Making Muslims Acceptable Q-News Magazine, Issue 360

The recent Guardian report, entitled ‘Young, Muslim and British’, was an attempt by the liberal press to portray Muslims in a new light. It failed. What readers got was the acceptable face of British Islam. Missing, argues Adam Riaz Khan, were the vast majority of British Muslims - working class, unemployed and still without a voice.

The Guardian invited over 100 young Muslims, many from second and third generation backgrounds, to come together and debate the issues shaping their lives. Most of the Muslims involved were university graduates with professional qualifications - entrepreneurs, accountants, lawyers, doctors and civil servants. Simply put, it was the acceptable face of British Islam - at least from the point of view of the Guardian’s predominantly white middle class readership. These were not faces that could represent the vast majority of British Muslims.

Guardian journalist Madeleine Bunting wrote that “for every person in the room, there are thousands of other young Muslims who are trapped in low skilled jobs or are unemployed” and that “36% of British Muslims are leaving school with no qualifications, while a fifth of 16-24 year old Muslims in Britain are unemployed” and “40% of British Muslims are in low skilled jobs and nearly 70% of Bangladeshi and Pakistani children live in poverty”.

The report remained content with listing statistics, giving a mere nod to the serious social problems Muslims face. The Guardian missed an opportunity to have meaningful dialogue with a marginalised minority community. Perhaps the Guardian did not want to get its hands dirty with the kind of Muslim youth mentioned in the above statistics considering that many of the views and experiences of such Muslims would be unpalatable to readers and inconsistent with the kind of Muslim the Guardian, and its allies in the Muslim community, wants to promote.

The over-representation of professionals to discuss these very issues was unashamedly elitist. In fact Musab Bora, a community activist from Birmingham who attended the meeting, expressed his concerns for the way various institutions “develop a gatekeeper mentality” which excludes the grassroots and fails to give them a voice. It is this approach that government and media favour, preferring to leave comment and representation on issues concerning Muslims community leaders from organisations like Muslim Council of Britain, thus, giving them a monopoly over the “Muslim voice”. This patronising approach gives little say to working class or unemployed Muslims, reducing them instead to statistics - easily quoted, easily manipulated.

Home Affairs editor Alan Travis, commenting on the accompanying Guardian/ICM poll, said the results showed that British Muslims were “optimistic, integrated and devout”. The poll itself was presented as living proof that Muslims are as comfortable with Britishness as anyone else, stating that 60% of the Muslim participants claimed they had many non-Muslim friends whilst 40% agreed that Muslims need to do more to integrate into mainstream British culture.

What is this obsession with being British? A good Muslim is apparently, the one who adopts Britishness wholeheartedly and pushes for integration. The latter is indeed a complicated subject; the liberal establishment has yet to tell Muslims the meaning of Britishness, integration or “mainstream British culture”. This post-September 11 politicised talk of “integration” and “being British” is accompanied by rising anti-Muslim sentiment, anti-terrorism laws that have been applied against British Muslims, and rising support for military interventions in the Muslim world leading to disastrous results. Under these circumstances, integration means accepting political and social inferiority.

Muslims who choose to resist this kind of integration are presented as being awkward citizens and bad Muslims. The Muslims, who responded to BNP violence in the summer of 2001, were immediately presented as yobs, drug-dealers and thugs (even by members of the Muslim establishment). The buzzwords once heaped on their Afro-Caribbean counterparts - integration, Britishness, social cohesion - resurfaced, but with the added assumption that Britain was under threat from the rise of a new Al Qaeda inspired, fundamentalist youth culture. Never mind the fascist racist thugs who attacked Muslims indiscriminately in Bradford, Burnley and Oldham; or Nick Griffin, whose speeches incited racial hatred. The state prefers to arrest and detain the likes of Abu Hamza who despite being advocates of very reactionary ideas, has never been directly connected to violence unlike many senior BNP activists. Moreover, the state detains hundreds of Muslims without charge or trial and keeps them in the legal limbo of Belmarsh. With this backdrop, the Guardian report seems meaningless and largely irrelevant.

Nevertheless, the white liberal always enjoys hearing institutionalised people from our community advocate the views they want to hear. The report presented Anber Raz, a social worker, as saying “The way Islam is linked with terrorism is partly the failure of the community”, but said little about the global politics of neo-imperialism, the war on Iraq, tabloid demonisation of the Muslim community and racist anti-terrorist legislation. Sarfraz Manzoor chastised Muslims for not wanting to be self-critical, but isn’t this the case with society in general? Manzoor mentioned racism and sexism within our community as an example, but isn’t this a wider social problem? Some elements of the press have successfully expounded the view that the oppression of women is somehow exclusive to Muslims. In fact Yasmin Qureshi, a participant, mentioned how if a Muslim male kills his unfaithful wife, it is perceived by society that it is “a religious issue”.

The report succeeded in marginalising those who advocate alternatives to the current notions of what is good for Muslims. Members of the Hizb ut Tahrir were represented, expressing the familiar views of how Islam and democracy are incompatible, however there was never an attempt to understand why some Muslims ideologically reject the political system and advocate the need for an Islamic state or express sympathy for Osama Bin Laden. The journalists reporting on the event were not interested in such views and were quick to present the HT Muslims as alienated. It is assumed that the “good Muslims” are those that accept democracy and view integration in a positive light. The liberals media chooses to speak on behalf of Muslims, prescribing medicine like an authoritarian doctor; and like a patient, Muslims cannot question this reality because the doctor knows best, even if he be a Harold Shipman.

Many of the Muslim participants also expressed their concerns for the issues which we have become so accustomed to: Islamophobia, racism, the war on terror, the war in Iraq, Palestine and anti-terrorist legislation. In that situation any form of integration into “the British way of life” amongst the Muslim community has occurred not on the terms of liberals who demand that we transform in accordance to Western modernity, but within the context of struggle, as seen with the massive anti-war demonstration on 15th February 2002. The anti-war movement and indeed the many campaigns against anti-terrorist legislation has brought Islam to the mainstream in a political way so as to counter injustice. What we can learn from the anti-war movement in Britain is that the unification of people towards a just cause, instead of some narrow minded nationalist notions of Britishness, can and has created community links which never existed before. This is an example of an alternative integration - a radical integration which applies to all of civil society and not just one section of it.

Panelists: Fiona McTaggert, Trevor Phillips, Tariq Ramadan, Humera Khan and Abdal-Hakim Murad.

Chair: Gary Younge

Comments from participants:

Abi Maghribi: I enjoyed listening to Tariq Ramadan and Tim Winter. The other panelists were wishy washy, long-winded. I’m disappointed they were given so much time.

Serena Hussain: I have always had an issue with these things because they never connect to the ordinary people on the street. This event wasn’t bad.

Ehsan Masood: The participants chosen weren’t representative. There were too many activist-types approaching the issues from set mentalities.

Saqeb Mueen: We managed to publicly discuss issues, without moaning about our victim status too much. I felt educated by the end.

Amin: Mostly a bunch of polite people having a nice inoffensive conversation. A lot of people, who should have been here, weren’t.

Sharif Nashashibi: McTaggert was a disgrace. She wasn’t here to listen but to tow the patronising government line. There was no real dialogue with her.

Salma Yaqoob: It’s ironic - it took a non-Muslim paper to bring us together. If a Muslim had called for this meeting, most people wouldn’t have participated.

Ismail Patel: I was shocked to learn that so many youngsters felt they couldn’t express themselves or discuss issues honestly. I thought this was a problem faced by older, first generations.

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