What Little Difference A Year Makes
by Humera Khan
Q-News Magazine
1 July 2006

British Muslims have been getting an awful lot attention. Too much attention, grumble some. But, with the formation of a high-profile Home Office task force and an action plan to tackle ‘extremism’, there ought to be reason for genuine optimism. Not likely, argues Humera Khan. In a political culture of quick-fix, the opportunities of the last year might well have been squandered.

In an interview on Radio 4 last month Doreen Lawrence - mother of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence who was killed in a racist attack in 1993 - implied that the government was over engaging with Muslims and not dealing with equally pertinent issues within other communities. This is not the first time such sentiments have been expressed and it certainly won’t be the last. Many have sympathy with such views, but if looked at more closely, it’s clear that engagement with Muslim communities is all ‘form’ and little ‘substance’.

Muslims this and Muslims that - with the conferences, lectures, articles, analysis and not to mention the money being spent, you would be excused for thinking that things should have changed and population and government alike would be happy. But now for the reality check. Nothing has changed at all. Sorry, one thing has changed. Anti-terrorist legislation has become strengthened and certain members of the Muslim community continue to have their homes raided only to be released without charge and their lives destroyed. Result!

If 9/11 wasn’t a wake up call enough then 7 July 2005 was certainly a rude awakening. Political radicalism engendered from events abroad found their way back home with tragic consequences. Muslim communities braced themselves for the familiar backlash and prepared to face the new crisis. While British Muslims were afraid to leave their homes because of the increase in Islamophobic attacks, the Government found itself in a quandary. Having in the past set up numerous ineffectual working groups and finding that it’s investment into producing a viable representative voice for the Muslim community was not delivering the goods, it had to think quickly and think new.

Enter the ‘Preventing Extremism Together Working Groups’ (PET), the so-called ‘Muslim task force’. While the title might be a little kitsch the format was definitely new. What was new about the this group was that it proved that when the government wanted to get a more representative cross section of the Muslim community together it could. The ninety or so participants represented mainstream political groups, Muslim denominations, secularists, researchers, academics, the voluntary and statutory sectors. Most were meeting for the first time in such a context and had not previously had any formal engagement with each other. Needless to say there was as much divergence of opinions in the group as there were individuals. So, given the magnitude of the task and the historical significance of a truly diverse cross-section of British Muslims being brought together for the first time to resolve as serious an issue as terrorism and radicalisation, result were fast forthcoming. Fat chance.

From the beginning there were sceptics both from outside of the group and within it. But when the government calls to tackle a major crisis affecting Muslim communities you really can’t object - it’s time to show up and be counted. Despite the differences the good will was phenomenal. Most, if not all, of the participants really wanted to help the community, in particular to avoid the catastrophe of 7/7 from ever happening again.

In the end, the task force demanded too much. We were hurried through a very complex process over one pre-meeting and then a weekend which consisted of one evening and a day. With civil servants playing midwives, we were led through a very narrow brief and expected to come up with recommendations that would shape how the government would respond to the Muslim communities - an almost impossible task in the best of circumstances. Most participants felt that more time was needed to thrash out some of the issues and for the groups to gel - but there was really no choice. The Home Office fine tuned its rules as we went along and it became obvious that some of the answers to the questions asked were already answered before we had begun.

The government needed to be seen to be doing something. It needed to keep Muslims distracted so that the real business could be done through the speedily amended anti-terror legislation that went through Parliament.

The final report of the PET working groups was not rocket science. The outcome reflected the limited time available to come up with something more tangible. Despite this, a close reading of the report reveals extensive discussions took place on an extremely broad range of subjects. In fact, if the government had taken its own procedure seriously we could by now have been at a much more constructive level of social and political engagement. What has not been exploited was the willingness of this broad range of individuals to work for the common good. Once the PET report had been produced the task force was dropped and of the final 37 recommendations only three were taken forward of which only one - The Radical Middle Way - has been successful in achieving its objective.

So where does that leave us? It leaves us with the government only being able to engage with Muslim communities once the horse has bolted and a terrible few have been pushed even beyond alienation and radicalisation. The prisms through which British Muslims are viewed, and the solutions that are being sought, see Muslims first and foremost as a potential threat. This covert Islamophobic attitude reinforces the centuries old view of Muslims being violent, irrational and war hungry.

For all the seemingly endless conferences and the reports littering our shelves, there is no moral or legal requirement for them to be implemented. The reason for this appears to be the ‘blame game’ quagmire we find ourselves in. The Blair government and the police can’t see beyond policing the community in order to eradicate the ‘terrorist threat’ while Muslim struggle to see beyond making the government accountable for its foreign policy blunders. Neither approach will in the long term alleviate Muslim discontent on the ground which in reality is fuelled more by discrimination and sense of profound injustice than the headline grabbing dialectics we have become used to.

The onus must lie with the government who has a responsibility towards its citizens and towards fostering social cohesion. Criticism of the Iraq debacle is not just a Muslim issue - it has rallied together a whole chorus of dissent from a multitude of different backgrounds. If the war was to end tomorrow, Tony Blair no longer Prime Minister where would that leave us? It would leave us exactly where we were before 9/11, the war in Iraq and 7/7 - struggling as communities on the margins of society.

When government ministers are asked about what they are going to do about institutional Islamophobia the reply usually refers to the soon to be set up Commission for Equalities and Human Rights (CEHR) which will have a brief to cover religious discrimination. But, without legislation against religious discrimination to back it, experience and expertise to support it, the CEHR is unlikely to make any difference to British Muslims.

Doreen Lawrence may well have a point. But, if she had followed the early years of the anti-racist movement she would know that racial unrest in the streets and the plethora of initiatives that followed didn’t automatically produce the desired results. At the time of the race riots in the 1980s, white people said the same things as is being said by people like Doreen Lawrence. They questioned all the government initiatives and the money being spent. It was argued that there were other equally needy people and causes and that government agenda was being hijacked by ‘Blacks’. Implementation of the Race Relations Act created major controversies for years and only more recently has the idea of race equality settled into a more mainstream arena where racism in principle at least is no longer seen as being acceptable. But even with legislation, institutional racism continues and the fact remains that young black men are still over represented in low educational achievement, within the criminal justice system, within mental health institutions, and are more likely to be involved in drug, gun and knife crimes. Seeing an increase in black faces on television, in sport and on the parliamentary benches doesn’t mean that anything significant has changed.

So people should not get their hopes up by what they may perceive as the excessive spotlight on Muslim communities. It seems that the lessons of the past have not been learnt and that Muslims are falling into the same trap as the anti-racist movement. Distracted by policing and a handful of well financed projects, the real work of challenging institutional Islamophobia has yet to begin.

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