The rising tide of Islamophobia in some Western countries is paralleled by an increase in extremist tendencies both on religious and political grounds. This is not a healthy situation; neither for the native populations nor the emerging communities with their divergent backgrounds. Multi-culturalism has worked to a large extent but these phenomena are beginning to undermine it. Serious debates with open minds and hearts are needed. The religious orders have the potential to contribute positively to these debates and influence their constituencies to embrace multi-culturalism.
Julian Bond: Responding to Islamophobia, with Love: There are eleven things you wished you didn’t know about Islamophobia so before we look at love, let’s recap on what we already know about Islamophobia:
1. It’s not going away;
2. There is a consistent third of the population/statistical sample groups who have very negative opinions of Islam/Muslims;
3. It is most likely that any news article about Muslims will be negative rather than positive;
4. Attacks on Muslim women, usually wearing hijab, continue, especially when there are anti-Muslim messages or Islam-related incidents in the news;
5. The ‘Trojan Horse’, or Trojan Hoax, case created further suspicion and anxiety about British Muslims;
6. The Qur’an does not have a good reputation in many places;
7. Nor, sadly, does the Prophet Muhammad;
8. This is against a backdrop of fourteen years of Muslims, and non-Muslims, trying to educate society about what Islam is really about
9. I’ve been accused of lying when speaking positively about Islam in churches and of being a ‘coward’ on social media, again by ‘Christians’;
10. It’s often asking for trouble if you talk about shari’ah, jihad and even tawhid (monotheism) in the masjid, or outside it;
11. And let’s not forget ‘creeping sharia’h’, Islamisation or Islamicisation of Britain, being ‘taken over’, ‘swamped’ and so on.
Thankfully, this is not the whole picture and many who are not Muslims do not have a problem with Muslims, though continuing fears about extremism, terrorism and ‘jihadis’ on their way to or returning from ISIS fuel an ongoing and increasing fear and dread. I take hope from the two-thirds who are either well-disposed towards Muslims or fall into the ‘don’t know’ segment. I haven’t seen any figures, though they may well be out there, tracking attitudes towards Muslims on an annual basis from 2001 to today. So what would Jesus do?
This question, trite, overused and debased by glib answers might be seen as the adult version of the Sunday school exchange – where the answer to every question is ‘Jesus’. However, I don’t believe that, when it counts, Christians are using it enough. There is a perception, though hopefully shifting through the good work of organisations like The Feast, Mahabba and Near Neighbours, that it is only liberals who do inter faith, i.e. that it is not something that Jesus would do. I’m not sure that Christians who have a problem with inter faith would therefore like to associate Jesus with bigotry, hatred, fear, isolationism and distrust but, for some, I am betraying my faith, and Jesus, if this fearful position is not my outlook too.
Of course I’m not so liberal that I wouldn’t claim Jesus’ support for doing the opposite of this, following the sunnah (example) of Jesus who had a habit of turning things on their head – you have heard it said that Muslims are the enemies of Christians but I say be friends with them and receive God’s peace and blessings (you can look this up in the ‘Sermon on the Mount’ in Matthew’s Gospel). Christians should actually be at the forefront of building bridges with Muslims, living up to the Qur’anic appreciation of the ‘People of the Book’. And, yes, God does expect that we should be using our Books, which some say are mutually contradictory and opposed to each other, in a creative way to bridge the gaps. That’s the only way I can make sense of the different Scriptures that we have and the reason why we should all be reading scripture together.
So what does Jesus say about Islamophobia? Jesus continually urged his followers not to fear – not to fear the authorities, those with hatred in their hearts, extreme weather conditions, death, the apocalypse, the miraculous, even God. So Jesus would not be Islamophobic, nor should his followers be. However, we need to take this further in case I only answer part of the question. Fear and hatred are two sides of the same coin, usually combining in the inexact use of ‘Islamophobia’ – phobos, phobia meaning fear or anxiety. This is why in recent years, following the example of TellMAMA, I have begun to use anti-Muslim hatred instead, it is a more appropriate term as, even though there are anxieties about conversion to Islam and shari’ah, very few public concerns, in wider society at least, are of a religious or theological nature.
So what did Jesus say about hatred? This is another of those very obvious, almost rhetorical questions, of course Jesus was against hate. Sadly this is not true of all his followers, some of whom reserve a particular hatred and deep suspicion of Muslims. I have experienced this in various ways, though most violently on 7/7 itself at a Christian conference about Islam. Unfortunately it was not an event which focused on getting to know Muslims and Islam or building bridges with them but Muslims and Islam as a problem. I have been to a number of much better events since then, organised by Evangelical Christians and by the Christian Muslim Forum. On this occasion, with much less actual experience, I challenged the brand of religious debunking of Islam and was almost rewarded with a punch from a fellow participant, until I asked him why he was balling his fist. The unfolding events of 7/7 offered some explanation, but not justification.
In short Christians should be doing better, they should be known for their efforts in engaging constructively in dialogue and relationship-building with Muslims. This was my mission at the Christian Muslim Forum, exploring and enabling ways for this to happen as widely as possible, the work continues. Central to this were two things which are very simple but I think at the heart of how we achieve change and sufficiently challenging that we will not say, ‘I’ve done that, what’s next?’ Specifically, making oneself into a personal, leading, example of bridge-building and having a radical appreciation of Muslims and Islam, enjoying the diverse opportunities for being and living together. This was all that the Christian Muslim Forum did, whether producing shared guidelines on ethical evangelism and daw’ah or on inter faith marriage, encouraging church-mosque relationships, scriptural reasoning, joint advocacy, campaigning against racism and Islamophobia and for halal food, standing together at distressing times, such as the murder of Lee Rigby or attacks on Christians in Pakistan or Muslims in Burma, praying for peace in Israel and Gaza and visiting the Holy Land together.
However, I need to develop this further. We should be speaking more positively of ‘love’. You can trace my own journey in developing this idea from the speech I gave at the 2012 launch of Islam Awareness Week, which had the theme of love. This should, indeed, shape our relationship with each other. This is excellently done in Ray Gaston’s (@revdray) book ‘A Heart Broken Open’, which I would recommend to anyone, particularly Christians, but also Muslims, and anyone else. Once we reframe the question in terms of love then it becomes something very different. This may be language which is too ‘religious’ for secular opponents of Islam and to them I would ask, echoing in reverse the Qur’anic motif, ‘Why be so willing to believe the negative and deny the good, harmonious and peaceful expressions of Islam in our society?’ The Qur’an urges ‘enjoining what is right and forbidding what is wrong’ (3.110). It also assumes, rather than urges, the love of the Muslims for the ‘People of the Book’, even when not reciprocated – ‘You are the ones who bear love towards them, while they do not love you, though you believe in all the Books’ (3.119).
So what can we do as individuals? Here’s a few suggestions:
1. At its simplest, meet and greet our Muslim neighbours;
2. Visit your local mosque, earlier this year there was a #visitmymosque initiative;
3. As Ramadan is approaching, attend a Big Iftar (@thebigiftar, #TBI2015);
4. Read the Qur’an, or at least part of it, the last part (shorter chapters is often recommended) or the beginning, which engages with many Biblical characters and relationships between Muslims and the ‘People of the Book’;
5. Join a dialogue or scriptural reasoning group, relatively easy in London, and in major British cities (details of groups via the Cambridge Interfaith Programme);
6. Find ways of including Muslim guests at your church at particular times of year (one of my Muslim friends came to the parish church with me for the Ash Wednesday service);
7. Mention your own involvement in inter faith from the pulpit, in prayers (pray particularly for the Muslim community during Ramadan) and in sermons.
A few pointers for Muslims
Almost as a footnote, I offer a few suggestions for Muslims, firmly believing, as in the case of Jesus’ words and examples in the Bible, that everything you need to know is in the Qur’an already. Nevertheless, it may be that an external prompt is helpful.
1. Invite people to visit your masjid, pray or share in dhikr (chanting, meditation) with you;
2. Do talk about Muhammad and the Qur’an in a welcoming and inclusive way, if you don’t already;
3. Read the Bible;
4. Visit a church with a Christian friend;
5. Become involved in inter faith initiatives;
6. Talk to other Muslims about inter faith and engagement with Christians and wider society.
Sheikh Dr Ramzy : Islam and Multiculturalism: I greet you with the Islamic greeting of peace Assalamu Alaykum Wa Rahmatullah May the peace and blessings of God be up on you all. Without a doubt, Islam is a religion that embraces multiculturalism and has shown great adaptability and inclusion towards different cultures in the past. In fact, Almighty God says in the Qur’an in a famous verse:
The above verse encourages all Muslims to integrate and to be a part of multicultural societies. The first Muslim constitution, the famous Madinah charter, which was written by the Prophet Muhammad concerning the relationships between the various tribes of Madina, including Jewish Christian bodies was an example of the importance of inter-cultural harmony and cooperation. This document stipulated peaceful interactions between people of many different walks of life and for the decades people of the Madina lived peacefully under it.
But why is multiculturalism so problematic in current times and how can we work toward establishing a multicultural society and country in which all are respected, and find a way for Muslims to be accepted and integrated as a solid part of multicultural Britain and Europe.
How can we change the mentality of ‘US and them’ to ‘Us as whole’.
There are two layers to this issue. The first is ensuring that within our Muslim communities we are practising cultural harmony, as is the tradition of the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh). Muslim communities are made up of diverse ethnic and cultural groups which need to be united, both under the banner of our faith, but also the banner of being British. And to a large extent they are.
The second is the integration of the Muslim community as a whole into British society, bearing in mind the diverse cultures this involves. Again, I believe, from a Muslim perspective, the community is well integrated, and is becoming increasingly so. We share British values, many of which are inherent in our faith, such as freedom of speech, freedom of thought, security and social justice for all, and Freedom of religion. (áóßõãú Ïöíäõßõãú æóáöíó Ïöíäö (109:6) ) you religion is yours and my religion is mine and peace be with you.
And yet, we face unprecedented levels of both extremism and Islamophobia. Much of this anti-Muslim sentiment seems to arise from misunderstandings about Islam and from the focus on extremists in the community, despite the fact that these individuals represent only a handful of Muslims, and whose beliefs remove them far from the large majority of peace loving British Muslim citizens. Tackling extremism is important, there is no doubt about it, but in a right way.
Unfortunately, the Government’s new hard-line approach is counterproductive, promoting the removal of freedoms in the name of freedom. ,It places all Muslims under scrutiny solely because of their faith, depriving them of their rights because of the actions of a tiny, tiny minority. British Muslims are part of British society; most have been here for generations.
Friends, the government’s new laws encourage an atmosphere of distrust and suspicion against this large community, who themselves wish to see the end of extremism in this country and across the world. Rather than ostracise them, in the words of Syeda Warsi the former Minister of faith, “we must listen to British Muslims. Let’s not legislate for tolerance by being intolerant.”
The stance of the Government affects the views of people on the street. Islamophobia is on the rise and such policies will only serve to promote it and will result in alienation rather than integration.
No one’s rights should be removed unless they are guilty of a crime. The British Muslim community are guilty of no crime, and yet these stronger anti-terrorism policies are rapidly influence upon their rights.
There are around 3 million Muslims living in the UK as law-abiding British citizens. The Government should not sacrifice the rights of these Muslims for a handful of rotten ones.
If we are to fight extremism we must bring people together, not ostracise a whole community by promoting an atmosphere of suspicion and hate, where every Muslim is a suspect until proven innocent.
By undermining the rights of any section of society, we undermine the very fabric of our country, and do away with the very freedoms we are trying to protect. To eradicate Islamophobia and extremism is a challenge for Muslims and non Muslims alike. By alienating Muslims, this will only make the problem worse and drive wedges between us. To truly tackle extremism and prejudice of any sort, we must unite, within our Muslim communities, and within our British society as a whole against forces that threaten us all. I hope and pray that we can come together as peace loving British citizens to achieve this aim so we may all live in this country that we all call home.
Ahmed Versi: My presentation will be totally different from the other two. I am going to talk about Islamophobia itself because I believe that one of reasons we have radicalisation is Islamophobia. I will give a historical account of Islamophobia in the 1980s and 1990s. The history is quite interesting.
The term Islamophobia is of huge concern: the fear or the dread of Islam. We used to use the term anti-Muslim or anti-Islam in the Muslim News depending on what the story was about. Islamophobia is now as commonly used as is anti-Semitism. Islamophobia became present in discussions since the early 20th century in France and later on in the mid 80s it became more popular and now it is very common.
Unfortunately now the United Nations is using it as terminology for anti-Muslim and anti-Islam. So is the European Union and other organisations and it has become common terminology. Unfortunately because of the term Islamophobia many of the right wing journalists and leadership in this country are trying to misuse it in a very negative way. So for instance when I interviewed Ed Milliband the then leader of the opposition in the general election campaign he said that if he becomes prime minister and if Labour comes into government they are going to outlaw Islamophobia. He clarified during the interview that only anti Semitic and hate crimes are recorded. There is legislation against them.
What it means is that if someone is attacking someone it is just like any other attack. But if they swear at Muslims or attack mosques or women with head scarves it is called an aggravated offence. It is more than just an attack. It is because of the person’s faith. The other terms are directed at attacks when it is about race and so on.
He wanted to make this into legislation and he also wanted all the police services to monitor it. Currently only the Metropolitan police in London and greater London are monitoring Islamophobic attacks. Once you are outside greater London they record the attacks as racist attacks. So if a mosque is attacked they will not say it is an Islamophobic attack or a religiously motivated attack. They say it is a racist attack. So he wanted to change this.
When he said this after two days the Muslim News had 2.5m hits on its website, 200,000 views of facebook and thousands and thousands of tweets on this issue only. A lot of the right wingers from the mainstream – people like the columnists in the Times and the Daily Telegraph and those kinds of people responded very aggressively and violently in a literary sense against what Ed Milliband said.
They said that if this legislation is brought in they would be the first ones to try and break it and see how they would be arrested. These were the kind of attacks made. I can’t repeat some of the phrases that were used against Ed Milliband. It was part of the campaign against him because of the elections which were coming up.
There is an issue of an aggravated offence. If Muslims are committing crimes like grooming young women as they have done in some areas in the UK we cannot even talk about it. We cannot say that Muslims are committing these crimes. If we do we will be committing an offence which is completely wrong. They have twisted everything that Ed Milliband has said. You can see the kind of Islamophobia that is out there. Even if you mention something to protect the community you get a very negative response.
Many people blame journalists and the media for Islamophobic reporting which increases attacks on Muslims. It is true that there are some journalists who may be Islamophobic but the journalists do not live in isolation. They live in society and they reflect what is happening in society and they are part and parcel of society. There are politicians, there are the leaders of other faith communities and minority leaders and others who look like they may be bringing about Islamophobia.
There are two main issues during the period of the 80s and 90s when Muslim schools were a very hot topic as they are now. The second issue is Palestine and I will look at how the reporting was done and why I felt it was Islamophobic.
If you are a faith school you can get funding according to the law. It is not discriminatory. Any faith – Christian, Jewish whatever – can get state funding but unfortunately until very recently when the Labour Party came to power in 1997 no Muslim schools got state funding. The Tory government found many, many excuses not to give funding to Muslim schools. There are only about 10 or 12 Muslim schools out of almost 200 which are funded by the government. During the 80s there were no terrorism attacks but the schools would be described as schools for extremists and terrorists, divisive etc
Before I established the Muslim News I was working for Afkhar Inquiry and at that time there was a report on race and education by Lord Swan called the Swan Committee Report Education for All. It was published in March 1985. At the time three Muslims schools were trying to get funding: The Muslim Girls’ School in Kirlees, West Yorkshire, Zakaria Girls’ Secondary School, The Muslim Girls’ Secondary School, now called Faversham College in Bradford and the Islamia Primary School in Brent (Yusef Islam’s school).
These schools were trying to get funding and against the advice of the majority of their black members. At that time they used to use the word black to mean black and Asian. So against the advice of the majority of its black members the Swan Report came out against voluntary aid for Muslim schools. The committee argued, even though the black members of the committee were against it, that there should be no funding, for Muslim schools because they would be separate, divisive schools and there would be problems as there were in Northern Ireland between the Catholics and the Protestants.
Six out of eight black members of the committee dissented and spoke out against the recommendation and accused the Swan Committee’s recommendation as being a denial of human rights for the Muslim community. One of them even went as far as calling them racist. When the report was published the media supported the Swan Committee report. The left wing liberal newspaper The Observer said that the committee was right in rejecting the separate state supported schools for ethnic minorities because that is what underlies the tensions and troubles of Northern Ireland. It blamed fundamentalist Muslims for wanting to establish their own schools. No one talked about Jewish and Christian schools being divisive – only Muslim schools were called divisive.
In its editorial the respected Times Education Supplement expressed the fear of fundamentalists and said “the education system will be fragmented with all its implications of institutionalised social and ethnic divisions.” On the BBC’s Panorama Programme the reporter Margaret Jay said “it is not Judaism but militant Islam that is now mounting the most formidable challenge to the organisation of voluntary aided schools.”
In February 1995 the Tory government refused an application for state funding by Faversham College in Bradford. The respected Catholic publication the Tablet in its editorial of February 1995 said that Islam was incompatible with the very idea of liberal education as a Muslim school would be likely to become a fifth column for fundamentalist extremism.
Another argument The Tablet presented against government funding for Muslim schools was that certain Muslims want their own schools so that they can preserve certain aspects of their culture which run counter to the prevailing norms in the West: especially the education of girls on an equal basis.
The Anglican weekly The Church Times argued against government funding of Muslims schools and said that only Christian and Jewish schools are ready to fit into a pluralistic society. However Muslim schools would not show the same willingness. It ended its editorial by saying that the danger of such schools is that they produce citizens who will be divisive and unsettle the society as such schools create religious believers of an exclusive frame of mind. The majority of faith schools in this country are Anglican.
Christian columnists like Cliff Longley wrote against Islamic schools (and this is supported by the media) because he believed Muslims do not share the values of the majority of the Christians. He said “justification for state funded denominational schooling does not rest simply on the members of the denomination in question of having a right. It is the consent of the majority which decides whether Muslim schools would contribute to the common good of this country.” Longley in 1992 was not convinced that the values taught in Muslim schools were sufficiently close to those that the majority wanted to uphold. His argument was not dissimilar to the Tablet.
Longley had not changed his views when he wrote about the state funding of Muslim schools a year later in the Daily Telegraph this time under the secular and profane column when the Islamia school’s application had been rejected under the argument of surplus places. Longely wrote again that Islam has the greatest difficulty in coming to terms with the values of Western secular society unlike the Orthodox Jews and Anglicians who are not fundamentally at war with these values. So you can see them and us.
Even Christian leaders at the time campaigned against the funding of Muslim schools. The late head of the Catholic community in Britain, Cardinal Basil Hume, was at least in 1992 against the funding of Muslim schools. Speaking at a secondary heads association meeting in Cardiff in April 1992 he said that state funded Muslim schools would be divisive,: “ the danger we have to consider is how we are going to make our society more divided.” Even the Church of England was against Muslim schools and they voted in a private members bill in the House of Lords in March 1991 against Muslim schools.
There is a marked contrast to how the media wrote about other faith schools. A newly established Hindu school in Neasden had a very positive spin to it and there were no dissenting voices.
Now Palestine. The bomb attacks in Israel in February 1996. Some of the Jewish leaders in Britain accused Muslims here of funding terrorist attacks in Israel. The then Labour MP Greville Janner, now Lord Janner, wrote to the former Home Secretary Michael Howard: “The funds raised in the UK by supporters of Hamas are used for terrorist attacks in Israel.” But the home secretary rejected the link saying there was no evidence to support such claims and he also rejected Janner’s accusations that the group had planned operations from Britain.
The Board of Deputies for the Jewish community asked the Charity Commission at that time to investigate the activities of Interpal a British-Muslim charity which was assisting impoverished students in the Occupied Territories, Lebanon and Jordan. Interpal was widely accused by the media, and by others, of funding terrorists in Israel. The Evening Standard in its front page repeated the accusation made by Greville Janner to the Home Secretary that terrorist operations were being funded, planned and ordered from Camden. The paper went on to accuse Muslims of collecting such funds outside the mosques.
Even though the stories carried denials from Interpal the headlines were Islamophobic : British Charity accused of aiding Hamas bombers, British Muslims accused of funding bus bombers. These accusations led to the freezing of Interpal’s accounts by the Charity Commission. They did not investigate. They acted just because the media was saying those things. This is also happening now. There are been numerous attacks by Israeli intelligence. They speak about the alleged threat from the Muslim fundamentalists planning terrorist attacks against Jews in Britain. In a front page article in the Evening Standard in August 1997 headlined London home to top Arab terrorists it was stated that Israeli intelligence are certain that at least part of the money raised by Interpal is used to purchase guns and explosives for the military wing of Hammas. These stories were also carried by other papers.
The accusations against the British-Muslim charity Interpal continued even after the Charity Commission on May 30th 1996 had given it a clean bill of health which was hardly reported in the media. The commission said that it found no evidence that the charity’s funds were being channelled into terrorist activities. On the contrary it said the charity was a well run and committed organisation which carries out important work in a part of the world where there is great hardship and need.
However on 26th May 1998 the Daily Telegraph carried a story saying that Interpal was run by Hamas activists who encourage and support terrorist activities against Israel and that the charity was used to raise money to fund the training of suicide bombers in Gaza and West Bank. This time Interpal did not take this lying down. It took legal action against the paper as similar accusations were appearing in the European papers and the paper apologised in November 1998.
Accusations of collecting funds for terrorist activities against Israel in 1996 led to attacks against mosques by some Jewish groups. London Central Mosque, Regents Park received threats and had to increase security and close its underground car park. The threats that were that if you kill any more Jews in attacks in Israel we will kill you.
Some people even targeted innocent Muslim families. For instance the Times of March 17th that year carried a headline Hamas radicals find a haven in London. The paper incorrectly reported that the occupants of a top floor flat in Crickelwood were supporters of Hamas. The Muslim family in question had no connection with Hamas. They took legal action and the paper had to apologise later on.
Even the ethnic media are Islamophobic including the BBC. It is funded by the tax payers and it should reflect our views. They had a programme called Wedlock and they talked about forced marriages. Forced marriages are not unique to Muslim Asians but the only examples they gave in the programme were Muslim women. It created the kind of Islamophobia that it was the only the Muslims who did this.
Even liberals from other communities were also Islamophobic. Darcus Howe a very well known broadcaster and economist for the well-known weekly New Statesman wrote about Muslim inmates in prison. He said we should not expect Muslims to be especially law abiding. What upset him most was the news of the appointment of a Muslim adviser. Until that time in prisons there were no Muslim imams. Advisors would look after the spiritual needs of the Muslim prisoners. Because their numbers were increasing the Labour government decided to have a Muslim adviser. They could not call him a Muslim Chaplin because they would have to change existing legislation so they had to call him an adviser.
When the appointment was made Darcus Howe asked a rhetorical question: Would these councillors be armed with the Quran pointing out that the way of a transgressor is exceedingly difficult? This seems to be religious fanaticism at its worse. What of the young women who wish to break out of this restrictive way of life. If they end up in Holloway, as some of surely will, because they have been forced into arranged marriages and all that goes with them. This is the reaction of ethnic minority groups and it is very interesting.
What I also found very surprising is that Islamophobia was rampant then as well. There was a very well known anti-racist organisation the Runnymede Trust. They had published before about anti Semitism and they felt they ought to publish something about Islamophobia. The commission published a book called Islamophobia. What I found very disturbing was that it had succumbed to the stereotyping of Muslims. It is a big story. We investigated it very deeply.
In the chapter on Building Bridges the report discusses how various faith communities cope in times of tension. The report says that seven well publicised attacks around the world including London, Argentina as well as Israel on Jewish communities and targets were perpetrated by people claiming to be motivated by Muslim beliefs. Those convicted in London never claimed, nor did the prosecution claim, that they were motivated by Muslim beliefs. This is a publication which talks about Islamophobia and then they themselves are succumbing to a kind of Islamophobia.
Another way in which Islamophobia works is when the government and the media starts to say that they are doing Muslims a favour. This is very problematic. For instance in Oldham there was a perception that the impoverished Asian Muslims were getting more financial resources from the local authority than the white people who were poor as well. There were large numbers of attacks on Asian Muslims and there were riots as well because of the way the media was reporting that the Muslims were getting more money than the whites.
After 9/11 a lot of negative issues were created. Within four hours of the attack the Muslim Council of Britain condemned it unequivocally. Within 48 hours they organised a meeting of every Muslim organisation, imams and everyone else to jointly take a stand and the Prime Minister Tony Blair quoted that. But the media gave it very little space. On the contrary it gave space to a handful of extremists. So the people perceived that Muslims were supporting terrorism.
Not only that. Mrs Thatcher said at that time that Muslims should come out and condemn terrorism. The Muslim News criticised that heavily and the Telegraph got upset and they wrote an editorial against us.
Whenever Muslims engage in any criminal act they call it extremist like the phrase Islamic extremism and so on. You cannot say Islamic extremism because you are blaming the religion so they come up with this idea of using ‘political Islam’ and ‘Islamists’. But when the ordinary person sees the words ‘Islamist extremist’, ‘Islamist terrorist’ he believes it has to do with the faith. Whenever this happens you have an increase in Islamophobic attacks against anything that is visibly Islamic: women wearing the headscarf and mosques and Islamic centres. This happened after the terrorist attack when Lee Rigby was attacked. For the first time in the history of this country over 20 mosques were attacked and some of them were bombed.
Because of Ramadhan, one of the mosques in Manchester changed the duhr time from 1pm – 2pm and the bomber thought the maximum number of people would be there. So he placed the bomb at 1pm thinking there would be a large number of Muslim casualties. But luckily because the time was changed no one was killed when the bomb went off. But neither the prime minister nor the home secretary condemned the attack. I am a journalist based in parliament so I asked the press officer’s for the prime minister why he has not said anything as so many Muslims could have been killed. They said he is concerned about what happened. ‘Concern’ was the harshest word they used.
But at the end of Ramadhan when the prime minister went to a mosque in Manchester we had a journalist there and he asked the same question. The prime minister said “I condemn all forms of terrorism.” Period. This is the whole point. When young Muslims see there are so many Islamophobic attacks and the prime minister has no sympathy or empathy they feel they are ‘the other’. They feel they are excluded. They feel it is not my society. This is one of the reasons young people get radicalised.
Julian Bond, 52, is currently Lead Editor/Writer at the Methodist Church of Great Britain. He was previously (until January 2015) Founder Director of the Christian Muslim Forum. He has engaged with the Muslim community around the country while also encouraging Christians to meet with Muslims, both through
