At 5am this morning, I read this piece by an anonymous former pupil of an illegal ultra-Orthodox Jewish school in Hackney, and my blood has not stopped boiling since. Sadly, I am all too familiar with the experiences described in this article – physical beatings, beatings with sticks, and an emphasis on keeping problems within the community.

Luckily, I did not attend a religious secondary school, though this was not for lack of my parents trying. In fact, I myself went through a brief phase in secondary school where I begged my parents to let me go to a secondary school because I desperately wanted to learn more about the deen and felt this was best done by immersing myself in an Islamic environment. This was around the time I was beginning to grapple with my first doubts about Islam, and I was desperate to try to learn all I…