In the grip of panic
The Guardian
Saturday 22 January 2005 00.15 GMT
These questions have long smouldered - but now they're on fire. For several years a bunch of knotty problems have confronted British Muslims; they were debated on these pages yesterday and at a Guardian conference earlier in the week. But what's given them a new, radioactive charge are events thousands of miles away from Oldham, Bradford and Burnley, events over which British policymakers are almost powerless. The debate about British Islam is not confined to these islands and will not be settled here alone. It is suddenly part of a much larger, international story.
Take the word "Asian". One fascinating phenomenon laid bare in this week's conversations was the decline of that term. Those who used to wear the Asian label are now ditching it, one participant reported. He cited the young woman who told him that, these days, she preferred to announce herself as a Hindu. Why? Because if she was just an "Asian" she might be confused for a Muslim - and therefore regarded as a terrorist.
This is the rocket fuel that has been tipped over the already tinder-dry terrain of Islam's place in Britain. There was discrimination, tension, poverty and segregation before. But what's shifted this cluster of problems from the realm it used to inhabit - the concern of social workers and urban policy types - into one of the most vexed questions confronting contemporary British life is the perception of Islam as a global phenomenon. And not just a phenomenon: a threat.
Put simply: young Pakistani lads may have been hassled on the streets before. But now they are seen as "Muslims", agents of a terrifying global menace. Now it's not just about white resentment of Bangladeshis' housing allocation from the local council - it's about white fears of worldwide, Islamist terrorism. Before 9/11, the familiar racist charge was that outsiders threatened to change the traditional "British" way of life. Now that fear has been joined by a new suspicion - that these outsiders might want to kill anyone they can.
And the fear extends far beyond sink estates and blighted towns. It courses through society from the bottom to the top. Flick through the comment pages of the right-leaning newspapers and it won't be long before you find an essay written not by an unemployed white lad in Leeds but by a learned, well-paid commentator in the south-east, outlining the danger the fundamentally alien culture of Islam poses to the "rest of us".
Several of those present at this week's dialogue argued that the state subtly reinforces that message. For all Tony Blair's praise of the Qur'an and of Islam as a religion of peace, these speakers said the practical effect of Belmarsh and Guantánamo Bay, even citizenship tests and ID cards, was to cast one group of Britons as the enemy within - on the wrong side of the war against terror.
An article by Kenan Malik in the latest edition of Prospect magazine challenges all that head on, insisting that Islamophobia is a "myth" and that the number of recorded attacks against British Muslims is in fact far lower than popularly imagined. Malik dismisses the widespread assumption that Muslims make up the majority of those stopped and searched under anti-terror laws: he says Asians make up 14% of those arrested - still disproportionately large, but not the 90-plus percentages some Muslim leaders have claimed.
Even if he is right at street level, he surely cannot deny the change in the climate of opinion. The rightwing press is in the grip of a moral panic, constantly serving up new theories to shore up the now familiar thesis that the west and Islam are locked in a clash of civilisations. Admittedly events in the world don't help. Palestinian suicide bombing, the school siege at Beslan and beheadings in Iraq all fuel the image of an Islamism that shows no mercy.
British Muslims have got caught up in this and it is affecting their lives, here in this country. For they stand accused - explicitly by the British National party, tacitly by more respectable others - of being a fifth column, a homegrown wing of a global movement bent on terrorising the west.
What this amounts to is an external pressure, a big finger pointing at British citizens and calling them "Muslim". But there is also an internal pull, drawing men and women to embrace a label they might once have eschewed.
Testimony from this week's conference spoke of young people from Pakistani and Bangladeshi families who feel no connection with an "old country" they may never have seen, and who therefore reject the label associated with it: they are not from Pakistan, so why should they be called Pakistanis? But nor can they easily swap "Pakistani" for "British" when so many of them feel rejected, or at least suspected, by Britain. "Muslim" has stepped into the gap.
This has not happened in splendid British isolation. Across the Middle East, those who might once have referred to themselves as Arabs increasingly identify themselves as Muslims. The causes are well-documented, starting with the failure of alternative movements in those countries, chiefly secular Arab nationalism. The rise of Islamism has also been in step with a surge in fundamentalist movements across the world's major religions. As for its anti-western hue, that is surely, in part, a reaction against decades of outside meddling, particularly in the Middle East. (It's no coincidence that radical Islamism first burst upon the world in Iran, where the west had never stopped trying to run things.) Taken together, it has become an assertive political identity, one that was bound to reverberate throughout the Muslim world, reaching even our own shores.
So this is the wider picture into which the British debate fits. There is a global Islamist movement; some British Muslims choose to identify with it; still more are identified with it by others, whether they like it or not. The result is a degree of suspicion which has thrown petrol on the old "race relations" tensions, which were pretty flammable to start with.
Luckily, this situation is not entirely new for Britain. At the turn of the 20th century, Jews were not only disliked for all the wearily familiar reasons - resentment of the immigrant newcomer and the like - they were also suspected as a disloyal fifth column that was determined to change Britain completely, resorting to violence if necessary. Anarchism and Bolshevism were the feared ideologies of the day, and Jews were said to be bent on bringing them here. Three hundred years earlier, there was similar angst about British Catholics, with their foreign loyalties to Rome and their plans for European domination. Read today's papers warning of the plot to turn Europe into an Islamic caliphate, and you soon hear the echoes of Britain's past.
How can it be solved? For Catholics, it took the decline of the great Catholic nations of Europe for British Protestantism finally to feel safe, in the 19th century, in granting basic liberties to those who followed Rome. In the Jewish case, it may be that only the near-destruction of European Jewry by the Nazis beat back British anti-semitism.
But for both Jews and Catholics, it also took time and a defusing of the larger cause with which they were identified by their enemies, or at least some disavowal of the use of force to pursue that cause. Is that what British Muslims need to do now, to allay the fears of their neighbours and distance themselves as clearly as they can from violent Islamism? This is tricky territory: merely to demand such a move puts a pressure on British Muslims that is applied to no other group of citizens. In truth, no one can demand it of that community. If it comes at all, it will have to come from within.
Islam allows us to integrate into Britain's shared national culture
Muslims and non-Muslims alike must play a role is dismantling Islamophobia, writes Tariq Ramadan
British Muslims need to pay more attention to the doubts and fears that their fellow citizens have. They have a duty to establish intellectual, social, cultural and political spaces for the development of trust and appeasement. This has to begin with an engagement in a clear discussion about Islam, about the practices and the values that Muslims promote. Islam is not a culture but a body of principles and universal values. One should not mix up these universal principles with a Pakistani, Turkish or Arabic way of living them.
Islam allows Muslims to adopt aspects of the culture they find themselves in, as long as it does not oppose any clear prohibition specified by their religion. While practicing their religion they can preserve certain features of their own culture of origin - in the form of richness, not dogmas - while integrating into British culture, which in turn becomes a new dimension of their own identity. No one asks that they remain Pakistani or Arabic Muslims, but simply Muslims; with time, they become Muslims of British culture. This is a process that is not only normal but desirable.
British legislation recognises and protects the fundamental rights of all citizens and residents. This common legal framework allows equality within diversity. The presence of Muslims has forced British culture to experience an even greater diversity of cultures. A British identity has evolved that is open, plural and constantly in motion, thanks to the cross-fertilization between reclaimed cultures of origin and the British culture that now includes its new citizens.
Seen from this perspective, the new British Muslim citizenship is enriching for the whole society. Muslims should live it and introduce it in this manner to their fellow citizens. Of course, this compels them to come out from the intellectual and social ghettos within which they have lodged themselves. Living together and building a truly multicultural society does not mean merely being satisfied with the existence of communities of faith or juxtaposed cultures, whose members ignore each other, never meet and remain enclosed within their own universe of symbolic reference points. Nothing should be stranger in our way of living and allowing for a mutual exchange of ideas between our communities, than a model of parallel lives, shielded beneath an illusion, which in reality is of mutual ignorance.
Our responsibilities are shared. Members of the so-called traditional British society can, at times, doubt their own identity and are frightened. When this happens they have to refuse any imprisoning reaction by attempting, for example, to draw the boundaries of what they may consider to be an authentic British identity which is "pure". In any period of crisis, the temptation to fall back upon phantoms of national identity is stronger than ever as people are carried away by fear, spilling over into the same camp as populists of the extreme right, a phenomenon which we are unfortunately witnessing all over Europe.
We need to begin by working upon memories. From the Middle Ages, Islam has participated in the building of a European, as well as a British, consciousness in the same way that Judaism or Christianity has. From Shakespeare to Hume, the influences of Islamic civilisation on the literary and philosophical traditions of the time are innumerable. Horizons need to be broadened through the study of these sources, which should be included in the teaching curricula at both secondary and university levels. This wider, deeper and more subtle understanding of what has moulded British identity throughout history would naturally help all people in this society to open up towards each other, including towards Muslims, and to understand that they are not so very different or strange when judged by their values and hopes. A truly multicultural society cannot exist without an education in the complexity of what shapes us and in the common dimensions that we share with others, regardless of our differences.
The extension of this education consists of developing partnerships willing to engage together in social and political issues that affect us all, including discrimination (against women, minorities etc), racism, unemployment, and other social and urban political issues. British society must reach this new perception of itself collectively: with its people, all equal before the law, developing multidimensional identities which are always in motion and flexible enough to defend their shared values.
It remains imperative to distinguish between the social problems and the religious challenges. Muslim and non-Muslim citizens alike need to de-islamise social fractures - unemployment, violence and marginalisation have nothing to do with Islam or Islamic belonging.
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