A new multiculturalism

Multiculturalism in the UK

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In observing that "each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice," the 16th century French philosopher Michel de Montaigne was ahead of his time. Today, most of us feel ourselves to be a little more enlightened, and indeed, ever since the rejection of Assimilationist politics by the Labour Home Secretary Roy Jenkins in 1966, appreciating different cultures has been official government policy. Jenkins heralded in the doctrine that came to be known as Multiculturalism when he stated that the Labour Government no longer sought “a flattening process of uniformity, but cultural diversity, coupled with equal opportunity in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance”. This then, was to be the way to build a better Britain: encouraging all her citizens to recognise that in a culturally diverse society, social harmony, justice, and equality are best achieved by allowing for, and indeed safeguarding cultural differences, whilst encouraging a generic appreciation for such differences as collectively enhancing the rich tapestry of the modern landscape amongst the wider society.

So what went wrong? When the Archbishop of Canterbury gave his opinion in February of this year that the implementation of certain aspects of Shar’ia law in Britain was "unavoidable," one could have been forgiven for thinking he was calling for the introduction of death by stoning, such was the vehemence of the media response. That his comments referred solely to aspects of personal law, in relation to marital and inheritance rites, for instance, seemed not to matter. The Sun newspaper made its views on the matter quite clear when it ran a headline series entitled "Bash the Bishop," whilst the front page of its 7 February issue had the headline "What a Burkha," alongside a picture of the Archbishop standing shoulder to shoulder with a fully veiled Muslim woman giving the ‘V’ sign to the camera, presumably in an attempt to show their mutual contempt for all things British.

The media response was, to use the words of the Muslim Council of Britain, “hysterical,” though that is not to say that there was not a genuine problem with what the Archbishop had said, primarily the inherent contradiction between Shar’ia and democracy, no matter the limitations on its implementation. Significantly, this was the conclusion of the European Court of Human Rights in 1998 during the Refah Case, in which it asserted that since the freedom of thought, conscience, and religion is one of the foundations of a democratic society, the State must be the “neutral and impartial organiser of the exercise of various religions,” and thus Shar’ia law, based as it is on the primacy of one religion over another, was incompatible with democracy. Yet this is not an issue with which non-Muslims can justifiably worry themselves about, since that particular dilemma is not theirs. Instead, we should be concerning ourselves with the things that can be done differently to help improve relations between Muslims and non-Muslims in Britain, and ensure the kind of paranoia engendered in the reaction to the Rowan Williams affair does not persist.

Yet more than 60 years after Muslims first started arriving in the United Kingdom in significant numbers, following the end of World War II, and more than 40 years after Multiculturalism became government policy, relations between Muslims and non-Muslims seem to be worse than ever. In the words of Trevor Phillips, chief of the Commission for Racial Equality (now part of the broader Equality and Human Rights Commission), rather than taking Jenkins at his word and embracing people of other faiths and cultures, Britons instead seem to have "retreated" behind their own ethno-religious walls. Data recently released from the Commission claimed that 94 per cent of all white Britons said that all or most of their friends were white, whilst 55 per cent could not name a single non-white friend. Fewer than one in ten could name two.

Given that less than nine per cent of Britons are from ethnic minorities, it is equally concerning that 37 per cent of non-white Britons said that most or all of their friends were non-white. In the specifically Muslim context, data from the Fourth National Survey of Ethnic Minorities found that 70 per cent of Muslims said they would "mind very much" if a close relative married a white person. It is now the case that, according to the Pew Research Centre, some 60 per cent of Britons believe relations between Muslims and Westerners to be "generally bad," and negative perceptions on the Muslim side are higher still: 67 per cent believe Westerners to be selfish, 64 per cent that they are arrogant, and 59 per cent that they are violent.

Ironically then, it seems that attempting to nurture diversity in Britain has just led to the entrenchment of division. It is a truism that ,however hard we might wish it were otherwise, people inevitably tend to congregate with others who share a similar outlook on life and always have done. This has been true of Britain’s Muslim community, who are congregated as tightly in 2008 as they were when they began to arrive in Britain half a century ago. Though in the case of the first-wave immigrants in the 1950s and 1960s—coming to a country in which living costs were as much as 30 times as high as they were in the home country—this could be put down to economics, that there has been virtually no subsequent diffusion in the following generations has been largely the consequence of personal choice.

Indeed, of 1.6 million Muslims to be found in Britain, over one third—some 490,000—are to be found living in just 10 local authorities throughout England. Over 600,000 live in London alone, with more than half spread through just 9 boroughs where Muslims comprise between 10.3 per cent of the inhabitants (Ealing), up to 36.4 per cent (Tower Hamlets). As a proportion of the total population of the UK, Muslims comprise roughly 2.6 per cent. At the other end of the spectrum, just 0.6 per cent of Durham’s 88,000 residents listed their faith as Muslim. As is to be expected, the situation is more dramatic in rural areas, and in the whole county, which numbers almost half a million, barely 1,000 are Muslim. Figures from local authority after local authority, all around the country, reaffirm this trend. Just 32 of North Cornwall’s 80,000 residents listed themselves as Muslim; of the 26,000 Britons to be found in Berwick-upon-Tweed, one could find just 9 Muslims at the time of the last Census in 2001. In Wales the situation is similar, with more than half of the country’s 22,000 Muslims living in Cardiff. Though such precise figures are harder to obtain for Scotland, it is known that Muslims comprise 0.84 per cent of the population, that more than 70 per cent of those are South Asian in origin, and that the percentage of households where not all persons are of the same ethnic category is 0.97 per cent.

The inevitable and very damaging consequence of such segregation has been a totally inadequate level of contact between Muslims and non-Muslims in a positive social context, with the result being that many of the negative and frankly false stereotypes that have evolved have not had the opportunity to be dispelled. One of the most serious stereotypes that has gained credence since the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Centre on 11 September 2001, and more recently the London bombings of 2005, is the belief that Muslims, if not actively partaking, nonetheless sympathise with terrorism more than non-Muslims. According to ICM polls recently carried out in England and Scotland, 60 per cent of those polled believed the British presence in Iraq was turning Muslims toward terrorism. In the wake of 9/11, the Forum Against Islamophobia and Racism (FAIR) reported a 600 per cent increase in Islamophobic assaults, suggesting that many Britons in some way held British Muslims collectively responsible for the attacks. The truth, of course, is quite different. Though the vast majority of Muslims disagree with British involvement in Iraq—and in that they are no different from a great many non-Muslims—the idea that the war was turning Muslims toward terrorism is refuted by the fact that 96 per cent of Muslims polled asserted that they unequivocally condemned the 7/7 London bombings.

It must be conceded that opinion polls cannot tell the whole story, and nor is it always certain that they will be entirely accurate. For instance, there is every possibility that total honesty is not always forthcoming when answering such sensitive questions as “do you believe it is right to exercise violence against those deemed by religious leaders to have insulted Islam?” and there is also the issue that those with genuinely subversive views may not agree to be polled at all. Nonetheless, through analysis of opinion polls over the last 10 years, there does emerge a consistent and telling trend that what British Muslims think, and what the rest of society deems them to be thinking, are quite different.

One of the principle reasons for the evolution of these negative perceptions has to be the visible differences between Muslims and non-Muslims on the one hand, and the similarity in terms of modes of dress, religious beliefs, and cultural peculiarities between British Muslims and Muslims abroad on the other. This problem is only sustained, and cannot properly be dispelled, whilst inadequate levels of contact in a positive social context between Muslims and non-Muslims continue to persist. When asked why so many non-Muslims are suspicious, or even hostile to British Muslims, one high-ranking Muslim police officer insisted that in his opinion, perceptions of British Muslims were filtered through the lens of international politics to the point where British Muslims have become almost synonymous with Muslims in the Middle East, and this despite the fact that 70 per cent of Britain’s Muslims are actually of South Asian origin. In other words, having watched the 6 o’clock news and seen bearded or veiled Muslim "fanatics" yelling and firing Kalashnikovs in the air in Lebanon, non-Muslims can then look out of the window and see a bearded or veiled Muslim walking down the road in London and come to the conclusion that because he looks the same, he must therefore think the same. It goes without saying that the only way to dispel such stereotypes is to foster an environment in which both Muslims and non-Muslims understand each other better, and as importantly, an environment in which they mix together socially, for only then will a person who holds such views realise that they do not correspond to reality.

It would of course be naïve to insist, as the government does, that perceived injustices in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine, in which Britain is seen as being complicit, have not had their effect in embittering many British Muslims, nor that there is no link between the attacks in London in 2005, and those in Madrid a year earlier, and the decision by the British and Spanish governments to follow America into Iraq in 2003 as part of President George W. Bush’s "Coalition of the Willing." Despite this, however, the real danger lies in alienating more British Muslims by constantly depicting them in a negative light, especially in the media, and tarring far wider sections of the Muslim community with a proverbial brush than is neither necessary nor justified.

Such negative perceptions, whether in the media or anywhere else, would not be tolerated or believed to the same extent if there was a greater understanding of what both Islam and Muslims are really about, and vice versa. It is patently false to assume that all or even the majority of British Muslims sympathise with the activities of terrorists in the Middle East and elsewhere, though the majority will sympathise with the situation of Muslims in those arenas. Identification on the basis of mutual religious affiliation is one of the central tenets of Islam, and the world-wide community of believers, the Umma, is thus of great importance to Muslims, sometimes over and above loyalty to what is after all a fairly recent and Western conception - the modern Nation State. It is for this reason, perhaps, that 80 per cent of British Muslims believe the War on Terror to be a war on Islam.

This belief is certainly erroneous, but it highlights the importance of making far greater efforts to engage with British Muslims of all hues, and not just those that are deemed to be "for us." The level of almost wanton ignorance of Islam in government circles and the media is almost daily evidenced by the terminology used to draw a distinction between "moderate" and "extremist" Muslims, that grades the legitimacy of faith according to how accommodating it is of non-Muslim values, wholly independent of what actually constitutes being faithful to Islam. As well as better understanding the contradictions—which is always the first step towards finding the solutions—there is also the need for a far more concerted effort to highlight the common values and beliefs shared by both Muslims and non-Muslims, which exist in far fuller abundance than many people realise. A belief in the importance of the family, respect for the community, and the rejection of immoderation; all these could have come straight out of David Cameron’s new Conservative handbook, yet they are also central to Muslim life.

Trying to promote and even nurture religious and cultural differences, as has been the agenda of Multiculturalism for so many years, is a policy that is destined to fail. Instead we should be pursuing the path advocated by Trevor Phillips, one of the most high-profile converts away from Multiculturalism in recent years, who has asserted vigorously the need to promote a core set of values that each and every person in Britain can recognise both as their own, and as those of their fellow citizens, namely democracy, sexual equality, the integrity of the person, and freedom of expression.

There is also, and as importantly, the need to promote a common cultural identity based on a more accurate understanding of where we have come from. It is a matter of no small irony that it should have been Enoch Powell who said, in 1946, that “the life of men, like that of nations, is lived largely in the imagination,” for he could have shared a stage with the majority of contemporary race-relations experts. Much of the suspicion and lack of positive feeling that presently exists between Muslim and non-Muslims is the result of quite divergent, sometimes conflicting, and often inaccurate ideas about their respective heritages. It is absolutely right that each year, on Remembrance Sunday, we should commemorate the immense sacrifices made by so many men and women for this country during the Second World War, and the nation usually feels collectively prouder for having done so. It is a damning indictment of the current problem, therefore, that in 2008, right through school, not a single lesson of a single unit in the history national curriculum is dedicated to the sacrifices made by the more than two million Muslims who fought on the British side during World War II.

Foucault was absolutely right in his assertion that no-one is born with an identity, and with it prejudices. Identity is acquired, and further, it is constantly refined and transformed through social interaction. It is for this reason precisely that greater efforts must be made to increase the level of such interaction between Muslims and non-Muslims, and the most sensible place for this to start is in the classroom, for education is undoubtedly the key. The introduction of modules that properly taught children about both Islam and other historically influential religions adhered to in the United Kingdom, as well the history of the relationship between the Muslim world and the West, would be a step forward.

If one needs evidence that such understanding does not exist at present, one need go no further than to ask the man-on-the-street to name the Five Pillars of Islam. Almost invariably the answer given is incorrect, if indeed any answer is given at all. Just such a system geared at promoting greater religio-cultural understanding already exists in Northern Ireland under the so-called Integrated Education initiative, though the focus there has been on improving understanding between Protestants and Catholics. Described as "a fundamental development in Northern Ireland’s history," the motto of Integrated Education is "taking the fear out of difference." Perhaps it is no coincidence that, 27 years after the first Integrated School in Northern Ireland was established, the people of Northern Ireland have accepted a power-sharing agreement between Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuiness and the DUP’s Ian Paisley, which resulted in the restoration of powers to the Northern Ireland Assembly on 8 May 2007. There is no reason to believe that this system could not succeed in taking the fear out of the differences between Muslims and non-Muslims throughout the whole of the United Kingdom.

Ever the paradigm of exactly what is wrong with most things in modern Britain is The Sun newspaper. Many people may think the way it covers current affairs is something of a joke, but the influence it has with a daily circulation of 3.2 million, as much as every broadsheet in Britain combined, is not to be underestimated. No better evidence is needed of the polarising effect of its "them and us" style coverage of “brainwashed terrorists,” “paedo scum” and “lawless savages,” than the fact that a poll of 95,000 Sun readers published on 25 February found that fully 99 supported the re-introduction of the death penalty. The level of support out with The Sun’s readership is half that. The Sun is not alone in the negative and alienating ways it depicts British Muslims however, and much of the media must bear responsibility for failing to provide stories that seek to positively engage with these issues. Indeed, the argument has been well made that the media are in fact part of the problem, for in constantly focusing only on the negatives, they run the risk of bringing about precisely the kind of alienation and hostility that they expend so much time warning their readers about.

A welcome change would be to see an increased commitment to coverage that sought to explain the tensions felt by British Muslims, as well as why differences between Muslims and non-Muslims have come about, rather than just reporting their often negative consequences. The perpetuation of negative stereotypes may make for interesting reading, but a greater emphasis on the strength of the possibilities for increased cohesion and understanding would be news. Indeed, given the level of segregation that presently exists between Muslims and non-Muslims in the United Kingdom, it is only through the media that many non-Muslims come into contact with Muslims at all.

The responsibility incumbent upon the press to be active in calling for the increased integration and understanding between our communities that is so badly needed, and indeed to be a part of that process, is thus all the greater. The British National Party is on the rise at present, and though it is a long way from gaining a foothold in Parliament, the fact that their vote quadrupled to almost 200,000 between the 2001 and 2005 General Elections should nonetheless be a cause for genuine concern. Though, as this piece has been at pains to make clear, British Muslims are anything but the subversive fifth column they are sometimes made out to be, it is the case that real hostility to Britain amongst certain quarters of the Muslim community does nonetheless exist and is not dissipating. We can continue to ignore this situation, and to continue on the present course, but we do so at our peril.

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