Jihad

The Islamic School raided by anti-terrorist police yesterday is the former Legat Academy.

[added later] This is from Charles Moore's Spectator diary

"You could write the history of a culture through the changing uses to which its buildings are put. At the weekend the Jameah Islameah at Mark Cross, in East Sussex, was raided by police in connection with possible terrorist training camps. The enormous Gothic edifice began life in 1868 as an orphanage. Later it became a Roman Catholic seminary. After the war it was taken over by the Legat School of Russian Ballet. Madame Nadine Legat, daughter of a Tsarist admiral, taught her version of ballet with rigorous devotion. Her book Preparation for Ballet devoted an entire chapter to ‘The Correct Way of Putting on Ballet Shoes’ in the Russian style. A colleague who taught art there in the 1980s recalls a beautiful place which tried to live by its motto, ‘Through Art Comes Education’. ‘The school possessed the most perfect studio an art teacher could imagine: at the top of a central sweeping staircase, double gothic doors opened on to a room flooded with light on three sides. In front, a cedar of Lebanon framed the view to the lake. The windows on either side gave a bird’s-eye view into the dance studios from where the sound of tapping feet and piano keys came all day'. Ballet tastes gradually changed and the school closed in 1991. I suppose the Roman Catholic seminary, the Legat school and the Jameah Islameah school are all testimony to a host nation that opened up to outside influences and gradually became more tolerant."