Open Discussions/ Gulf Cultural Club
Muslims in Britain
citizenship, inclusion and integration
*Abdool Karim Vakil (Lecturer at King’s College)
** Ifath Nawaz (Chair, Legal Affairs Committee, MCB)
***Julian Bond (Grants Team Leader, The Methodist Church)
While the emergence of Muslim communities and Muslim civic and political participation across Europe has largely shared the trajectories and struggles of other ethnic and racialised groups, their histories are often cast as religious stories apart, and their present belonging and citizenship held as conditional and exceptional within debates largely framed around integration and security.
Critical discussions, in turn, have either largely focused on the question of negative representations and the role of the media, or on the role of the far right, Muslim experiences of violence and harassment, or of prejudice and discrimination. From different directions, political left and Muslim critical voices point to the problems of state multiculturalism, communitarianism, and identity politics, while conservative and liberal opinion champion British values and identity.
What alternative stories might we narrate? How have Muslims engaged citizenship in ways that mobilise different conceptions of identity and belonging? What constraints and predicaments map current challenges and opportunities?
Tuesday, 5th March 2019
Ifath Nawaz: When I looked at the topic for tonight’s discussion it is quite big. If you break up the topic of citizenship, inclusion and integration you could have quite lengthy debates on all of those. What I am focusing on is how Muslims engaged and what constraints and predicaments we face here in the UK and in Europe generally.
Personally for myself these issues became prominent in 1993 when I was at home having given birth to my son and I was taking a career break for the first time. It was in those days that the war in Bosnia was unravelling itself on our television screens. It was not a war that was in some remote country but right on the doorstep of Europe.
For the first time in my life time we saw concentration camps once again in Europe. We heard harrowing stories of Muslim girls being raped and of routine brutality to the Muslims in Bosnia. And yet the world stayed quiet for far to long. As a Muslim lawyer I was intensely disturbed at what was happening and the silence that the world was showing to this travesty.
It occurred not just to me but to many Muslims to ensure that this never happened again we had to learn from the situation in Bosnia and to the credit of Muslims in the UK a lot happened at that time.
Around 1997 a number of Muslim organisations were established: The Association of Muslim Lawyers, the Muslim Council of Britain and the Muslim Association of Britain. These organisations then continued to play a respective role as voluntary organisations in educating the communities, in providing leadership and providing representation on issues concerning Muslims and engaging with the government, with NGOs, with law enforcement agencies and with Interfaith groups and one would have thought that having embarked on this that we would have achieved and made a huge difference.
We find that 25 years later the enemy of the people is Islamic fundamentalism or Islamic terrorism and that the axis of evil is a number of Muslim countries. Since 2001 the net over which Muslim countries are perceived to be part of this axis of evil has been thrown ever wider to include any country that is considered not to follow the so-called Western values.
Here at home in Europe as a result of the war on terror Muslims in Europe find themselves facing one of the most hostile environments for minorities with the rise of the far right and a growing intolerance of Islam, the Islamic way of life, Muslims in general, the populist authoritarianism, Brexit, moral collapse, the global refugee crisis, extreme inequality and environmental catastrophe.
The initial reaction of Muslim organisations and their leadership was, in my view, quite reactionary. We were trying to always respond to issues as they occurred. This kind of activism has been termed by the scholar Dr Borne as the post mortem of crisis. He describes a situation where Muslims are hampered by educational backwardness and cultural disorientation, lack of political and intellectual direction, tunnel vision in the way we approach things, the absence of women and young people in this work, the lack of priority and the rise of opportunists within the community, who are serving personal gain.
Dr Ibrahim Kalim says that the Muslim world has turned into a passive spectator due to relations of dependence, problems of legitimacy, short term thinking, inferiority complexes and a lack of investment in serious thinking, education and research.
Therefore change has been necessary for Muslims in Europe to adapt – there has been no choice. But those Muslims who think they can hold on to their cultural norms and bring about the very critical change that is required need a wake up call because otherwise we are in danger of sleeping walking into another Bosnia like situation.
So what has been done to bring about change? What is necessary? I kind of explored it from a number of different angles because Muslims are not new in Europe. We have been here since around the 8th century and we have been part and parcel or Europe’s heritage. The Muslim contribution to Europe in human, physical and natural sciences is monumental.
The post colonial Europe now possesses a new challenge with millions of Muslims living in the midst of the Europeans while Muslim lands are susceptible to aggression by Western forces or extremists from within their own midst. Their religion and religious values are under attack. Muslims in Europe are undergoing a historic transformation in their social evolution. They are readjusting their position in European societies from being foreigners to indigenous or native personnel.
Muslims in general have proved themselves to be very simplistic and naïve in their social interaction and their engagement with the wider society. Many have lived in Europe for
decades and have taken European passports and European nationality. They work in various sectors but psychologically they do not belong to Europe. They are confused in their identity.
Despite some progress in some areas of life the lack of clear intellectual direction from Muslim scholars, the apathy and parental guidelines and ineffective community leadership are known to be the main reasons for this. The disproportionate media attention on a few individuals who do not represent the majority make matters worse.
So the main Muslim organisations have been set up to provide direction and representation but they are still not having the desired effect. Why is this? I believe we have a need to stop living in closed societies where a few people run everything and women and young people are excluded and do not have a voice and need to look to have an external presence in wider society and the obvious place is political participation. This still remains at a minimum in Europe.
In the US we now have 15 Muslim parliamentarians and eight women and a growing number of councillors at government level. Then there is criticism in the way this has been achieved. An example of tribal issues is the way the belati system of the Pakistani community takes root in local elections. This does no favours to the Muslim community.
Because I have worked in local government I have seen first hand Muslim councillors being voted in on the back of the beladi system and the tribal communities have supported them with little knowledge of the English language or capacity and they represent the people who voted them in with no regard to the wider community and no regard for achieving something for the wider society.
Secondly participation in civil society is critical to moving forward. In 2013, 96 percent of local councillors were white and four percent non white. In the UK Muslims are under represented in the civil service compared with other ethnic and minority groups being one percent of the total of around half a million civil servants.
Thirdly the management committees of mosques and community groups need to better understand and respond to modern life. There needs to be a cosmic change in the way we run our religious institutions to ensure that we have religious teachers engaged in the teaching of youngsters who comply with the legal processes and undertake work in wider society.
I undertook some research on behalf of Minar a few years back to try and find out why a lot of Islamic institutions, mosques and Islamic centres were not embracing the women within their communities and not empowering them to take more proactive stances.
On a personal level one of the things I found most frustrating was a lack of willingness on the part of the Muslim leadership to tackle the old fashioned ideas and old fashioned cultures. To go into communities and try and engage and empower Muslim women we would be talking to Muslim women who have been brought up to come and take part in the conference as a tick box exercise without any real sincere intention on the part of those leading those organisations to bring about change.
When I wrote my report I was highly critical of this approach but it took quite a while to convince those who were supporting me in this initiative to be openly critical and to seek the change that was necessary in the community to bring about the change that we need.
The Muslim Council of Britain is trying to lead the way. There are initiatives it is embarking upon like Visit my mosque which happened this weekend just gone. It started five years ago with about 13 mosques taking part. This weekend over 200 mosques took part.
There is a need to be even stronger. There is a need for bodies like the MCB, MAB, Minar and smaller organisations to introduce voluntary standards for mosques and Islamic Centres relating to training which produce fit for purpose leaders that produce cohesive strategies and move away from being reactive and becoming more outward facing and taking a stronger stance against the persecution of communities, contributing to the development of a broader range of voices and women and putting together development programmes.
One of the biggest things that came out of the Citizens UK Commission on Islam when it toured the UK was that we have a lot of Muslim leaders coming and complaining about the way Muslims are being perceived in society, about the negative portrayal of Muslims in the media and a sense of, to me, victimization. But when the commission would ask these leaders so you are leading organisations what is your strategy for turning things around there were very few organisations that actually had strategies to bring about the change that is so necessary.
The MCB is an example of an organisation that is trying to change things. It has put together for example this year a programme to try and upskill, empower, educate and create better leaders. It is trying to put together leadership training for women, it is rolling out seminars on charity, good governance and leadership training. It is taking part in hate crime workshops with the Metropolitan Police and with law enforcement agencies, interfaith groups and other organisations strengthening relationships and reaching out to the wider society.
MCB has also taken on very passionately the women in mosque initiative to increase the number of women who are taking on positions of responsibility not only within the community, not only within Islamic organisations but also within wider society.
An organisation that I ran personally is called Muslim Up Make a Difference. We ran this programme in the UK called Muslim Women Natural Born Leaders. In these programmes we
try to tackle stereotypes, underachievement in education, empowerment of women and youth and leadership training and skills and mentoring to support women and young people.
Muslim organisations need to overcome their cultural fears and take a principled and bold step to come out of their confusion vis a vis women and involve them generally in their work. Working with law enforcement agencies on hate crime, reviewing the law where relevant and prosecutions succeed and fail are all part of the work we should be doing.
Overcoming Muslim prejudice and lack of action taken on overcoming hatred – this is clearly quite an important stream and with a lack of recognition of Islamophobia Muslim organisations are working hard to ensure that prejudice and negative stereotyping is brought into the open.
No doubt many of you will be familiar with the work of the MCB and Mekdad Versi particularly in pursuing misrepresentations of Islam in the media which has had some success.
Citizens Foundation UK report on The Missing Muslims in 2018 had as one of their recommendations made to the government to reassess the way in which it engages with the Muslim communities and both the government and the Muslim communities need to play a role in ending the current stalemate. This is critical and this is something we are working on.
The report goes on to say that parties need to be proactive in addressing this. The report also recommends that the government develops an integration strategy which includes work at local level to ensure progress with shared goals of a cohesive British society built on common goals and principles.
These are recommendations which other European leaders can benefit from. That piece of work is unique and extremely constructive. There is a lot of work which is good but obviously we have a long way to go. Across Europe we need to share our experiences and knowledge and our experience shows that when we reach out and reflect the society we have chosen to call home we have found receptive and positive responses.
Julian Bond: No Room for Muslims
There is no doubt about our history together, avoiding this reality is denial. One might say
that there is a distinct lack of interest in history (more denial), rooted in embarrassment.
Remembering history means facing up to it. A good understanding of history, produces
humility, and open-mindedness.
The biggest problem that some British people have with British Muslims is religion. It is true
that our society has objections to the presence of brown people, yet it is religion, the
religion of Islam, of Muslims, that singles them out. There is no similar objection to Hindus,
Jains, Sikhs and Buddhists. Again, there is a mixture of denial and ignorance (‘ignorance’ is
not an insult, it describes being uninformed) at societal level.
There must be very few people who do not know that Muslims have an attachment to Jesus and voice publicly their connection with Jews and Christians (‘People of the Book’). At the very least Islam is recognised as a middle-eastern religion, as is the established religion of England. We are faced with a potent mixture of not knowing and not wanting to know and understand, it might open us up or force us to do something. It creates an extremism among non-Muslims, tied in a vicious circle with political intolerance (possibly not the same thing as real intolerance) and media ‘outrage’. Certainly media outrage is manufactured, how else would stories be sold? Likewise, political intolerance is convenient and apparently popular.
‘The London mayoral election has been accused of sinking to “disturbing lows” by Muslim
groups who say the Conservatives are deliberately exploiting racial tension to help their
candidate Zac Goldsmith.’
The MAB said that it was ‘disturbed at how some candidates have gone to extreme
measures to attack either Islamic practices or Muslims.’ You may remember the accusations against imam Suliman Gani, who turned out to be a
Conservative supporter!
Muslims are urged to integrate (people like me urge non-Muslims to integrate with Muslims
…), yet are accused of Islamisation, or the illiterate ‘Islamification’, when they do. Muslim
integration is also described as jihad and taqiyya. Do you know what non-Muslim use of
‘jihad’ tells us …? That non-Muslims could gain a proper or better understanding of Islam, if
they wanted to.
As a society, or parts of it, we are slow to learn. Catholics were seen as a great problem in
days gone by, due to historic political extremism. Rejoicing at the failure of a Catholic
extremist plot in 1605 is embedded in our society, but no one is afraid of or disturbed by a
Catholic presence any more, except very extreme Protestants, and even their passions have
cooled over the centuries.
There were also concerns about the British Jewish community, starting around 1000 years
ago. England was the first country to eject a major Jewish community and the last to take
them back (one of the good achievements of hardline English Protestants). In the Victorian
era, newspaper articles were written complaining about the threat from the Jewish
community in the East End, now Tower Hamlets.
London historian Dan Nilson de Hanas mentioned this as part of a talk that he gave for the Christian Muslim Forum about five years ago. The article that he read out then spoke of the Jewish community in much the same way as some sensationalist journalists have written about the Bangladeshi community in recent times.
Parts of British society do not learn from, or reflect (as the Qur’an encourages us to do) on
the succession of ethno-religious communities, whose only ‘crime’ is being foreign, which
are perceived as dangerous. In each case, very little happened and the ‘threat’ dissolves
over time. At this stage, 30 years after British society first really became widely aware of
Muslims following Rushdie’s book, it seems as if anti-Muslim negativity is not going away,
fed by terrorist attacks and fear-mongering public voices.
It is a gift to politicians, they know that they can rely on around a third of the population
(and this is a statistic that has remained constant for at least 10 years from my experience
working in this area) who will lap up negative messages. Into this vacuum of real
engagement comes the stripping of Shamima Begum’s citizenship, making her (against
international law) a stateless person. I absolutely do not support her actions, yet I am only
removed from her by one degree of separation, I know and have worked with people who
know her and her family. We are all very connected. I want her to come back to the UK
because she is a British citizen, her actions make her many things, actions which are
unwelcome in Britain and any other society, yet she has never stopped being British. We
have responsibilities (though government thinks that these responsibilities do not apply to
Muslims) – to know more about her journey of radicalisation, of her networks, and of
appropriate legal treatment. This could be our alternative story, directly challenging the
extreme and callous status quo.
There are so many alternative stories which we have and pray will become mainstream –
from Visit My Mosque at the weekend organised by friends and colleagues at the MCB to
the Big Iftar which will mobilise again soon, with Ramadan now only two months away.
Or this book, 99 Names of God, which contains many stories. It was Zaki Badawi, much
missed many years after his death, who, in response to the protests against Rushdie, said
that what we should be doing is writing a better book.
Or, also recently, the British Islam conference, just over a week ago, which showcased how
British Muslims are leveraging their faith to address key issues such as Islamophobia,
patriarchy and misreadings of the Qur’an and ahadith. We keep hoping and praying that
government will take some notice, and there have been some signs of encouragement, such
as David Cameron hosting Eid parties at 10 Downing Street, yet the anti-Muslim rhetoric
continues from those who also apparently reach out to Muslim communities.
Our response, together, must be to find every constructive way to challenge negativity, so
there are in fact many opportunities for Muslims and their allies. One of them is gatherings
such as this, and I have been blessed to collaborate with Saeed for at least the last 10 years.
Telling positive stories is part of this, which is why we need more Muslims in journalism and
the arts, and Muslim parents could be encouraging their children to enter these professions.
Last night I watched the film One Day in the Haram with a non-Muslim friend. He chose it
deliberately as it was one of the few films available on Amazon Prime which did not portray
Muslims as terrorists. This is the world that we live in, it should not be this way.
Abdool Karim Vakil: In the 20 minutes that I have I would like to say four things. The first one would be this. Not so long ago any discussions that had as their focus Muslims, Britain and citizenship would be overwhelmingly focused on Muslim segregation, cultural problems and lack of literacy and the focus was primarily on what the Muslims needed to do.
We have seen tremendous and very important and welcome changes in the way the discussions have been framed which have changed the focus from what Muslims need to do to what the British citizenship needs to do to open up and be more encompassing to give voice to a broader variety to what constitutes living in British society.
So from framings that were essentially focused on cultural factors and approaching the issue of integration in a very assimiliationist way to structural concerns about socio economic capacity and socio economic obstacles to civil engagement and participation to a sort of notion that was about the removal of obstacles to specific engagement to a realisation that dictates a much more important and proactive action to enable access particularly in terms of how to build capacity and to ensure that it is not just about people being able to speak and being heard.
That is essentially the first point – that there has been a very welcome shift from discussions on Muslims in Britain from the focus of Muslims being a problem to a focus on how to transform notions of Britishness.
The second point would be this that Muslims as citizens face much the same challenges as other citizens at the present time. This goes from current and immediate uncertainties about Brexit and the liberal economies which are under strain, greater numbers of people on the margins of society, increasing polarisation between the have’s and the have nots to the question of the erosion of civil and democratic rights and the sectarian pressures, anti terrorism legislation and access to so many countries of the West.
And finally the current political threats be they the populist agendas which are increasingly deriving majoritarian politics from the very niche markets to the global shifts that are occurring in societies in Europe and in the West. This represents a shift in the balance of power between the global south and the global north.
In addition to those challenges which Muslims and other citizens face the Muslims also face specific challenges as do other minorities and other groups within our societies. These challenges span from the centrality of Muslim figures in the nexus between the global war on
terror on the one hand and the assimilationist nation state agendas in each of the European societies on the other.
The most direct result of this for Muslims on the one hand is the extreme precarity of the citizenship rights of Muslim citizens real or perceived and this includes the Shamima Begum question as well as the notion that basically there is currency of Islamophobia in the way that we define the acceptable boundaries of citizenship tends to increasingly position Muslims that the capacity for expression is not on the same terms as that of other citizens.
It is critical to understand this. Islamophobia is not as is so often said about negative images and about prejudice. Islamophobia is about narrowing the range of acceptable ways and acceptable forms of public expression about Muslims. What is an acceptable way of being Muslim and what should Muslims speak about and the ways in which they should present their public image.
In particular this carries implications about the place of faith and religion and what it means to be a British Muslim citizen. This increasingly seems to carry the expectation of a transformation of being Muslims who happen to be in Britain to Muslims who are of Britain and who are ultimately British Muslims. And what is meant by being British Muslims is essentially a nationalisation of Muslims and of Islam.
The third point is that this is not just about a state discourse or a public discourse. It is about memories. It is about how we think of our position in society and how we came to be where we are today. So the stories and narratives that speak to where we are now and where we came from specially now 30 years since the Rushdie affair have to have central elements to the story: one is that Muslims civic engagement and engagement as citizens is essentially the trajectory that we have travelled since then.
So Muslims first became publically engaged in the issue of Rushdie and what we have is a process of learning and being schooled in public images. And the second strand of that narrative is that we have matured and have learned and those involved in the Rushdie affair would repent and say that had they to do the same again they would have reacted differently.
This is a way of bringing about not only a historical narrative of how we came to be and how we should be. Unquestionably Rushdie was a critical moment in the emergence of Muslim civic and political engagement in public life. Unquestionably. And it was very important to the learning curve particularly of Muslim organisations and of essentially a sort of schooling in the languages and practices of how to engage local government, central government, public life, public discourse, journalism and public opinion – unquestionably.
But Muslim civic engagement was forged in campaigns that started in the local context about issues that mattered to local communities. There were issues about halal food, schooling, religious education in schools, about Sunday school about madrasas about meals in schools and about mosque construction. They were about dress and the law. They were not just about being recognised within existing terms but fundamentally about changing the terms within which British life was conceived.
It is important to include two other strands that are often left out of the story. One is that Muslim public engagement in this country had as a very strong element within it international Muslim students who were always engaged in transnational political engagement. They were
here, they were concerned with local affairs, as well as with affairs in the Muslim world and they were politically active in thinking about what the place of Muslims is in global terms. Think about the venue where we are today: The Gulf Cultural Club. It has a horizon that goes beyond the local framework.
And the second feature beyond the students is the struggles of men and woman in the workplace, the struggles against racism by men, by women and by youth and the diverse organisations and many forums of solidarity.
So Muslim history and Muslim public engagement and Muslim civic participation and struggle were never confined to faith issues. They were always broad fronted in many kinds of engagements that started with local issues and went to international ways of thinking and in many kinds of connections that had two different strands: anti racist, the right to belong and seeking access.
So I come to my fourth point. I think that our current thinking on citizenship suffers from poverty of the imagination – poverty of the imagination as to what brought us here which separates anti racism struggles, struggles for belonging and recognition to faith-based action and separates these two different histories when they were always intertwined.
Secondly a very bounded concept of what it is proper for Muslims to be campaigning on and what are the issues that they should be engaged in. And thirdly what are the horizons of British-Muslim citizenship and what they should be.
So consider the otherwise excellent Missing Muslims report of the Citizens Commission of Inquiry into participation in public life. They have a section called recommendations for Muslim communities in the UK. So these are the main points of the recommendations: standards for mosques and Islamic centres, reform of mosque committees, access for women, a stronger stance against the persecution of others (anti Semitism, Christian persecution and sectarianism) to broaden the range of voices that are involved from youth and women to have greater access, to explore partnerships for greater capacity and training with other faith-based institutions and for Muslim professionals to help strengthen Muslim communities.
These are all really important things and I am glad that these recommendations have been made. But this is what I would expect to see in a report on developing citizenship. I would expect to see advice directed to Muslims as well about developing general civic literacy about the struggle for equal rights that are enjoyed by all ethnic minorities as well as the majority which were achieved by ethnic and religious minorities in this country.
That the British values that are so proudly proclaimed and that are used as an instrument in order to bring about reform in the Muslim community to be thought instead about what was achieved for the majority so we can take for granted the standards that were achieved but which were actually achieved by the campaigns and struggles of ethnic and religious minorities in this country. It was their fight for equal rights and against racism and other forms of discrimination that brought the standards we have in this society today.
In terms of building global and international networks I would expect any discussion of citizenship in this country to do no less than it does for other citizens of this country which is to think globally, to think about questions of global consciousness and global solidarity and that the education for citizenship should not shy away from the focus on core Islamic
concerns with injustice, oppression and poverty wherever they are found. And that any issues of injustice, oppression and poverty are necessarily political as much as faith based issues. They are the concerns of mosques and Islamic centres.
The remit for mosques is much broader than just British cultural literacy which is what the report focused on and certainly much more than reforming mosque communities and the widening of voices. Socio economic issues are mosque issues and they are community issues and they are certainly youth issues.
And secondly the remit for Muslim communities in the UK as they put for Muslim leaders and for engaged Muslims should really be about citizenship that does justice to the history of Muslim communities in this country but engaging in broader struggles which we have all dealt with and almost not to be confined to the horizons of the British nation state and British territory but to global horizons. That is the only way to face the global challenges that we all face as citizens and Muslims. So if the struggles we face are global the citizenship issues we face are also global.
* AbdoolKarim Vakil is Lecturer in Contemporary History in the departments of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies and History at King’s College London. He is co-editor with S. Sayyid of Thinking Through Islamophobia: Global Perspectives (2010) and co-author of Moçambique: Memória Falada do Islão e da Guerra (2011), an archival and oral history exploration of Portuguese colonial and counterinsurgency policies towards Muslims during the decolonisation war in Mozambique. His research interests have ranged over Portuguese intellectual and cultural history, nationalism and national identity, Islamophobia and the comparative history of contemporary Muslim communities in Europe, and is currently involved with ReOrient: the Journal of Critical Muslim Studies. AbdoolKarim has been academic advisor to Muslim organisations in Portugal and the UK.
** Ifath Nawaz is a solicitor with over 25 years’ experience in the public and private sectors in the United Kingdom specialising in planning, environment and national infrastructure work and is heading the Planning Team at Setfords Solicitors in London. She was one of the founding members of the Association of Muslim Lawyers (AML), President of the AML from 2002 – 2011 and Vice President until 2016. As a senior member of the organisation she played a key role in representing the organisation in the Citizens UK’s Commission on Islam, Participation in Public Life and the 2017 report “The Missing Muslims – Unlocking British Muslim Potential for the Benefit of All”, presenting workshop in 2014 at the Oman Message Conference on Freedom, Human Rights and types, being a member of the London Strategic Partnership on Hate Crimes and previous member of Hate Crimes Scrutiny Panel Thames Valley and Deputy Convenor of the working groups on Policy and National Security on the Government Taskforce, Preventing Extremism Together 2005.
***Julian Bond works for the Connexional Team of the Methodist Church in Britain. He was previously Director of the Christian Muslim Forum, which is built on friendship between a group of Christians and Muslims, showing how faith is a catalyst for good relationships and welcomes the ‘other’. Julian is a theology graduate from the University of Aberystwyth and is keen to encourage wider dialogue with, and ‘translate’ religious ideas for, the non-religious. He is currently writing a short book on ‘Jesus our Role Model’.
