Rioting by youths in a Paris suburb has highlighted the discontent among sections of France’s immigrant population. The BBC News website’s Henri Astier explores the sense of alienation felt by many French Muslims.
A useful corrective to the claim that French secularism, in contrast to British multiculturalism, counters segregation and treats members of minority communities as equal citizens.
By Murad Qureshi
Tribune, 21 October 2005
Among the stalls at this summer’s Camden Bangladesh Mela in London’s Regent’s Park, I came across one run – rather sheepishly – by Hizb ut-Tahrir. This is an Islamist political party that the Government is now proposing to ban. I found myself involved in an argument with them.
This is a battle of ideas that my family has been fighting for many years. In 1947 at the time of the partition of India my grandfather argued against the creation of religious states. Now it was my turn to argue against a cult that believes voting is haram, an act of disbelief, and that the return of the khalifah – an Islamic state headed by the caliph, the “successor” to the prophet Muhammad – is the only answer to every problem faced by Muslims in the modern world.
How can voting be an act of disbelief? Those such as members of Hizb ut-Tahrir, who insist that it is, claim it means participating in a democratic system that upholds the will of man over the will of Allah. For them, Islamic government is “God’s rule” and they reject democracy as “people’s rule”. They look to the political system established in seventh-century Mecca after the death of the prophet as the model that Muslims should aspire to and seek to recreate.
However, while Muslims regard the period of rule under the “rightly-guided caliphs” in idealised terms, as the best that human endeavours can achieve, it was also a period of dissent, rebellions and wars. Let us not forget that three of the four caliphs who succeeded the prophet were murdered.
Organisations like Hizb ut-Tahrir which forget this historical context are similar to those religious classes on the Qur’an where the sole emphasis is on the rote learning of Arabic letters. It is a method that leads to closed minds.
The formula that the only solution to the Muslim world’s problems is a return to the early days of Islam living under just rule through the khilafa state is of no help to Muslims confronted by the problems of today. The issues of contemporary politics are too complex to be simplified in this manner.
Even in the case of Muslim-majority countries, Hizb is vague about how existing nation states can be persuaded to cede power to their proposed supra-national khilafa state. Its programme is even more abstract in the UK, where Muslims are a small minority and prospects for the establishment of an Islamic state are non-existent.
Therefore, in practice, Hizb operates as a sect, making propaganda in order to recruit Muslims to their ideas so they can make more propaganda in order to win further recruits. Members are encouraged to turn their backs on mainstream politics in Britain and to reject the struggle for realistic reforms that will improve the lives of British Muslims.
Nasreen Suleaman examines the background of 7/7 bomber Mohammed Sidique Khan. It knocks on the head those ignorant theories, emanating from both the Right and the “Left”, that multiculturalism resulted in segregration which then led to the adoption of the extremist views that produced the London bombings.
The Beeston of Khan’s youth was a largely white neighbourhood – and indeed he seems to have spent most of his time in the company of white English lads. Over the past few months I have spoken to many of those white childhood friends, friends who knew Khan as Sid, and they all tell a similar story.
Their accounts of Khan’s upbringing and character show a man who spent most of his formative years not really mixing with other local Muslims.
And, says Ian Barrett, unlike the other children of Pakistani parents, he was not under any family pressure to take an interest in Islam.
“The other Pakistani lads would have to go mosque because their families would say ‘You’re going to mosque.’ But Sid didn’t go,” says Ian. “He didn’t seem interested in Islam and I don’t ever remember him mentioning religion.”
Khan was, by all accounts, an exceptionally well integrated person. His anglicised name “Sid” was just one symbol of his willingness to take on a British identity.
As ministers accuse Muslims of failing to integrate into mainstream society, a leading black intellectual and anti-racist campaigner calls on Tony Blair’s government to face up to the reality of continued racism in Britain.
A. Sivanandan writes in the Observer, 16 October 2005
Lee Jasper replies to the chair of the Commission for Racial Equality: “Asked whether the word multiculturalism should be killed off, he replied: ‘Yes, let’s do that. Multiculturalism suggests separateness.’ Confronted by the Spectator‘s Rod Liddle and asked if Islam was an issue for the CRE – in particular if it was ‘merely a matter of culture’ rather than race – Phillips’s response spoke volumes. ‘Well privately I would go quite a long way down the route you’re taking. It is not primarily an issue of race.’ … But the truth is that vile anti-Muslim prejudice, using the religion of a community to attempt to sideline and blame it for many of society’s ills, is the cutting edge of racism in British society. Those who consider themselves anti-racists need to wake up to this fact.”
“Multiculturalism did not create militant Islam, but it helped create a space for it within British Muslim communities that had not existed before. It fostered a more tribal nation, undermined progressive trends within the Muslim communities and strengthened the hand of conservative religious leaders – all in the name of antiracism. It is true that since 9/11 and particularly since 7/7 there has been growing questioning of the consequences of multiculturalism. From former Home Secretary David Blunkett to CRE chief Trevor Phillips many have woken up to the fragmenting character of pluralism and have talked of the need to reassert common values. Yet the fundamental tenets of the politics of difference remain largely unquestioned. The idea that society consists of a variety of distinct cultures, that all these cultures should be respected and preserved and that society should be organised to meet the distinct needs of different cultures – these continued to be regarded as the hallmarks of a progressive, antiracist outlook. The lesson of the past two decades, however, is this: a left that espouses multiculturalism makes itself redundant.”
Kenan Malik in Prospect, October 2005
“The equality watchdog Trevor Phillips used to irritate the hell out of me. To be frank, I never felt he properly engaged with the real issues affecting modern multi-racial Britain. He always seemed to pussyfoot around the edges, indulging himself in the soft option of political correctness. Either I was plumb wrong … or the guy has just awoken from a kind of intellectual torpor and emerged, virtually overnight, as a clear-sighted, acerbic and fearless crusader against the long-held dogmas and obsessions of our traditionally self-serving race-relations industry.
“Phillips has transformed the office of Head of the Commission for Racial Equality into an abattoir for the slaughter of sacred cows. This week he took a series of cherished beliefs held dear for decades and put them to the sword. Some of the principal pillars of multi-culturalism – one of the most pernicious, wrong-headed creeds of modern times – were shaken to their foundations as he actually dared to ask questions that have been long proscribed. Such as, why it is necessarily wrong to describe people as coloured; why town halls should print forms in a variety of different ethnic languages; why Muslim pupils should be excused from wearing full school uniform.
“Another shibboleth to be chucked overboard was the traditional condemnation of the British Empire. Phillips actually praised it for mixing people of different races and religions, and exhumed the long-buried truism that the British people are not, by nature, bigots. ‘We created something called the Empire where we mixed and mingled with people very different from those of these islands,’ he said. This is terrific stuff….”
Richard Madeley (of Richard & Judy) in the Daily Express, 8 October 2005
“The bombings in London have finally put the multicultural ideal under closer scrutiny…. At its deepest level, multiculturalism represents a denial of all Western claims to truth. The purpose of multiculturalism is to extirpate the truly free cultures by asserting that they are equivalent to primitive, Islamic cultures…. If all cultures and religions are equally worthy of respect, why didn’t the West remain in the age when we burned witches and held slaves? We progressed and left Islam behind because we possessed the ability to criticize ourselves and move on. The only cultures worthy of respect are those who can withstand scrutiny. If yours is too weak to survive this treatment, then you do not belong in a Western society.”
Wolfgang Bruno’s blog, 3 October 2005
Note the approving nod to Kenan Malik.
“Multiculturalism is a divisive political doctrine that creates enormous costs, foments racial hatred, and may even have been complicit in cultivating the homegrown suicide bombers of July 7, according to a new report from the independent think-tank Civitas.”
National Secular Society news report, 3 October 2005
And what is this mild-sounding organisation Civitas that the NSS cites so approvingly? Well, actually, it’s a hard right anti-migrant outfit that numbers Anthony (“Islam really does want to conquer the world”) Browne among its leading contributors.
Civitas explains that the message of the report, The Poverty of Multiculturalism by Patrick West, is that “hard” multiculturalism has led “some Western intellectuals, who regard themselves as progressive, into the perverse position of defending cultures that condone the killing of homosexuals and the virtual enslavement of women, whilst denigrating the culture of the free societies of the West, inspired by the ideals of the Enlightenment”.
Civitas provides the following quote from Mr West: “State-sponsored multiculturalism has led to cities such as Bradford, Burnley and Oldham fissuring along sectarian lines, and to heightening racial tensions between whites and Asians – with white people feeling ‘the other lot’ are getting favourable treatment from the local council…. The rise of the BNP in the north … is the result of white people seeing themselves discriminated against by local authorities.”
Tariq Modood, author of Multicultural Politics: Racism, Ethnicity and Muslims in Britain, defends multiculturalism.