00:32:03 Speaker_16
Tahir ascribed to an educational philosophy that, the way he and other Parkview staff talk about it, reminds me of Afrocentric or Black excellence schools in the U.S., that students will do better academically when their schools incorporate and celebrate who they are.
00:32:17 Speaker_16
And there's research that backs this up. So under Tahir's leadership, Parkview allowed students to pray if they wanted. They installed facilities for voodoo, the ablutions you do before prayers.
00:32:28 Speaker_16
They celebrated Ramadan and altered the schedule during that month to facilitate fasting. They served halal food.
00:32:34 Speaker_13
And I felt that, you know, this was our school. I mean, we were proud to say that this is our school. We wanted our children to say that this was their school and that they were proud of it.
00:32:44 Speaker_05
In the wake of the Trojan Horse letter, government officials would declare that the way Tahir and his colleagues were running Parkview School had undermined quote-unquote British values, that they were limiting the children's ability to thrive in modern Britain.
00:32:57 Speaker_05
Which is an interesting charge to bring against Tahir because I have to say, I haven't personally met an English Pakistani more confident that he's British than Tahir.
00:33:06 Speaker_05
Deciding whether or not to call yourself British is a fraught and personal thing for us.
00:33:10 Speaker_05
Speaking for myself, even though I came to England when I was eight and became a British citizen with a British passport, even though I have a British education, went to British University, worked for Britain's National Health Service, I didn't call myself British.
00:33:23 Speaker_05
I was never precious about nationality, so I didn't really care what I was called. Put short, I'd also picked up on the subliminal messaging that in order to be proper British, you had to be white.
00:33:33 Speaker_05
Tahir, on the other hand, not only calls himself British, but does so proudly. I got to talking to Tahir about this one day. He and Brian and I were getting tea at my favorite chai shop on Alamrak Road.
00:33:46 Speaker_13
This is the hangout.
00:33:48 Speaker_05
And as we sat outside in one of the main thoroughfares of Islamic Britain, around the corner from where Tahir grew up, with double-decker buses passing by sweet shops and fabric stores and a lot of chippies, I told him my reason for why I'd finally, only recently, started calling myself British.
00:34:02 Speaker_05
So for a long time I never called myself British. I was about 30. I'd been reading a book about the British Empire and I learned how rich India, which at the time included Pakistan, was, according to some economists, before the Brits took control.
00:34:14 Speaker_05
I believe the statistic is roughly it controlled about 24% or something like that of the world's economy at the time.
00:34:21 Speaker_13
23% of the world's economy. It was the richest nation in the world.
00:34:26 Speaker_05
24% of the world's economy is roughly what the US controls today.
00:34:31 Speaker_05
I know this is somewhat of an apples and oranges comparison because the world wasn't organized into a globalized economy back then, but it does show how rich India was in relation to other countries at the time.
00:34:42 Speaker_05
When the British left the Indian subcontinent after some 200 years of economic exploitation, India and Pakistan were among the poorest nations in the world.
00:34:52 Speaker_05
I didn't learn this stuff in school because Britain's colonisation of a quarter of the planet is not a compulsory part of the national curriculum, which is why I only discovered it as an adult, as so much of the wealth I saw in Britain was actually extracted from the place I come from.
00:35:05 Speaker_05
And so from that point onwards, I started calling myself British. I was just like, I'm British. I own this country. This is my money with which you have raised everything around me.
00:35:14 Speaker_13
Yeah, so I mean, that's very similar to the position I arrived at.
00:35:18 Speaker_05
Except for me, proclaiming I'm British is somewhat of a finger in the eye. For Tahir, it's sincere. It also came to him later in life. He says he was at an event held by a British Muslim organization.
00:35:28 Speaker_05
And they began saying very clearly, you're never going back to Pakistan. Your children are never going to move back.
00:35:35 Speaker_13
The people at this event were saying, you live here now. we were part of this country and that it was important as Muslims we should benefit to this country.
00:36:01 Speaker_13
So ever since then I've been kind of dissing the idea that we are other, that we are outsiders, that we don't belong here. Islam is part of Russia. It's not alien. I don't accept that. Can you see?
00:36:17 Speaker_05
So this is why... So for Tahir, not only was incorporating Islam into the school an academic strategy, it was also a British value.
00:36:27 Speaker_08
It was really nice for me that I'm doing something at home and now my school is helping me.
00:36:31 Speaker_07
I didn't want to have a different life at school. If I'm pregnant at home, I want to pray at school too.
00:36:36 Speaker_16
These are two students who graduated from Parkview in 2014. We're not using their names because such is the stink of the Trojan horse scandal. They don't want potential employers to know where they went to school.
00:36:47 Speaker_16
They actually keep it off their resumes. When Hams and I met them, four years after they graduated, they were both studying law at university, some of the first in their families to go on to higher education.
00:36:58 Speaker_16
They've been best friends since school, the kind of friends who don't need words to communicate. The students told us about these assemblies they would have in the mornings, which included religious teachings and sometimes prayer.
00:37:17 Speaker_16
This is something that as an American made me do a double take when I first heard about it. The idea of teachers in a public school leading prayers during an assembly is not normal to us. But in Britain, there's no separation between church and state.
00:37:30 Speaker_16
The Queen is head of both. So not only is prayer allowed in schools, some form of worship is legally mandated in all schools that are publicly funded.
00:37:38 Speaker_16
Schools don't always adhere to this, but students are supposed to take part in what's called a daily act of collective worship.
00:37:44 Speaker_16
By default, it's supposed to be broadly Christian in character, but schools can apply to change it to other faiths if that better suits their students, which is what Parkview did. It got approval for its worship to be Islamic.
00:37:56 Speaker_16
The students told us at Parkview's assemblies, they would sit in the main hall and a teacher would tell parables or lessons, usually from Islam, but other faiths too.
00:38:04 Speaker_16
Do you guys remember actually learning things in these assemblies or did they make you think or were they just kind of boring teachers blah blah blah blah blah like like you know?
00:38:11 Speaker_07
I really, you know what, I really enjoyed those assemblies because I didn't learn this from anywhere else.
00:38:17 Speaker_16
They still remember this one assembly all these years later about charity.
00:38:21 Speaker_07
about charity and they say when you're giving charity put your hand in your pocket and take out don't look at how much you're giving just put it in don't count what you're giving and what you have left because when you give you receive tenfold yeah and charity does not make you poor
00:38:38 Speaker_08
Quite literally, like sometimes when I see somebody who's asking for money and things like that, I'll put my hand in, in my purse.
00:38:45 Speaker_07
Take it out.
00:38:46 Speaker_08
I'll take it out and I don't look at what's in it.
00:38:47 Speaker_07
I do that all the time.
00:38:48 Speaker_08
Just because I remember that one teacher, he literally said it like that.
00:38:51 Speaker_07
Like that, give so that your left hand doesn't even know what your right hand gave.
00:38:58 Speaker_05
When Tahir became chair of Parkview's governing body in 1997, 4% of students were passing. By 2010, that number was 71%, a 17-fold increase.
00:39:12 Speaker_13
We had not changed the children. We had not changed the parents. But slowly but surely, we took the results so that they were consistently in the 70s, which means the school actually is kind of guaranteeing an outcome.
00:39:26 Speaker_05
Parkview is now actively preparing its students for the eventuality that their academic success would lead them out of East Birmingham.
00:39:33 Speaker_08
Something that a lot of teachers said to me, you live in a bubble.
00:39:38 Speaker_05
Again, the former Parkview students.
00:39:40 Speaker_08
And I was like, what do you mean? They were like, you live in an Asian community, you go to an Asian school, you're very safe, you don't know what it's like to branch out. I remember we learned about the population and how it's divided in UK.
00:39:56 Speaker_08
And I think it was something like 2% of the population in the UK is Asian. And I was like, wow, only 2%? I was like, 2%? How is it 2%? Everybody I know is Asian.
00:40:10 Speaker_07
Every person that I've come across is proud.
00:40:13 Speaker_08
How is that possible? So it was so odd.
00:40:16 Speaker_05
The UK is actually 2% Pakistani, 7% Asian. But point being, there was a vast majority of the population that these students and their classmates were not bumping into day-to-day in Alamrak. The school organised visits to Cambridge University.
00:40:29 Speaker_05
They took them on camping trips. They visited the Houses of Parliament in London. Some students went on a week-long trip on a sailboat with kids from all over, including a bunch of white kids.
00:40:39 Speaker_07
We weren't used to mingling with people who were not Pakistani. So they were exposing us to you guys. Okay.
00:40:48 Speaker_16
You're looking at me.
00:40:49 Speaker_07
This is what they were preparing us for.
00:40:53 Speaker_05
Parents clamoured to get their kids into Parkview. The school had a waiting list.
00:40:58 Speaker_13
We were given all kinds of accolades nationally in the press. We had officials coming in and out of our school really saying, what are you doing? Perhaps we can learn something. and they invited us actually, that why don't you support other schools?
00:41:13 Speaker_05
The Hare became well regarded in education circles and over the years he expanded his reach beyond Parkview. He was certified as an inspector for Ofsted, the agency that monitors and rates schools in Britain.
00:41:24 Speaker_05
The Birmingham City Council hired him to train other governors throughout the city. The National Department for Education even asked the Hare and his colleagues at Parkview to take over two other troubled schools in East Birmingham, which they did.
00:41:35 Speaker_05
Tahir was invited to tea at 10 Downing Street and met Prime Minister Tony Blair. Back in Birmingham though, some people resented him.
00:41:43 Speaker_03
He had made enemies of a lot of schools in the area. He became like hated amongst a lot of people.
00:41:49 Speaker_05
Mas Hussein, who became Parkview's acting headteacher around this time, was a full supporter of Tahir's.
00:41:55 Speaker_05
But still, he and other former colleagues told us they wished Tahir was a bit more circumspect in the way he went around to other schools advocating for reform.
00:42:03 Speaker_05
He was self-assured, blunt, and particularly unsparing when laying out for headteachers and other school leaders the way their schools were failing Muslim students.
00:42:11 Speaker_03
to tell other schools, look, Puff, you can do it. Puff, you can do it. Puff, you can do it. Same family, same children that you've got. They can do it. That's not an excuse. We used to tell Ty off for this a lot.
00:42:22 Speaker_03
Stop using us as a beating stick because it's isolating us amongst other schools.
00:42:27 Speaker_14
He was actually pointing the finger and saying directly to headteachers, you're not doing a good enough job here for these kids.
00:42:36 Speaker_05
Jackie Hughes used to be in charge of school improvement for the Birmingham City Council. And she says she can name headteachers that she knows the Hare made enemies with. Many of them were used to having the final word on academics.
00:42:47 Speaker_05
And then here was the Hare, this volunteer with no professional teaching experience, waltzing in and criticising their work.
00:42:53 Speaker_14
I mean, actually, people come to me and say, I can't understand why you give Tahir the time of day. He's a terrible man. He said to me, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they would go sounding off.
00:43:04 Speaker_05
Colleagues and friends warned the hair. You might want to consider softening your approach. But the hair wasn't having it.
00:43:10 Speaker_13
You have to fight for justice. Justice is not going to be handed to you on the plate. You know, you have to make space for yourself. So the fact that some people may not be okay with that is irrelevant to me. You know, that's their problem.
00:43:27 Speaker_05
In 2012, Parkview received the ultimate validation in what was probably its proudest moment in Tahir's nearly 18 years there. Ofsted arrived for an inspection and deemed the school outstanding, the highest rating possible.
00:43:42 Speaker_05
Among the many things inspectors praised at Parkview were the quote, wide range of opportunities for spiritual development, including voluntary Friday prayers.
00:43:52 Speaker_05
In his time as chair of governors, the hair had taken Parkview from the lowest ranking, the verge of closure, to the very top. The person in charge of Ofsted, the chief inspector said, quote, every school in the country should be like this.
00:44:12 Speaker_16
Less than two years later, on November 27, 2013, an envelope arrived on the desk of the leader of Birmingham City Council, a man named Sir Albert Boer. Inside was a cover sheet addressed to him, marked very important, confidential. Mr. Boer, it said.
00:44:31 Speaker_16
This letter was found when I was clearing my boss's files, and I think you should be aware that I am shocked at what your officers are doing.
00:44:38 Speaker_16
You have seven days to investigate this matter, after which it will be sent to a national newspaper, who I am sure will treat it seriously. Sincerely, A.N. Anonymous, presumably. Behind that note was the Trojan horse letter.
00:44:54 Speaker_16
Four poorly copied pages, shadows at the edges, instructions to destroy after reading. The letter was written as if from a collaborator of Tahir's, describing a conspiracy Tahir had been running to take over and Islamize schools by deception.
00:45:08 Speaker_16
It took weeks for Tahir to learn about it. He heard rumors there was a mysterious letter making its way around Birmingham, around the city council and to headteachers in town, which named him as the orchestrator of a plot.
00:45:20 Speaker_16
One of Tahir's friends rushed to his house to tell him that he'd been getting a haircut over on Washwood Heath Road, and afterwards his friend's barber had beckoned him into the back room of the shop and showed him a copy.
00:45:31 Speaker_16
Tahir did not know what to make of it. Finally, he got a hold of the document himself.
00:45:36 Speaker_13
You know, obviously, I was thinking, what is the source of this letter? Who wrote this letter? Why was this letter written is what's ringing in my head.
00:45:44 Speaker_16
The front page was missing, so there was no dear whoever. It just started as if it had been going on for a page or more already. And the letter ended mid-sentence, too, with the phrase, I would also like.
00:45:55 Speaker_16
So there's no sign-off, which meant Tahir couldn't tell exactly who it was supposed to be to or from.
00:46:01 Speaker_13
But whoever wrote the letter said explicitly, Tahir and I. It's supposed to be from somebody who knows me well in Birmingham, and he's talking to somebody in Bradford. Another British city that's home to a lot of Muslims.
00:46:14 Speaker_13
He's talking about Tahir, what he's done here, we can do it over there.
00:46:18 Speaker_16
And he's your friend, or your associate, or she, whoever.
00:46:21 Speaker_13
Whoever it is, yeah. Can you keep reading just the first few paragraphs? Okay, Operation Trojan Horse has been carefully thought through and is tried and tested within Birmingham. Tahir and I will be happy to support your efforts in Bradford.
00:46:35 Speaker_13
This is a long-term plan and one which we are sure will lead to great success in taking over a number of schools and ensuring that they are run on the strict Islamic principles. In Birmingham,
00:46:51 Speaker_16
The main tactic of Operation Trojan Horse is to target headteachers at the schools you want to take control of, to make their lives so miserable that they'll resign or else be fired.
00:47:01 Speaker_16
At which point, you can install your own people, who will implant Islamic extremism in the school. The author gives several examples of schools in Birmingham where Tahir and his cronies were supposedly in the middle of doing this.
00:47:12 Speaker_16
We have caused a great amount of organized disruption in Birmingham, the letter says, and are on the way to getting rid of more head teachers and taking over their schools.
00:47:20 Speaker_16
While sometimes the practices we use may not seem the correct way to do things, you must remember that this is a jihad, and as such, using all means possible to win the war is acceptable. What was your feeling or your attitude?
00:47:33 Speaker_16
Were you laughing at it? Were you actually kind of taking it seriously and frightened?
00:47:38 Speaker_13
I wasn't laughing, actually, because I knew the serious nature of the allegations that were being made. But as far as the claims themselves were concerned, they were laughable. So I knew that there was something not right about what was going on here.
00:47:50 Speaker_16
Tahir contacted the Birmingham City Council, where the letter was first sent. He'd done training for them for years.
00:47:57 Speaker_13
And I said, look, I work for you, and this letter apparently is going around.
00:48:01 Speaker_13
claiming certain things and I'm surprised that you haven't spoken to me to at least to get my view on the matter at least ask me to explain or if I know anything or whatever or something and the gentleman there actually from the City Council he said Mr. Alam to be to be very honest with you we don't think anything of the letter we think it's a completely bogus hoax letter and we don't believe there is any truth in it and therefore we didn't take any action
00:48:30 Speaker_13
We didn't do anything with it.
00:48:32 Speaker_16
Did you feel reassured by that?
00:48:34 Speaker_13
Not really, no, because then the letter began to be printed in the national media as well.
00:48:41 Speaker_05
Someone leaked the letter to the Sunday Times of London, and from there it became a frenzy.
00:48:47 Speaker_05
One story turned to two, turned to dozens, in the Daily Mail, the Telegraph, the Spectator, Sky TV, many of them giving credence to the letter, saying that extremists like Tahir had allegedly been infiltrating UK schools for years.
00:49:02 Speaker_05
Reporters camped outside Parkview, they stalked Tahir down the street,
00:49:06 Speaker_15
We tried to put these allegations to the Academy's Chair of Governors, but to hear a lamb... Turned up at his house. Hello? Hello, Mr. Lamb? Mr. Lamb? Hello?
00:49:18 Speaker_05
The government kicked into gear too. Investigators swarmed Parkview. Ofsted, the school inspector, arrived for two surprise inspections.
00:49:27 Speaker_13
And then we had the Education Funding Agency investigation, which was about 10 days, I think. They were in there for 10 days.
00:49:34 Speaker_13
And soon as they left, we had the PWC, PricewaterhouseCoopers, a big outside auditing firm, looking into the financial affairs of the school. So then we had them for four or five weeks in the school as well. I said, what are you looking for?
00:49:50 Speaker_13
I said, please, what are you looking for? You've been here three weeks. You must have a family."
00:50:01 Speaker_16
There was more. The Secretary of State for Education called in England's former counter-terror chief from Scotland Yard, a man named Peter Clark, and the Birmingham City Council appointed its own special investigator.
00:50:12 Speaker_16
And they scrutinized Parkview, along with 20-some-odd other schools in Muslim neighborhoods. In the middle of the melee, some politicians and journalists were saying that the letter itself was likely a hoax.
00:50:24 Speaker_16
There were some obvious factual inaccuracies. Yet the government believed it still warranted this action. Honestly, I don't think any authority explained this logic with much clarity at the time.
00:50:35 Speaker_16
But my understanding of how the thinking went is that even if the letter itself wasn't an actual communique between two real-life conspirators, it could still be pointing at a real problem.
00:50:45 Speaker_16
Even if it was fiction, the thinking went, the letter could have been fabricated by someone who had legitimate concerns about Muslim extremists scheming and wielding influence in schools.
00:50:54 Speaker_16
And maybe the letter was their creative way of raising an alarm.
00:50:58 Speaker_16
So rather than look into who wrote the letter and why, instead the government put out general public calls for information about these schools, and people started coming forward, mostly anonymously, with complaints.
00:51:09 Speaker_16
Again, investigators found no evidence of radicalization, no evidence of violent extremism, and no plot. What emerged instead was a kind of grab bag of Islam-adjacent allegations.
00:51:20 Speaker_16
Many of the same things authorities had celebrated up to that point, but apparently now we're seeing in a different light. Like, these educators weren't merely allowing students to pray. They were pressuring them to pray.
00:51:31 Speaker_16
They weren't innocently recruiting brown Muslim staff. They were hiring their buddies, who thought the same way as they did, and possibly discriminating against non-Muslim candidates in the process.
00:51:41 Speaker_16
School governors, including Tahir, weren't holding headteachers to a high standard. They were pressuring them, harassing them, and exercising more power than a governor was supposed to.
00:51:52 Speaker_16
Investigators also said they'd found instances of intolerance towards LGBTQ people and unequal treatment of women and girls. They said Parkview had held assemblies and invited speakers with anti-Western views.
00:52:04 Speaker_16
and that Tahir and people aligned with him allegedly subscribed to quote, an intolerant and politicized form of extreme social conservatism that claims to represent and ultimately seeks to control all Muslims.
00:52:19 Speaker_16
All of this, as the then Secretary of State for Education put it, as she presented the findings on the Trojan Horse letter to Parliament, meant that students,
00:52:27 Speaker_06
Instead of enjoying a broadening and enriching experience in school, young people are having their horizons narrowed and are being denied the opportunity to flourish in a modern multicultural Britain.
00:52:54 Speaker_16
After months of scrutiny in early July 2014, Tahir, looking tired and stressed, stood at a lectern outside Parkview's gates and resigned.
00:53:04 Speaker_16
Tahir told us he and the other Parkview governors only agreed to do that because the Department for Education promised that the head teacher and other on-the-ground leadership at the school would be kept in place.
00:53:15 Speaker_13
But as soon as school opened in September, all of those people were suspended. All the leadership was basically sacked. Ruthlessly, they went about destroying their careers, destroying their reputations, and they did that systematically.
00:53:31 Speaker_13
We had worked for 10, 15 years, really, to build this school. They destroyed it within months.
00:53:42 Speaker_16
The government renamed the school. It's no longer Parkview. It also notified nearly every teacher and governor you just heard from, Tahir included, that it was bringing proceedings to ban them from education for the rest of their lives.
00:53:56 Speaker_16
In the years since, student achievement has plummeted at the school, formerly known as Parkview, from more than 70 percent passing to, in recent years, from the low 40 to mid 50 percent range.
00:54:11 Speaker_05
So that's the story Tahir told us that first meeting in his makeshift tutoring room.
00:54:15 Speaker_05
That this letter, which was never fully investigated, that described a plot called Operation Trojan Horse which was never found to have existed, inspired all of this. The ruining of careers and an educational movement.
00:54:28 Speaker_05
The fear-mongering headlines against Muslims that continue to this day. The government instituting policies that encourage us to spy more brazenly on each other. We've been talking with Tahir for a couple of hours by this point.
00:54:42 Speaker_16
What time is it? I know you need to leave at some point.
00:54:44 Speaker_13
I don't want to... I mean, I'm... I have to go to Friday prayer now. Yeah. So one o'clock I'm there really. I understand it's a lot to talk, so if you wanted to... There's a lot to... No, no, I don't get tired of talking these things really.
00:54:56 Speaker_13
I mean, you probably could tell. Obviously, when I talk about that, you know, you begin to relive it, isn't it?
00:55:02 Speaker_13
And I have to say that, you know, it does, it does sadden me actually as to what has been lost for the children, for the community, the irreparable damage that has been done for absolutely no reason whatsoever.
00:55:20 Speaker_13
So anyway, can I get you guys some tea or something?
00:55:32 Speaker_05
At that event I went to, where we all got redirected to the wedding hall, one of the speakers, a columnist named Peter Obon, put it well. He said, Operation Trojan Horse has become a social fact in Britain.
00:55:44 Speaker_05
That even though within weeks of the Trojan Horse data hitting the news, people acknowledged it was probably a hoax, that's never seemed to matter. Whether Muslims in Birmingham were conspiring or not doesn't matter.
00:55:55 Speaker_05
The intimation that there were has persevered. To the extent that Prime Minister's former Chief of Staff was outraged that some people in the community centre would dare to say otherwise.
00:56:06 Speaker_05
But we don't need to settle for a social fact, because there are actual facts. Why up to this point has no one cared about who wrote this letter and where this letter came from?
00:56:21 Speaker_13
Well, that's my question.
00:56:22 Speaker_05
That's my question.
00:56:24 Speaker_13
This is what I've been arguing. This is why I went to the police. to see what they could do. This is what I said, wrote in my letter to the Birmingham City Council, that you need to get to the bottom of who wrote the letter.
00:56:39 Speaker_13
This is what I wrote to the Department for Education as well. You need to get to the bottom of the letter, who wrote the letter, because that will then unravel why the letter was written. You see?
00:56:50 Speaker_13
So this is what I have been arguing, but Department for Education is not interested. The police are not interested. the Birmingham City Council is not interested in answering that question.
00:57:02 Speaker_05
Why?
00:57:03 Speaker_13
Because they have used this letter and on this hoax they have built so much policy. Do you think now they want to launch an investigation into the letter to have it proven that it was written for completely different reasons? Yeah?
00:57:20 Speaker_13
How would that make them look like? Bunch of monkeys.
00:57:25 Speaker_05
As I've been saying, if you could just find out who wrote that letter and why, that's the only thing that might change Britain's understanding of Operation Trojan Horse.
00:57:35 Speaker_13
But whoever wrote the letter, they knew me, I think. And I like to think that I know them too. What does that mean? I have a strong hunch as to who wrote the letter. I strongly believe that I know who wrote the letter.
00:58:00 Speaker_13
And I strongly believe that I know why the letter was written as well.
00:58:04 Speaker_16
So you think you know the who and the motive?
00:58:07 Speaker_13
Yes.
00:58:11 Speaker_05
That's next on the Trojan Horse Affair. The case of the four resignations.
00:58:33 Speaker_16
The Trojan Horse Affair is produced by Hamza Syed and me, along with Rebecca Lax. The show is edited by Sarah Koenig, additional editing by Ira Glass, and by our contributing editor, Aisha Manazer-Siddiqui.
00:58:44 Speaker_16
Fact-checking and research by Mark O'Cronnelly and Ben Phelan. Original score by Thomas Meller, with additional music by Matt McGinley and Steven Jackson.
00:58:53 Speaker_16
Sound Design, Mixing, and Music Supervision by Stephen Jackson and Phil Domohowski at the Audio Non-Visual Company. Julie Snyder is our Executive Editor. Neil Drumming is Managing Editor, Supervising Producer is Ndeye Chubu.
00:59:05 Speaker_16
Executive Assistant is Alberto De Leon. Sam Dolnik is an Assistant Managing Editor of the New York Times. Audio is provided by NBC Getty Images.
00:59:13 Speaker_05
Special thanks to my journalism professor, my Yoda, Richard Danbury, Kimberly Henderson, the Barclay Agency, Kenneth Pomeranz, Greg Clark,
00:59:21 Speaker_05
And John Holmwood, who along with Teresa O'Toole, authored an in-depth book which was very helpful to us called Countering Extremism in British Schools, The Truth About the Birmingham Trojan Horse Affair.
00:59:31 Speaker_16
The Trojan Horse Affair is made by Serial Productions and The New York Times.