Muslims in Britain

Making Social and Political Space

Waqar Ahmad, Ziauddin Sardar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136327513
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Théologie islamique

The management of social, religious and ethnic diversity is a key social policy concern in Britain, and Muslims in particular have become a focus of attention in recent years. This timely and topical volume examines the position of Muslims in Britain and how they are changing and making social, political and religious space.

With contributions from world renowned scholars on British Muslims and from policy makers writing on issues of concern to Muslims and others alike, the book explores how British Muslims are changing social and religious spaces such as mosques and the role of women, engaging in politics, creating media and other resources, and thus developing new perspectives on Islam and transforming Muslim society from within. Chapters cover issues of religion and politics, Britishness, governance, parallel lives, gender issues, religion in civic space, ethnicity, and inter ethnic and religious relations, as well as the role of intellectuals, chaplains and activists in reforming Islam and renovating the British political landscape.

Providing a broad and comprehensive examination of the key issues surrounding Muslims in the UK, this book will be a valuable resource for students, lecturers and researchers in sociology, social policy, geography, politics, Islamic studies and other related disciplines.

1
RELIGION AND PUBLIC SPACE

Ziauddin Sardar

Introduction

That religion has been marginalised in Britain’s public space, reduced to a muffled whisper if not exactly a dying whimper, we can take for granted (Hosen and Mohr 2011). It is not just that there is an absence of moderate Muslim voices in public discourse. Rather, Muslims are part of a more general collective failure by all religious communities. People of all faiths — Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus — have failed to raise their voices on crucial issues of ethics and morality, society and international relations, and to talk and educate the great British public sufficiently or appropriately on the meaning of faith. The void thus created is only too evident. As the entire world was seduced by the ethics of ‘greed is good’, where was the religious duty of care? Did faith communities in Britain raise their voices about conspicuous wealth or the need to purify wealth by delivery of social justice and real resources to the poor? As the globalised economy reaps what has been sown, and cuts to social services begin to overwhelmingly affect the poor, and bonuses for bankers reach an obscene level, where are religious voices demanding that the first priority is the option for the poor and detailing what in conscience must be done to protect those in dire straits? The only religious voices we hear are the voices of extremism: Muslim cults shouting inhuman slogans, Christian groups refusing vaccination, messianic Muslims and Christians proclaiming the end of time!

But my concern is with the mainstream, not extremism. I believe the most secure route to eradication of the seduction of the extreme is ministering to the God-shaped void in the daily lives of the mass of the population. The task is to become relevant to the issues, concerns and circumstances of the society in which we coexist, asserting the need for an acknowledged role for faith, whatever that faith may be, in the public life of our society. This challenge raises its own questions. Some of these questions — should we celebrate diversity, or are matters of truth at stake? Can we maintain our love of freedom, while cutting it off from religious roots? Should all religions be equally welcomed in the public sphere? — have been ably raised by Roger Trigg (2008). We could raise others. What part in the activity of the faithful, or even the mildly interested, should religion take in public life? What does society gain, what has society lost by the retreat of religion from public life? What can and should religion contribute to the life of society? Are the religious a reliable, safe pair of hands to be entrusted with a role in public life? In what ways can and should the religious and various faith communities contribute to public life in Britain? Of course, we also have to confront the elephant in the room. How can religion occupy a place in the public space of a multi-faith and genuinely multicultural society? These are urgent questions for religious communities to address.

The need for religious voices

We live in a time when our social fabric is unravelling and unprepared to confront the hardships that await us, a particular period in history that I have elsewhere characterised as ‘postnormal times’ (Sardar 2010). Generations have grown up knowing only ever-expanding material horizons. These generations have been abandoned to the untender mercilessness of a system of values that equates human worth with what material goods we have and display. We live in a consumer culture where personal identity is shaped by the advertising glitz that gives a lifestyle profile to the brand names of the products, goods and services one selects and owns. The xyz alphabet of the me generations must now face hard choices not only of economic recession but of saving the planet from our history of extravagance, finding solutions for the obscenity of entrenched national and global poverty and inequality that blights the lives and confounds the hopes and opportunities of billions at home as well as abroad. Then there is an abundance of moral and ethical conundrums we have accumulated through the exponential growth in our knowledge and ability to manipulate the processes of the life of humans, animals, plants and the very substance of our planet. With knowledge, we have amassed accompanying ignorance, not least of how to reason in conscience with the difference between what can be done and what should or ought to be done, and whether our power to know and to do is applied for true betterment of the human condition or contributes to debasing our humane capacities and indeed could even end by making us less human. It is not merely nurturing the development of and concern for conscience that is the proper duty of religion. Religions are in many ways the last bastions of the language and terms in which to reason with and think through the dilemmas that become ever more common in our daily lives. What do generations bred to endless possibilities know of sacrifice, endurance, acceptance, self-denial, duty of care and prudential considerations? These are religious issues. It is the responsibility of religious communities to make positive contributions to sustainable humanity so that those who have no religious formation are not conned by the ethos of the marketplace or left with the erroneous impression that all we have to offer them are joyless ‘thou shalt nots’. Faith communities cannot leave unchallenged the dominant philosophy of our time that all life amounts to is individual and personal satisfaction, the fulfilment of self. Rather, they have to offer alternatives to all whose journeys of personal indulgence leave them asking, ‘Is that all there is?’

Before considering the complex challenges, let me begin with some commonplace details. According to all measures, British society still considers this to be a Christian country. True, church attendance has been in long, gradual decline. Yet a majority of British people consider themselves Christian irrespective of whether they participate in formal organised acts of worship or not. Of the 92 per cent of British people who answered the voluntary religious affiliation question on the 2001 census (Office of National Statistics 2001), nearly three-quarters (72 per cent) declared themselves to be Christian, as opposed to 16 per cent who stated that they had no religion. The ‘no religion’ category included atheists, agnostics, heathens and self-proclaimed Jedi. And I would make the point that the general presumption that minority non-Christian religions fare better in maintaining the affiliation, attendance and practice of their adherents is a generosity too far. The truth requires unpicking of the distinction between cultural identity, faithful practice and informed, educated participation in the fellowship of an interpretive community. The distinction is a complicated manoeuvre, but one which would reveal a situation comparable to that among the generality of the Christian population. There are numbers of what might be termed latent Muslims, Hindus or Buddhists comparable to the numbers of latent, or should that be residual, Christians. The extremist voices do not represent, and can never speak for, this silent majority.

The point, however, is that the figures for self-identification with religion endure while the public acknowledgement of religion is becoming further and further marginalised. When I was a lad, the Sunday morning television programmes for Asians — all geared to encouraging us, especially women, to learn English — were always followed by a televised act of Christian worship, which I understand was allocated proportionally among the various denominations over the course of each year. The Radio Times reserved two front covers per year, one of which was invariably at Easter, for religious imagery and plugging religious programmes. Radio 4 broadcast a daily act of worship to all permutations of bandwidths or frequencies and audiences. According to the original charter of the BBC, there were only three persons who had to be employed by the corporation and one of them was the head of religious programmes! Good Friday saw a reserved place for a televised act of observance between noon and 3 p.m. Christmas stamps used to reflect the nativity story, rather than Santa appearing to poo down a chimney. Television schedules gave prominence on Christmas Day itself to acts of worship and a number of programmes with explicit religious themes. These are just a few of the signs and symbols whose disappearance represents the retreat of religious observance from the public space. They are harbingers and consequences of a general shift in the temper of society.

Radical secularism

The process that gradually but inexorably has carried religious observance to the margins is a product of radical secularisation (Asad 2003). A great deal of the spiritual, over the course of centuries, was transferred to temporal control without noticeable effect on public acknowledgement of the importance of organised religion. But for some time now we have passed the point of critical mass. Secularisation has become synonymous with something quite distinct: secularism. Secularism is an organised philosophy even when not an outright ideology. It has claimed the centre ground because it has persuaded many of its superior ability to serve the real needs of society. Allegedly, it is the neutral, dispassionate and disinterested outlook that alone is capable of maintaining a peaceful conversation between all the competing voices, factions, interest groups, ideas and ideologies contending in the public space of an increasingly complex and heterogeneous society. What fits secularism for a dominant role is its trademark: doubt, perpetual doubt that debunks, overturns and interrogates all grand narratives claiming to explain the human condition. The clear implication of secularism is that conviction, convincement of almost any kind, is the product of a closed, unreasoning and potentially irrational, not to say fanatical, mind and hence by implication bad and most certainly a limited and inferior outlook. As a consequence, priests and bishops prefer to remain silent rather than speak out against gross inequalities in society. Mosques cannot look like real mosques; they have to look like opera houses or warehouses to be acceptable to the secular tendency. Faith communities, it is assumed, have nothing to say about the great economic, social or political issues of our time.

All this has led to a severe God problem in society. God has become the great unmentionable. For the faithful, God is an absolute reality, whether found through mystery and clouds of unknowing or revealed in lucid clarity. This defies the uncertainty principle that is the essential feature of secularism. Religion in any and all its manifestations can be only a subject for scrutiny, interrogation and tests of justification and legitimacy — never simple affirmation or mere acceptance. Under such a dispensation, religion is best understood and treated as a quaint personal and private predilection. Its claims on the public space are at best traditional, purely ornamental and ceremonial, getting a polite indulgence on the margins for a few high days and holidays but not given routine prominence, the kind of educative exposure that would unduly impact on popular consciousness. So, the television programme Songs of Praise endures, because God can be allowed to have a few good tunes. But ‘Thought for the Day’, on the BBC’s radio programme Today, is much too much for the secular lobby: a slot for only religious views is supposed to be a dark blot on secular Britain. The fact that almost all other slots are devoted to secularism is, of course, neither here nor there. On the whole, religious programming becomes comfy sofa magazine shows of unbearable niceness and a complete absence of anything challenging or argumentative, let alone disturbing to the conscience of the times, and virtually never mentioning God. Alternatively, it may appear in investigative trawls through the perverse and perversions advanced in the name of religion by the extremes. The perception grows in society that true and authentic expression of religion is to be found among the extremists, making the plaintive whimpers of the mainstream ever harder to hear and more subject to equivocation and outright incomprehension.

The result is not only an absence of religion in the public space but also the growth of a profound religious illiteracy (Moore 2007) that spreads like a virus through society. Fewer and fewer people become acquainted with what religion actually says and does. Religious education by the faithful is something children must be shielded from because it is tantamount to brainwashing, a foreclosure of choice — though how one learns anything without education is a question best not asked. Do not classical musicians start their training at a tender age? And, one is forced to ask, why education in the doubt of secularism, or its curriculum surrogate comparative religion, is not merely another form of indoctrination that prejudices the capacity for belief and commitment is again a question that dares not state its case. We exist in a climate where all religions must struggle against the tide of inquisition which usually focuses on monumentally irrelevant questions and misses the salient points of what genuinely matters to people of faith. Self-description, self- portrayal by the faithful becomes more and more difficult, further compounding the rise of general religious illiteracy. We end with a situation where those who do not believe assume the right to define what is authentic in religion and therefore who and what is typical, representative of religious belief and believers. While this is an acute problem for minority non-Christian religions — and I speak as one of the most sorely afflicted — it is by no means exclusive to us. I would suggest it now affects what passes for common knowledge of Christianity itself.

Society has accumulated both a distorted and a reductive idea of what constitutes religion, any religion. It has only a minimal understanding of the beliefs, practice and contemporary interpretations of any and all religions. And all religions are best known through their least appealing historic failures. Religion has gone beyond being what believers say and do in the name of religion, the sociological reformulation of the comparative religion explanation. It has become identified by the very worst that believers have ever done to themselves and others in history. That is why it is little wonder that religion is not exactly welcome in the public space — for none of us, or only the most select few, can claim to be without taint, to be entirely innocent of grievous faults, always to have lived up to our best calling either in the practice of our own faith or in relations with those of other faiths.

Reductive perceptions of religion

The generalities of the conception of religion, any religion, at large in Britain today present us with a bleak and depressing picture. Before we can consider what is to be done, we need to take stock of what is left of the presence of religion in the public space. The reductive redoubt falls into two categories: religion is ritual; and religion on its best behaviour is about niceness, a vague, non-specific, woolly sense of some sorts of moral and ethical parameters.

Ritual is the most obvious relic of religion and not surprisingly has come to be seen not only as what religion is about but as the prism through which it is best understood. Ritual observance is about high days and holidays and the rites of passage of human existence: the occasions marking birth, marriage and death. Individually, this is how people make the significance of major events in their lives memorable, utilising the facility of formal religion as an integral part of the opportunity for ‘a bit of a do’. I am not one of those who spurn this kind of encounter. I would argue that it can be one of the few occasions when religious outreach is possible. And there is another face of such ritualised religious observance in Britain that we ought to think about. The grand state occasions, which integrate or revolve around acts of religious observance, have become increasingly important in the bleak landscape we face. I think of things like the funeral of the late Queen Mother — vicariously the memorialising and laying to rest we would all like to give to a beloved grandmother, and expressed through the solemnity of religion, where we hear the words that signify what belief is about, even if we do not necessarily grasp the fullness of their meaning. Ritual is not redundant; ritual is important as an occasion for collective shared meaning if we can learn how to use it constructively. I remember, for example, being in Malaysia at the time of the Dunblane school atrocity, when a gunman shot and killed children in their primary school. I was deeply impressed and moved to find that BBC World Service television broadcast the entirety of a church service from Dunblane. One could pick out other such instances. True, we can complain that such instances are reductive; religion is not solely about celebration or consolation. However, both are significant starting points, points of entry to public consciousness. If state occasions and public memorials are the only time we get to acknowledge the existence of something beyond the material, so be it. Our challenge is how we find a way to go further.

If religion as ritual is a reductive relic, the growth of the presentation of religion as niceness is what I would term a disaster. It is little more than a placebo for a society that no longer either understands what religion is or knows how to cope with what religion should or ought to be. All those dread magazine programmes which are about the nice things religious people do but run a mile from engaging with why, what these actions signify and how they have meaning and implications for the whole of one’s outlook on life, the universe and everything are a sad reflection of what vestigial religion has become. On the one hand, it suggests that religion pertains to morality in the broadest sense without ever seriously engaging with why or how such moral behaviour derives from or relates to religion. And, of course, niceness precludes the asking of any kind of tough questions to disturb the composure of the religious, the latently religious or the openly non-religious.

Religion as moral reflection is the ‘Thought for the Day’ factor. It is the fiendish challenge to be engaging, personable, relevant, pithy and profound in less than four minutes. The considerable constraints of the medium mean a general acceptance that mention of God is, by and large, a switch-off for the audience. The thought that occurs to me is that while this vestigial and truncated nod in the direction of religion testifies to a thirst for moral consideration, what is actually offered to the audience is morality without context. For people of faith, moral reflection is rooted in its only proper context, the belief that we are all answerable to a power far beyond the human. For the religious, it is God consciousness alone that makes moral imperatives important in our individual and social life. Being witty and wise, a good raconteur, may make the population think more kindly of the religious on a daily basis. It does not amount to a bridgehead for spreading education and understanding of the content and meaning of any particular faith. The rotation of multi-faith voices which is now the order of the day makes its contribution to the identikit interchangeable world religion gloss that is little different from the New Age, eclectic, make-your-own religion for your own personal world philosophy. The message gets us little further than the proposition: be nice and be good if you can, should circumstances permit. Most of the thoughts I hear on such daily outings leave me with an enduring feeling of sadness and remorse, however wise and apposite their content.

I would suggest that this prevalence of niceness is a feature of another problem, the real dilemma we need to consider. The placebo effect is a function of what society considers the intractable problems of how to placate the greatest number in what is now a multi-faith rather than just a multi-denominational society. It is that very British response of being polite. It seeks out the lowest common denominator by which everyone seems to have some mention while leaving all the big issues determinedly ignored. I happened upon an instance recently which illustrates the point. On a Sunday morning magazine programme I watched a film report in which one nice white English family was dispatched to spend one day sharing the Ramadan fast with an equally nice Muslim family. The two families clearly had never met before; a certain reticence and stiffness was evident all round. Other than the fact that Muslims do not eat during the fast — though even the exact specifics of this rather significant element managed to be glossed over — we learned little apart from the fact that the children of the white family did not fancy the idea much. Virtually nothing of what it means to fast — not, I a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Muslims in Britain
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Intro
• 1 Religion and Public Space
• 2 Britain and Britishness: Place, Belonging and Exclusion
• 3 Exploring Social Spaces of Muslims
• 4 Muslim Chaplains: Working at the Interface of 'Public' and 'Private'
• 5 Young Muslims in London: Gendered Negotiations of Local, National and Transnational Places
• 6 Multiculturalism and the Gender gap: the Visibility and Invisibility of Muslim Women in Britain
• 7 Everyday Making and Civic Engagement among Muslim Women in Scotland
• 8 Negotiating Faith and Politics: The Emergence of Muslim Consciousness in Britain
• 9 'Creating a Society of Sheep'? British Muslim Elite on Mosques and Imams
• Index