CHAPTER 8
The United Kingdom: British Values
The irony of hosting the 2015 annual general meeting of the Muslim Council of Britain at the Muath Trust in Birmingham didn’t escape some of the more opinionated members of both organizations. The trust, established in 1990 by the Yemeni community, the oldest Muslim presence in the multicultural city of Birmingham, has flourished over the years. It runs a slick operation—day nursery, adult education, a banquet and conference hall—out of a heritage building in the Bordesley Centre, a ten-minute walk from Birmingham’s New Street train station. Prime Minister David Cameron visited the centre to shore up the Muslim vote in the lead-up to the 2015 elections. You can see a photo of the visit on the homepage of the centre’s website. Granted, the men’s bathroom on this Sunday in June left much to be desired (toilets that didn’t flush properly, missing hand soap and leaky water taps), but the centre and the trust that runs it tell the kind of community-based success story Muslims in Birmingham love to share.
The Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), on the other hand, is struggling to stay afloat financially and to remain relevant politically. Upon its establishment in 1997, this umbrella body with over five hundred affiliated mosques, charities, social groups and schools set itself the mission of speaking to and on behalf of British Muslims. Media outlets and various political parties in Britain considered it the go-to organization whenever they needed a comment about or input on a policy relating to Muslim issues. In the early years of Tony Blair’s New Labour reign, the then predominately moderate MCB enjoyed both patronage and prestige, securing its reputation as the voice of Muslims in Britain.
Then 9/11 and the US-led, UK-backed wars in Afghanistan and Iraq disrupted this co-dependence. The MCB, under pressure from its affiliate organizations, dissented from the government’s positions and protested what it (and millions of other Britons) viewed as an unjustified war in Iraq. The organization also voiced concerns about the rise of the security state, which ethnically and culturally targeted the Muslim population as if terrorists lurked behind every home or business owned by a family of that faith. As it fell out of political favour, the MCB struggled to build a new identity amid a rapidly changing landscape of fundamentalism, terrorism (in particular after the July 7, 2005, attacks in London) and, in the last two years, jihadist Salafism as a wave of British Muslims and converts joined the Islamic State in parts of Iraq and Syria. The British government—no stranger to the divide-and-conquer strategy that served it so well during its empire days—switched its support to what it viewed as moderate or mainstream Muslim groups, such as the Quilliam Foundation and the Sufi Muslim Council, both of which echo and help craft the official narrative of combating Muslim extremism.
The MCB has become an organization with an identity crisis for a community facing a political crisis. I would go further and describe it as a community under siege, judging from the chatter in the Bordesley Centre and the topics of the multiple panels and workshops at the AGM (they range from discussing responses to counter-terrorism legislation to brainstorming strategies for promoting Muslim youth activism). “The community needs direction. Our shops and businesses are attacked. Our names are dragged in the media as killers and executioners,” I’m told by an attendant from a Yorkshire student group who asks not to be identified. “I’m here to see what this direction might be.” He doesn’t sound terribly optimistic, and it’s a lot to expect from a day-long conference, but this sense of a community simultaneously adrift and under attack permeated the conference hall. Never have I seen so many anxious brown faces in one room.
I lived in England for nearly eight years in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when I decided to move to Canada to seek a better life and to escape what I felt was a particular kind of English racism. But with hindsight, I see that most debates about Muslims in Britain back then had an innocuous quality. They dealt with issues of social cohesion or alienation within the parameters of the European multicultural model. The discussions centred on immigration quotas, the changes in the ethnic makeup of inner cities, and racial tensions between Asian and black communities on one side and far-right groups and conservative media on the other. Race defined the substance and tenor of the argument. Muslims were part of a larger community of “others” that included immigrants from the Caribbean and former British colonies in Asia and Africa.
Two decades later, the Muslim community stands more or less alone as the über-other, ostracized and stigmatized. A group of people who come from different racial, cultural and regional backgrounds have been fused into a single questionable minority: the unassimilated, the enemy within, the hotbed for radicalization. Muslims (those born into or practising the tenets of the faith) and Islamists (those who advocate for jihad, or holy war) have become one in the eyes of the mainstream. In returning to England for the first time in almost eight years and nearly two decades after living there, I find a country quite different from the one I thought I knew, and in whose culture and literature I had specialized. Islam has become a racially and politically charged identity, and as a result the vast majority of Muslims now have to confront a double whammy of racial and cultural attacks. The line between race and culture or race and religion has been crossed and possibly even erased. The changing fortunes of the Muslim Council of Britain confirm this theory.
In delivering the 2014–15 state of the union, Shuja Shafi, the newly appointed secretary general of the MCB, summed up his first year in office in apocalyptic terms: “The evils of terrorism overshadowed then—and continue to darken now—the image of our community.” The rest of Shafi’s overview of the past twelve months in the life of the MCB (and by extension, all Muslims in Britain) served as a pep talk to the community and a laundry list of the challenges it faces. In the past year, he said, the MCB had produced a major study on British Muslims based on an analysis of the 2011 census data, and the news was good, at least from a “strength in numbers” perspective.
Muslims now represent 4.8 percent of the population in England and Wales, more than all other self-identified non-Christian faith groups put together. The Muslim community is one of the youngest in Britain: about 33 percent of Muslims are fifteen or under, compared to 19 percent for the general population. Only 4 percent of British Muslims are sixty-five and over, compared to 16 percent for the overall population. Although Shafi doesn’t address it in his talk, the numbers his organization has distributed to the media have led to alarmist headlines (“UK Muslims Population of 26 Million by 2051?”) and predictions of a Muslim majority based on current rates of growth.
But problems are growing almost as fast as people. The David Cameron government has couched its counter-terrorism legislation in terms that set those who oppose it as lacking “British values.” This insistence on shared values signals a shift in the British government’s attitude toward multiculturalism (which, in the neo-conservative narrative, has increased the segmentation of society into smaller, more isolated cultural units). Commentators from the political centre and left interpret attacks on multiculturalism as proxy criticisms of the Muslim community’s perceived unwillingness to adapt to Western values. When conservatives talk of the “failures” of multiculturalism, they mean the failure of Muslim communities to integrate. Cameron’s own definition of British values remains vague even when the prime minister liberally applies the word “muscular” in championing them. But these values do include free speech, support of the rights of women and sexual minorities, upholding the rule of law and accepting social responsibility. “A genuinely liberal country believes in certain values, actively promotes them and says to its citizens: this is what defines us as a society,” Cameron wrote in an article for the Mail on Sunday in the summer of 2014.
In effect, Cameron’s British values single out Muslims not just as outsiders but as threats to the country’s stability. Shafi disagrees. “As a community we face many challenges in overcoming marginalization, prejudice, discrimination, demonization, disadvantage, ignorance and suspicion,” he tells the crowd. “It’s these obstacles, not Islam or Muslims, that stand in the way of our full participation in society.” To address the “plight of Muslims in this country,” the community needs to unite behind a new vision and a new direction.
If Shafi entertained any hopes of fostering unity while delivering his report, the Q&A period that followed must have crushed them. Given the wide spectrum of ideological, social and religious views found in the affiliate groups, it was probably naive to believe in the possibility of a dialogue around this so-called united vision. And doing all that within an organization that’s down to two and half full-time staff—not to mention faced with chronic budgetary woes due to unpaid affiliation fees—struck me as doomed from the start.
The following week, when I meet the MCB’s Talha Ahmad in London’s Whitechapel, an Asian and Muslim enclave in the borough of Tower Hamlets, I get a better sense of how the organization that still likes to think of itself as the voice of British Muslims operates. Ahmad, its spokesperson and public face, earns his living as a solicitor but volunteers his time and media expertise to the MCB. (He says he’s also a de facto spokesperson for the Bengali community.) Judging by the royal treatment he receives at the Indian/Bengali restaurant on Whitechapel Road, I get the sense that the venue serves as his unofficial second office.
Ahmad dismisses my “doom and gloom” reading of the AGM. The atmosphere had more to do with the location than any actual sentiment in the hall. After more than a decade of hosting the AGM in London, MCB began to take it outside the capital in an attempt to “reach out in a serious way” to British Muslims in regions like the West Midlands, the northwest and Yorkshire, where they’re concentrated. AGMs outside London always feel “depressed and less upbeat,” he says. “In London there’s more confidence. . . . MCB is at its best in London, in its historic roots.” (About 12.5 percent of Londoners identify as Muslims.)
Taken as a whole, Ahmad says, the Muslim community does suffer discrimination from government policies, particularly in the counter-terrorism arena, where they are “under the spotlight, targeted” at all times. Add issues of concentration in low-income, high-unemployment boroughs (especially among youth); violence and a lack of voice in public life; and constant vilification by most mainstream media outlets, and you have an idea of what it feels like to be a Muslim in Britain today.
By and large, my sense of a community under siege checks out, but I’m still not sure if this new form of culturally determined racism is as colour-blind as it appears. To me, it sounds like an elaborate scheme to target racialized communities, especially brown people. The fact that Sikh and Hindu businesses and homes occasionally get attacked by far-right groups with anti-Islam messages suggests that charges of a so-called Muslim threat are in fact a run-of-the-mill racial attack.
Anshuman Mondal, the chair of creative writing and English at Brunel University London and author of Young British Muslim Voices and Islam and Controversy: The Politics of Free Speech After Rushdie, believes that this shift in public attitudes toward Muslims started with the general backlash against multiculturalism. It’s also happening, ironically, at a time when younger members of the community feel more British than their parents ever did.
While researching his book on young Muslims in Britain, Mondal—who spent two years travelling throughout the United Kingdom, talking with and listening to his target demographic—witnessed how the vast majority of them have created a hybrid cultural space where Islam merges with their British identity. However, that doesn’t square with the neo-liberal politics of the Labour and Conservative parties, Mondal tells me during a late-morning tea break in central London. Both parties have discovered the political advantages of demonizing one community to rationalize curtailing personal freedoms for everyone else. “How do you distract your working class from the fact that you are running an economy that debased their work, undermined their collective bargaining [rights] and introduced precarity?” Declaring Islam culturally incompatible with values that are intrinsic to British society is one way of doing just that. Free speech, for example, becomes “the banner to marshal all the arguments against Islam. The conjuring trick here . . . is to articulate a new form of racism without being racist.” Mondal refers to this strategy as a discourse of euphemism, or “not saying what you mean and not meaning what you say.” In this context, Muslims in Britain (who predominately hail from South Asia and the Middle East) are seen as inferior “not because of their skin but because of their culture.”
Although the word “brown” as a racial and social identity is widely used in British popular culture and in street language—for an example of both, read Gautam Malkani’s recreation of London’s South Asians and their brown-on-brown inner fighting in his novel Londonstani—it hasn’t gained the political traction of “black” or the politically correct term “BME” (black and minority ethnic). “People here don’t like to talk about brown because it’s a racialized term. We’re not supposed to talk about race,” Mondal says.
In addition to creating this “racism without racists” culture, British society has divided Muslims into two sets: good and bad. The good ones, in broad strokes, are the middle- and upper-middle-class Muslims who have Indian origins and work as doctors, lawyers, judges and politicians, and in the creative industries. The bad Muslims tend to be largely Pakistani, Bengali and more recent immigrants from the Middle East—working-class asylum seekers and others who have entered the United Kingdom illegally. The media, who conflate race and class as much as they do race and culture, don’t always make the same distinction. The divide between the two sets of Muslims, like the economic divide between the one percent and the rest of the population, is growing.
My conversations with a retired family doctor and a young fashion designer brought this contrast in the economic and political fortunes of both sets of Muslims into focus. It also illustrated a huge shift in mainstream British society’s perceptions of brown Muslims in Britain over the past forty to fifty years. They live by their faith and in their skin, never knowing which part of their existence sets them outside the British value system.
IN HIS EARLY TEENS, Rahemur Rahman (known to his friends as Ray) excelled in Islamic studies and recited passages of the Koran in a soft, melodious but commanding voice that his parents thought would be ideal for a career as an imam. “I was the chosen one,” says Ray, now twenty-five, as he recalls evenings spent in Shadwell Ford Square Mosque in London’s East End, studying religious texts and living up to his “very strict” mother’s image of her son as a devout Muslim. But as a fourteen-year-old in London, Ray was more interested in Western music, fashion and popular culture than the company of stodgy old religion instructors and other brown Muslim boys. (And they were always just boys, since religious schools frowned on mixing the sexes, especially as students entered adolescence.)
And so began a rebellious phase in Ray’s life. It started with the time-honoured teenage tradition of ditching school and heading to the West End of London to browse record stores. While he wasn’t the only teenager of colour sifting through the R&B and vinyl remixes on Tottenham Court Road on a school day, Ray was probably the only one to tuck his traditional Islamic thoub (dress) inside his baggy jeans in an attempt to blend in with fellow truants. Ray’s creative way with his wardrobe didn’t come by accident. His father had migrated to the United Kingdom from Bangladesh in the 1970s to work as a tailor in a clothing factory, a job he holds to this day. It was the father who took Ray—the third child in a family of nine—and some of his siblings to museums and galleries to foster their appreciation of art, colour and design. When a social worker at Stepney Green School in the East End suggested that Ray nurture his love for clothing and design by applying for the prestigious fashion program at Central Saint Martins, the then eighteen-year-old didn’t even think it was within the realm of possibility for a working-class, brown Muslim man living with his parents in a council flat in Tower Hamlets. Isn’t that school for the likes of John Galliano and Stella McCartney? wondered Ray, thinking of two of its internationally renowned alumni. Despite some misgivings and a one-year deferral, Ray enrolled in the school in 2009 and graduated in 2014. His journey from an imam in training to a budding menswear designer illustrates both the promises and setbacks of young Muslim working-class men in Britain today.
“Being a Muslim made it very hard to find my place,” says Ray as he recalls his early days at the school. While his instructors were supportive and directed him to use his heritage and his “story” for inspiration, life as a London fashion student presented cultural challenges for someone raised on Koranic verses, prayers five times a day and, largely, male-only friends. “It was my first time seeing openly gay people, cross-dressers and full-on drag.” Parties would take place in warehouses in Soho and other trendy parts of London, where drugs (heroin) and alcohol were freely available. “It was not a real life.” At home, his mother told friends and family that Ray was studying art in order to become a schoolteacher. The very idea of her son designing clothes—even in a household where the main breadwinner was a tailor—struck her as un-Islamic and unmanly.
Ray’s outsider status was confirmed on the first day of a six-month internship, part of a year-out program option, at the headquarters of Louis Vuitton in Paris. When he asked an employee for directions to his workstation, she pointed him to the closet where they kept their cleaning supplies. “She thought I was a cleaner because of my brown skin,” recalls Ray, with a smile but also some bitterness. The rest of the internship followed a less racially stereotypical path, in part because he remained largely invisible. “I was the kind of brown person they can take to the white world and I can blend in. I wasn’t overly desi,” he says, using a term derived from the Sanskrit for “country” or “province” that has been adopted by the South Asian diaspora. For his social life in Paris, Ray found himself gravitating to other Muslim designers.
Back in London, he returned to the divide between the glittery world of fashion and the gritty one of the tower blocks, where tensions between Bengali migrants and right-wing extremists often took a violent turn. (A teenage Ray was attacked as he left a halal fried chicken diner—and there are too many of them in Tower Hamlets—and a man on a bicycle clubbed him with a metal bar for no other reason than his skin colour.) Bengali youths fought each other for control of drug-trafficking zones. At one point, Ray’s father found himself in a “group fight” between Bengali and white parents.
Even the journey to and from school plunged him into the world of racial profiling, where his looks and young age set off alarms. On Fridays, Ray dressed in his traditional thoub and rushed to school after his weekly prayers. Without fail, he says, police at Canary Wharf tube station would stop him for a “random” check of his bags and question him about the tools in it (box cutters, scissors, pins). Every week he’d have to show his student ID and explain that the items were part of his toolkit. “No white student has ever gone through this.”
By the time he finished his degree in 2014, having been through numerous instances of stop and search, Ray could understand why many Muslim men and women of his generation reconnected with their religion and culture and began retreating from or lashing out at British society at large. “You can’t blame them. The world has put Muslims in a pen. The only thing they can do is fight back.” He himself identifies not as Bengali but as Muslim British. “Everything comes back to it [Islam]. Bengali only means that my skin is brown.”
Ray’s views confirm a popular theory among political commentators that for Western-born children of immigrants, identification with Islam serves as a negotiation tactic between the world they know at home and the one they encounter outside it. Doug Saunders eloquently describes this generation’s “default affinity” to the faith in The Myth of the Muslim Tide: “That was their identity, their fate, and sometimes the only handhold they could grasp during the difficult climb into the centre of Western life.”
My conversation with Ray has taken place inside a local coffee shop, and now I ask him to take me for a walk through the council estates in the Whitechapel area and the gentrified but once purely ethnic (and rough) Brick Lane. I’m embarrassed to admit to him that I’ve never seen a London council estate before. He’s not surprised, and remarks that I sound pretty middle class to him. This last comment is said not with resentment toward me but with pride in himself for being working class. As we weave in and out of low-rise blocks in Hanbury Estate, I see a part of London that I’ve encountered only in novels and indie British films. Brown faces stare back at me. With one or two exceptions at a sunk-in playground—Ray claims it to have been the site of organized fights among Bengali gangs during his teens—every resident seems to be South Asian. The only white person we see is a postman who’s struggling to explain to a woman over the intercom that he needs to leave a package for a neighbour with her. I’m guessing that the woman on the other end is someone’s mother or grandmother and doesn’t speak English. “I’ve never seen a white family living here,” says Ray.
Until his men’s fashion line takes off, Ray works part time in Selfridges department store in central London. He is one of several Asian, Latino and Middle Eastern men he describes as roughly the same shade of brown. Customers invariably mix them up. Now that men’s beards are trendy—that hipster, Brooklyn look—locals and tourists find it hard to differentiate Ray’s beard, a symbol of his faith, from that of a South American sales assistant for whom it’s merely a fashion statement. For now at least, Ray thinks it’s funny that his brown face blends in with his status as a shop assistant. Once he goes back to his work as a designer, he knows that his skin colour and his faith will likely set him apart again.
OTTERBOURNE, A HAMPSHIRE VILLAGE of about fifteen hundred residents, is the kind of quaint English setting that calls attention to itself precisely because not much happens there. Its village hall offers tango lessons and hosts sewing circles. The drama group stages an annual pantomime in December and a summer variety show. The village sits about six kilometres west of Winchester, which you can reach in just an hour from London’s Waterloo station. It’s one hour and a world away from the reality of Bengali Muslims in Tower Hamlets and the Muslim terror threat, but I’m here to discuss these very issues with one of its residents: Dr. Reefat Drabu, a semi-retired general practitioner.
I met Reefat at the Muslim Council of Britain’s AGM, where she made clear her feelings about the organization’s tacit support of a small but vocal segment of Muslims who insist on their rights (religious accommodation) but think little of their responsibilities or the rights of others. Is the MCB’s fall from grace in part the result of accommodating too many unreasonable demands? I approached her during the lunch break and suggested that we should talk more. After a few email exchanges, we made a plan for me to visit her in Winchester. In the two hours or so of our conversation, I got an introduction to a slice of brown Muslim life in England that is rarely seen in media representations of the community. Over tea in the kitchen of Hillside, Reefat’s Edwardian home, I begin by telling her how the image of a patrician country doctor who doesn’t wear a hijab or any other symbol of her Muslim faith contrasts with what I’ve just seen in London’s East End.
“The image of Islam [in the media] is mostly a lady with a hijab. I find that offensive because there are more women who don’t wear the hijab than do.” Reefat thinks that this image helps perpetuate a misleading narrative about gender oppression within Islam. (For the record, she doesn’t see the hijab as the symbol of discrimination that critics of Islam claim it to be.)
Growing up Muslim and brown in Britain in the late 1950s and early 1960s brought Reefat face to face with racism. But coming from a well-to-do family—her father was a doctor, and she and two of her four siblings followed in his footsteps—gave her a host of other advantages. “I had a lot of confidence growing up. I could say, ‘I’m different.’ I came from a family that’s sympathetic, prided itself on the value of being truthful, honest.” And yet this privileged upbringing became the source of early hardships, setting Reefat apart from the largely working-class South Asian immigrants in the northwest of England, where she came of age. “More people have gone the route of shopkeepers to middle class.” Her parents arrived as middle class, and it’s a privilege she passed on to her own children.
The family did not shy away from Islam in those early years, but they also didn’t see it as a political identity. As Reefat recalls, it was just there. Muslim. Full stop. While working-class Muslim families instituted strict laws on what their daughters could and couldn’t do, Reefat and her sister simply adapted aspects of British culture to fit their faith. They played sports, participated in school dances and wore whatever they wanted (as long as the clothes “didn’t stand out or attract attention”). They didn’t go out with boys, she acknowledges, but “nobody told us don’t do it.” The family didn’t eat pork or drink alcohol, but also “didn’t rely on mullahs to tell us what to do.” David Cameron would applaud: British values at work, he’d point out.
Life wasn’t always so idyllic in North Manchester Grammar School, however. Reefat recalls day-to-day discrimination and racial taunts. A games teacher (of Russian background, she clarifies) always picked on her at netball because of her skin colour. Many years later, Reefat’s first child had to deal with constant teasing about her brown skin. Other seven-year-olds would say that she had “poo on her,” and that’s why her skin was brown. “It left her with a desire not to be brown. To be white.” Still, Reefat views this type of schoolyard bullying not as race-specific but as an example of how cruel kids can be; overweight children are called fatties and those with glasses four-eyed, she adds.
I can’t help wondering if Reefat’s own light brown skin has shielded her from some of the nastier aspects of race discrimination, or if it has acted as a get-out-of-race-jail-free card. Her husband, a founding member of the MCB and a human rights authority, is much darker. “Being light-skinned didn’t give me any advantages,” she insists. “My husband being darker, it didn’t give him any disadvantage.” Her ethnic name, she says, has played a bigger role than skin colour in her professional life, with some patients indicating a preference for a non-ethnic (and that’s largely understood to be non-Asian) physician.
That last observation is a rare example of Reefat directing her experience with racism onto the laps of white Anglos. For the most part, she believes that the Muslim community has had a hand in creating the drama of its own alienation from society. Democracy requires give and take and an acceptance of the concept of the “common good.” The MCB’s current way of thinking about Muslim identity in Britain is more of a problem than a solution to the problem, she explains. “The MCB types are typical of us brown people. We’re very good at criticism. Everything is rubbish except what we’re doing.” She cites demands for prayer rooms or separate bathrooms for ablutions as examples of how Muslims insist on special treatment from schools or local authorities. “If we don’t get them, we shout and scream about it. We forget that other people have demands of us.”
Another example is wearing the niqab, the Muslim veil that covers all of a woman’s face except for the eyes, a custom Reefat finds particularly grating. “It means you’re withdrawing from society. I see it as a threat to my future liberty as a Muslim.” In civil terms, a woman in a niqab gains an unfair advantage: she can see the person she’s talking to, but that person can’t see her. To Reefat, it symbolizes a community that has become more demanding about its rights and less interested in its responsibilities to fellow citizens of all faiths and ethnicities.
Despite espousing views that will be considered “secular” by most religious scholars, Reefat still identifies strongly with Islam. When I ask her what the faith means to her personally, she responds promptly, as if she’s heard this question before, that she wants her children to be able to read the sura, a verse from the Koran, when she dies. That’s all. When she asks me in return, I reply that I’m from a Muslim family but I don’t necessarily identify as Muslim, except when I have to defend the religion of my forefathers against racial or cultural stereotypes. She is not convinced. Islam to her means having a spiritual relationship with God. If I don’t have that, she insists, then there’s no circumstance in which I should call myself a Muslim.
This final part of our conversation took place as she drove me back to Winchester station to catch the train to London. It left me thinking about why I always end up involved in issues that relate to being Muslim and Arab, despite my uneasy relationship with both identities. I realize that I don’t have a choice. The religion forms part of how I’m perceived in the world. Just like my brown skin, it’s a fixture of who I am, no matter how much my relationship with it changes.
If you need proof of how Islam and brown skin intersect, or at least of how Muslim communities in Britain live under suspicion for both, look no further than the government’s recent attempts to crack down on violent extremism. The 2015 Counter-Terrorism and Security Act covers four areas: (1) Pursue, to stop terrorist attacks; (2) Prevent, to stop people from becoming terrorists or growing sympathetic to violent organizations; (3) Protect, to guard against terror attacks; and (4) Prepare, to mitigate the impact of such attacks if and when they happen. (The act builds on the British government’s strategy for countering terrorism, officially known as CONTEST.) While the government insists that all four tentacles of its strategy have equal weight, media outlets and civil liberty groups—not to mention Muslim organizations—have zeroed in on the second P, Prevent. In essence, the policy presupposes a link between thinking about extremism and committing violent acts (the so-called conveyor belt theory), and assumes the Muslim community is guilty of acting against British values until proven otherwise.
In the middle of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, when austerity became the defining government policy, officials threw money at Prevent. The initial 2005 budget of £40 million has long since doubled. Between 2005 and 2011, at least £80 million has been spent on a thousand schemes spread across ninety-four local authorities. Many of these schemes would have been considered wasteful spending if undertaken by a left-leaning city council or the old Labour Party. They include cricket, boxing and judo clubs; camping trips; fusion youth singing; and other initiatives that a commentator in the Daily Telegraph described as “many steps away from dealing with what drives young Muslims into extremism.” Prevent turned into a cash cow for local authorities and many Muslim groups. Anyone with a proposal that targeted Muslim youth and engaged them in an activity or structured learning had a good shot of receiving government funding. Critics argue that it’s very difficult to assess the effectiveness of Prevent initiatives. (Will a newfound love of boxing change the mind of a young person watching videos of or reading articles on the atrocities committed by the Assad regime?) But supporters insist that despite some growing pains, Prevent is moving in the right direction.
I need to look deeper into Prevent.
THE QUESTION MARK IN the title of the day conference—“Preventing Violent Extremism?”—seemed redundant. Organized by the Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC) in London, the conference was intended to challenge the assumptions of the British government’s anti-extremism policies, including the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act, which passed into law in January 2015. The act turns the many previous iterations of the Prevent program from policy guidelines into laws. What began, in the wake of the 7/7 attacks, as a strategy to win the hearts and minds of Muslims in Britain “by promoting a narrative that would counter extremist violence carried out in the name of Islam” has over the course of the decade that followed super-sized into what the IHRC describes as a “social-engineering exercise.” Other commentators describe Prevent as the largest program snooping into the lives of British citizens in modern history.
Prevent’s most troublesome aspect obligates teachers, doctors, nurses, social workers and community activists, among others, to report anyone they suspect of harbouring thoughts or feelings that might be described as extremist, or as not in line with British values. The program rests on an assumption that violent extremism is a natural progression of nonviolent thought. Prevent officers have descended on campuses and schools, using soft and hard pressure to force student groups, local authorities and businesses to cancel events hosted by or featuring speakers deemed either extremist or not in line with British values of tolerance and free speech.
Indeed, the June 13 IHRC conference started later than originally scheduled to accommodate participants who had registered online before a change of venue was posted on the website. A few days before the conference, IHRC staffers were told by the owners of the original venue, the left-leaning Water Lily group, that it could no longer host because one of the participating organizations (Cage UK, a vocal critic of government anti-terrorism policies) hadn’t passed the Prevent test. IHRC relocated the conference to the Amanah Centre, a private banquet/function hall in London’s Whitechapel district, which had another event booked for the evening of the same day but agreed to host the conference as long as everyone cleared the premises by 5 p.m. On the positive side, the clock-watching meant that speakers had to shorten their talks and the Q&A period after each session—usually a platform for the long-winded and the incoherent—had to be kept to a minimum. But not even the harried pace of the day could stop attendees from sharing horror story after horror story from the Prevent files.
At the community activism workshop I attended, the reports from the frontlines of being a Muslim in today’s Britain were almost indistinguishable from satirical stories in The Onion. The words “Orwellian” and “McCarthyist” came up a few times, too. I simply listened and took a few notes. Much of what I heard reminded me more of the Middle East police state I grew up in than the England that gave birth to John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty.
A teacher reports an eight-year-old Muslim girl to Prevent officers for telling a classmate that nail varnish is a bad idea since Muslim women can’t pray with painted nails. A doctor asks a young boy about his views on the “global caliphate” during a routine examination of a foot injury. When another young student tells a teacher about the anti-whaling movement in Japan, he’s reported to Prevent—although he may not even be Muslim. (Environmental activism apparently struck the teacher as a harbinger of extremism.) A workshop for Muslim mothers to educate them on Prevent policies gets called off when Prevent officers hear of it. A bus company cancels a contract with a Muslim university organization that has set up a tour of British campuses to educate and advise students on the Prevent program.
If a student expresses sympathy for Palestinians and criticizes or calls for a boycott of Israel, he or she risks being reported to Prevent officers. One of the indicators of nonviolent extremism, a senior Muslim policeman told the media, is youth who avoid shopping at Marks & Spencer, which is “mistakenly perceived to be Jewish-owned.” Other signs of radicalization include not drinking alcohol and not wearing Western clothes. Most Prevent interventions happen without any formal documentation—officers simply and suddenly appear at an event or company office and use “persuasion”—so there’s no paper trail that activists can use in a complaint or legal challenge.
Arun Kundnani, author of The Muslims Are Coming!: Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror, a critically lauded analysis of the security state in both Britain and the United States, is facilitating a workshop that’s quickly turning into a click-bait listicle: “Twenty Really Outrageous Stories from the Prevent Files. Number Nine Had Us Floored.” Born and raised in West London, Kundnani now calls New York City home and teaches media as a sessional instructor at various academic institutions. He’s keeping his cool, and the discussion on time, even as the number of participants climbs with the arrival of those redirected from the original venue to the current one. As Kundnani and others point out, Prevent is tasked with stopping all forms of extremism—including far right-wing extremism—but it seems to target the Muslim community almost exclusively. The IHRC characterizes the British government’s attitude to a slew of attacks on Muslim homes, businesses and mosques—the violent extremism that Prevent aims to stop—as a form of “silent acquiescence.”
As an example of the different treatment accorded far-right extremists, the IHRC cites the case of Glasgow’s Neil MacGregor, who in 2009 threatened to blow up Scotland’s largest mosque and behead one Muslim a week. He was charged with breach of peace and sentenced to three years’ probation in a lower court, but he should have been charged under anti-terrorism laws and tried in a high court. The police allow the English Defence League to stage marches in Muslim-heavy neighbourhoods in Birmingham and Luton, even when chants of “We hate Muslims” or “No more mosques” can regularly be heard. One march in Luton ended up with Muslim homes and businesses torched or vandalized. No one involved in those attacks was ever charged under anti-extremism legislation, the IHRC claims.
Given this, it’s not unreasonable to conclude that Prevent and other anti-terrorism initiatives reinforce a form of cultural racism. Because most Muslims in Britain come from core brown countries—South Asia and the Arab world—it becomes difficult to separate cultural from colour-based racism.
When I meet up with Kundnani in New York’s East Village a month later, he warns me about making a direct connection between Muslim and brown skin, even though he argues in his book that reactions to signifiers of Islam (veil, halal meat, beards) indicate a trend toward the racialization of the religion. There’s nothing fixed about racial categories, he tells me. “The same person in the 1960s was known as a coloured immigrant. In the 1970s as Asian. In the 1980s as Pakistani or Bengali.” Only in the 1990s, and certainly after 9/11, he says, did the same person become “Muslim.”
The Salman Rushdie affair in 1989 was a turning point in the transformation of brown identity. The reactions to the fatwa exposed a fault line in British multiculturalism: the existence of a secondary society that doesn’t subscribe to the main narrative of peaceful co-existence and in fact is willing to risk life and limb to defend its beliefs. The creation of a two-tier Muslim community began soon after—“good” Muslims were cast as moderate and silent, “bad” Muslims as religious and vocal. The idea of “British values” has permeated society since after the Second World War, when immigrants from South Asia and the Caribbean started to arrive in England and Wales to take on manufacturing and infrastructure jobs left vacant by the war dead.
Kundnani got his first taste of this argument as an undergraduate at Cambridge University, where he took a class with John Casey. The name sounded familiar to me, but I couldn’t remember why. Kundnani reminds me that Casey argued, in an infamous 1982 article in the Salisbury Review, for the repatriation of brown and black immigrants, or at least their restriction to guest worker status in England. “He was talking about shared cultural values being corrupted by immigrants,” Kundnani explains. According to Casey, these immigrants, largely from the Asian subcontinent and the West Indies, had failed to assimilate in the way that earlier groups (Jewish people and southern Europeans) had. “It blew my mind,” recalls Kundnani, who has a European mother and a South Asian father but is visibly brown. “It’s a more sophisticated way to hate me. I wouldn’t even know what the response would be.” Casey’s writing put Kundnani on the path of racial politics just as the whole debate of shared values began to dominate discussions of Muslim integration and isolation.
Even after 9/11, when Islam and terrorism became interchangeable in the minds of many in the West, the Muslim community could at least say that such threats came from individuals and groups outside Britain—by then, the blame had shifted to Arab Muslims in particular, based on the origins of the nineteen hijackers (most of whom came from Saudi Arabia, with the others from Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Lebanon). But when the 7/7 attackers in London were revealed to be British born and bred, Muslim voices were lost for words. In the wake of their silence, the government of Tony Blair raised the volume on the idea of British values as a counter-terrorism strategy. “If only [the 7/7 attackers] had been more British, they wouldn’t have been inclined to murder fellow citizens,” Kundnani says, summing up the official party line. And that thinking gave birth to Prevent, which defines terrorism and British values in a way that casts a wide net for the former and reduces the latter to a caricature. As Kundnani reminds me, former British prime minister John Major once described his idealized version of Britain as a place where old ladies cycled to church on a Sunday. It’s the idea of Forever England, a land that never changes, even when its inhabitants, and their skin colours, are forever morphing, browning.
But perhaps what makes Prevent particularly troubling as a form of racial profiling and targeting—a de facto control mechanism of brown political thought and activity—is that it operates in the “pre-criminal” space. In that sense, it’s similar to programs designed to warn the public (youth) about gang culture or drugs. But unlike such programs, Prevent assumes that the contemplation or exploration of hard-core Islamic doctrine is a prelude to violent crime. This leaves Muslim youth vulnerable to biased interpretations of their thought processes. It also opens the door to entrapment and a kind of police state where neighbours or individuals in positions of power (the teachers, doctors, social workers who are now obligated to report to Prevent officers) may rat on people against whom they have a grudge.
But it’s what comes after such reporting that seems to back up the IHRC’s characterization of Prevent as a social-engineering program. Once a person has been identified by a Prevent officer as at risk of becoming a violent extremist, she enters the Channel phase—one-on-one mentoring designed to deprogram her and rewire her social circuits. These programs assume that every Muslim who shows an interest in his or her faith is a potential mass murderer. If left alone, the beast will awaken, but if channelled properly, the Muslim person will not only renounce extremism but also act to stop others from it. This view perpetuates a cycle of mistrust and suspicion. The term “MI5 Islam,” referring to the state’s interference in matters of faith, has entered the political discourse in Britain.
I can’t help wondering if these policies are designed to stigmatize brown communities at a moment when out-and-out racial discrimination has run its course. It made me long for the days when people like me were just called Pakis and spat at or chased down the streets by a bunch of yobs. Back then, my brown skin set me apart as none other than an other. Now it’s a shield that hides my desire to destroy British values with a killing spree—or a Marks & Spencer–free shopping spree. Prevent can’t always tell the difference.