CP, this illustrates another part of the problem.
When we say "Muslim", what is meant is people who probably have Muslim ancestors and who are also active believers - who attend mosque, pray and fast, among other things. Though there are undoubtedly Muslims who are pretty secular, in my experience they keep their heads down. Remember the recent case of the Muslim shop-keeper murdered on the grounds that he disrespected Islam by expressing views tolerant of other faiths; he was unwise enough to draw attention to himself.
When we say "Christian" we mean a much vaguer concept. Christianity, to twist a phrase, is a broad church, including those who believe in some kind of deity connected with the Bible, who probably never pray and who may go to a religious service one or two times a year, who have only the sketchiest of notions about the Christian faith of any type - and those who are deeply immersed in their faith and take it into their daily lives - the latter belonging to a vanishingly small percentage of what is basically a secular population.
So Christianity embraces a wide range of beliefs and behaviours, with the preponderance towards the secular, while Islam may technically cover a wide range, but in practice tends to be weighted towards the religious, at least in outward observance and behaviour.
It is the difference in mind-set that this illustrates (which I tried to explain in my previous post) that poses the biggest challenge.
(In case you're wondering where I'm coming from on this, I have dealt with sizeable Muslim pupil numbers in comprehensive schools during my teaching career - mainly of Pakistani and Bangladeshi backgrounds - and I was involved in the multicultural experiment in the eighties and nineties - and am married to someone whose previous husband was a Bangladeshi Muslim and who lived in Bangladesh for a number of years. I'm not claiming to be an expert, but I do have some idea what I'm talking about, I think.)
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