Young British Muslims

Between Rhetoric and Realities

Sadek Hamid

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134789627
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Young British Muslims continue to generate strong interest in public discourse. However, much of this interest is framed in negative terms that tends to associate them with criminality, religious extremism or terrorism. Focusing instead on other aspects of being young, Muslim and British, this volume takes a multidisciplinary approach that seeks to 'normalise' the subjects and focus on their everyday lived realities. Structured into three sections, the collection begins by contextualising the study of young British Muslims, before addressing the sensitive social issues highlighted in the media and finally focusing on a variety of case studies which investigate the previously unexplored lived experiences of these young people. With contributions from scholars of religion, media and criminology, as well as current and former practitioners within youth and social work contexts, Young British Muslims: Between Rhetoric and Realities will appeal to scholars who have an interest in the fastest growing, most profiled minority demographic in the UK.

1 Researching young Muslim lives in contemporary Britain¹

Anshuman A. Mondal

Introduction

Since 2001, the figure of the ‘young Muslim’ has become a prominent object of knowledge within British public discourse. Anxieties that a disaffected and radicalized Muslim youth might become willing recruits capable of perpetrating acts of terrorism on behalf of al-Qaida and its affiliates have compelled government, media, academia and third sector organizations such as think-tanks and charities to commission, produce, publish and disseminate research, analysis, policy reports, narratives and images that constitute the discourse (in the Foucauldian sense – disciplined and regulated by institutional mechanisms of state and non-state power) about young Muslims in Britain today. Much, indeed most, of this has corroborated and confirmed existing tropes and connotations about Islam and Muslims that have become sedimented into the collective cultural habitus over centuries; some has contested and challenged them. In the course of this chapter, I will reflect on some wider theoretical questions pertaining not just to the difficulties, challenges and opportunities of being young and Muslim in Britain today as reflected by this knowledge, particularly that branch of it that might be called ‘academic research’, but also its relationship to the ‘real life’ that exists both within and beyond the sum of its representations.

These are questions I have dwelt upon a great deal, ever since I embarked upon the project that was eventually published as my book Young British Muslim Voices – not least because, as an academic literary critic, my professional training usually concerns itself with fictional as opposed to real lives, although the relation of fiction to reality is, of course, a complex and vexed one² (Mondal, 2008a). The real lives I encountered during the course of that research problematized for me the very nature of academic research itself for the problem I constantly encountered was the tension between the singularity of individual experience and the necessary abstractions that ensue when those experiences are translated, via our analytical concepts and categories, into knowledge. For, in a strict epistemological – as opposed to, say, existential or ethical – sense, experience does not signify until and unless it is absorbed and understood through categories of knowledge. To put it another way, an experience is not significant until it is seen to be part of a larger pattern or system that speaks to, and is spoken by, the ideas and concepts that motivate and determine our knowledge.

The central problem framing academic research into real life is, therefore, the relation of the general to the particular, of analysis to description. It is one that Dipesh Chakrabarty, in his book Provincializing Europe, characterizes as the tension between the analytical tradition (which operates through abstractions, generalizations, conceptualization and ‘grand narratives’), for whom the paradigmatic figures are Marx and Weber, and the hermeneutic tradition (which concentrates on the particular, the singular, the unique, and operates through a mode of ‘thick’ description), which follows Heidegger and the phenomenologists (Chakrabarty, 2000, p. 18). The other way to put this is to evoke the definitive problematic within social analysis between structure and agency. The point that I take from Chakrabarty, however, is that one cannot choose one or other of these positions but rather both – shuttling back and forth between the analytical and general, the hermeneutic and the particular (Chakrabarty, 2000, p. 107). That is, for academic research to be ‘research’ one cannot simply describe; one must analyze, evaluate and deploy categories and concepts even as one becomes insistently aware that the experiences which we are attempting to analyze are constantly exceeding the horizons of our thought. Experience, then, is always slipping through our fingers, an excess that always remains partially outside knowledge even as we try to bring it into discourse. One might argue that this ‘excess’ is the space of agency, of individuality, of liberty, of desire, of play – and of the necessary failure of knowledge to grasp its object, of truth to be fully present in any given truth claim. Acknowledgement of this fact involves an ethical gesture of humility before the ordinary sublimity of ‘real life’ that is seldom undertaken by those of us who have both invested (government, funding bodies, universities) and have an investment in (researchers and our readers) the truth claims that ‘academic research’ purports to deliver.

This is perhaps particularly the case with respect to the purely analytical tradition that constitutes the bulk of contemporary quantitative social research. As an illustration of how the hermeneutic tradition might consistently disturb and unsettle the truth claims of its analytical counterpart, I would like to stage here a reading of Eric Kaufmann’s demographic analysis of religion and religious politics in contemporary Europe, and in particular his critique, using quantitative methodology, of ‘Eurabian’ claims that the population growth of Muslims in Europe will soon result in the chimera of a majority-Muslim Europe (hence the term ‘Eurabia’) sooner or later³ (Kaufmann, 2010a). I should add that I find Kaufmann’s careful scrutiny and forensic demolition of the ‘Eurabian’ thesis entirely welcome. The supposed demographic ‘threat’ of Europe’s growing Muslim population to its culture and identity is a dog-whistle trope in the many contemporary debates about Muslims, immigration, integration and multiculturalism: barely audible at mainstream frequencies, it nevertheless possesses a shrill power to conjure up from the submerged depths of Europe’s collective unconscious all sorts of phantoms and fantasies about the Muslim ‘Other’. Such claims invariably prey on ignorance and fear and wither when exposed to the cold light of fact and the illumination of rational analysis.

And yet it is the nature of this illumination that I am concerned with here. Kaufmann’s conclusions concerning the veracity of the Eurabian hypotheses rest on the claim that ‘[d]emography is the most predictable of social science, much more so than economics’ (p. 57), and whilst this is perfectly adequate in assessing the Eurabianist arguments since these are made on demographic grounds, other aspects of his wider argument are problematic precisely because there are good reasons to doubt the maxim he proposes that ‘demography is destiny’ (p. 57). Notwithstanding the fact that the hard data of demography – population statistics across a range of criteria – must be translated into and, in a Derridean sense, necessarily supplemented by its other, discursive prose, the science of demography – and, by extension, the discourses of all the human sciences such as sociology, economics, political science, etc. – is subject to the insistent and troubling pressure of questions concerning language, representation and interpretation. Its supposedly objective ‘facts’ can, therefore, never be separated from the subjective nature of these troubling questions.

Although demography may be perfectly capable of quantifying and projecting the size and scope of populations and groups, it is much less adequate in analyzing the nature of those populations, especially when it comes to questions concerning culture, ethnicity, identity and ideology. These depend less on the numbers of people per se (the realm of demography) and more on what goes on inside their heads. It would be a crude kind of empiricism that truly advances the idea that demography can analyze and illuminate the more nebulous aspects of social life in the way psychology or the study of ideology and culture can, but that is what Kaufmann seems to suggest (the ‘demography is destiny’ epithet is clearly an allusion to Freud’s ‘biology is destiny’).

Unsurprisingly, he addresses the question of ‘integration’ primarily in demographic terms. ‘Intermarriage is arguably the best barometer of assimilation’ (p. 57), he suggests and, leaving aside the many slippages that conflate ‘integration’ with ‘assimilation’, I am inclined to agree: it is arguable. In fact, it is highly contestable since it could be argued that intermarriage represents merely one particular form of integration and not the sum of all possible paths towards it. Of course, intermarriage is exactly the kind of integration a demographer can evaluate because it can be reduced to bare statistics. As it happens, Kaufmann himself acknowledges other – more important – forms of integration that are also demographically analyzable. He notes, for example, the ‘assimilation’ of European Muslim fertility rates to ‘host society norms’ – an ‘integration’ based on the movement towards European family, work and social patterns but not on intermarriage (p. 58). This is just one aspect of the Europeanization of Muslim immigrants that many studies have already noticed (including a Europe-wide survey of Muslim attitudes, opinions and behaviours produced by The Open Society Institute),⁴ some of which can be measured, whilst others must be observed and analyzed using different methodology.

Another path to integration that Kaufmann considers is ‘secularism’. Being an ideological issue, this is clearly less comfortable terrain for a demographer, but Kaufmann tackles it anyway. ‘If Muslims are turning into secular Europeans,’ he says, ‘demography is immaterial.’ However, they are not (which is true, although of course, quite a lot are becoming more secular – as Kaufmann’s own data shows later in the article); and Kaufmann points out that Muslims under 25 are as devout as those over 55. ‘There is little evidence that time modifies this pattern,’ he observes (p. 58). The trouble is, there is also little evidence that it does not – Kaufmann’s point here is based on comparing only two generations. Even if the second generation remains as devout as the first, can we therefore conclude that future generations will follow the same pattern? If the data stretched over a longer period – say, over four or five generations – then probably we could, but given the short time that Muslims (as a significant social group) have been in Europe, the evidence is just not available yet to be able to draw such a conclusion (although the synchronic comparison with West Indians remains valid). Beyond that, there is a deeper point to be made. Even if the numbers of devout first- and second-generation Muslims remain the same, it does not follow that the nature of their faith does too. What does being Muslim mean to first- and second-generation Muslims? There is quite a lot of evidence to suggest that Islam is understood and practised very differently by these generations. Islam is more individualized, faith-based, and more ideological (though not necessarily in a political way) for younger Muslims than for their elders, for whom it formed part of the fabric of their social lives and community structures. This is very important because it is central to assessing the validity of the argument concerning the growing conflict between ‘seculars’ and religious ‘fundamentalists’. As I have argued elsewhere, there are emergent ways of being a devout Muslim in Britain and Europe that occupy a variety of positions in the wide middle ground between becoming ‘secular’ (whatever that might mean) and being ‘fundamentalist’ (Mondal, 2008b, 2009). Kaufmann, however, sees no such possibilities, and he prepares the ground for his wider argument by suggesting that if younger Muslims are changing, they are becoming more ‘fundamentalist’. To do this, he cites the (in)famous statistic from the flawed (but not uninteresting) Policy Exchange report on British Muslims published in 2007, which suggested that 37 per cent of Muslims aged 16–24 wanted Sharia law compared to just 17 per cent of those aged over 55 (Mirza et al. 2007). This sort of data, on which Kaufmann bases his wider argument, illustrates very precisely the limitations of quantitative as opposed to qualitative social and cultural analysis because it tells us almost nothing about what those 37 per cent take the question to mean. What does ‘Sharia’ mean to them? In what sense do they ‘want to live’ under it?

In Young British Muslim Voices I asked my respondents (aged 16–30) to talk about their attitudes to Sharia law. Of those who did express a desire for Sharia, when pressed to explain what that might mean in practice, all hedged their responses with so many qualifications that the concept of Sharia itself became completely attenuated. It represented nothing more than a utopian desire to see some kind of correlation between their faith and the reality of living as a minority in a non-Muslim society (Mondal, 2008a, pp. 130–132). It is a symptom of living amongst what Ziauddin Sardar calls the ‘wreckage of [their] heritage’ (Sardar, 2004, p. 156) – an elegaic yearning for a lost time when Islam was dominant, and also a sign that being a Muslim in Europe is still a work in progress. The lived complexity behind such raw statistics is one of the reasons I find the argument presented in the second half of Kaufmann’s article unconvincing. Another reason is the fact that it rests on a continual conflation of three different terms that can mean very different things in relation to the kind of faith people profess, but which are lumped together as equivalents in order to suggest an ideological faultline between ‘seculars’ and ‘fundmentalists’. The argument rests on the conflation of ‘devout’, ‘fundamentalist’, ‘conservative’ and ‘orthodox’ (there is, likewise, a conflation of ‘liberals’ and ‘seculars’). ‘Across all creeds, theological conservatives are expanding at the expense of seculars and liberals’ (p. 59), says Kaufmann, and whilst this may be true does this mean that all ‘practising Catholics’ are ‘theologically conservative’ just because they happen to ‘attend church regularly’? In turn, are they equivalent to the ‘devout’ European Muslim women who ‘pray daily’, and are they, in their turn, really comparable to the ‘women most in favour of Sharia law’ in ‘the large cities of the Muslim world’ (p. 59)? Moreover, when comparing the 86 per cent of ‘practising Catholics’ who voted for John F. Kennedy in 1960 with the 74 per cent of ‘young conservative Catholics’ who opted for George W. Bush, is Kaufmann really comparing like with like? Only if you take ‘practising’, ‘conservative’, ‘devout’, and ‘orthodox’ to be descriptors that are self-evidently equivalent. In turn, these can all only be adduced as composite evidence for a basic distinction between ‘seculars’ and ‘fundamentalists’ if all of the above are equivalent to ‘fundamentalist’. That is highly improbable and unconvincing, both as a matter of fact, and of logic.

Even more problematically, having lumped all these various shades of believers together under the rubric of ‘fundamentalism’, Kaufmann argues that there is now an interfaith fundamentalism that augurs the coming ‘culture war’ between ‘fundamentalists’ and ‘seculars’. The strategic alliances he describes are no doubt happening, but the idea that such co-operation between certain organizations somehow prefigures a battle within society at large rests on the dangerous – and totally mistaken – assumption that such groups truly represent all religious believers in their respective faiths (except the ‘liberals’ who are, of course, ‘secular’). Islamists, for example, represent a tiny fraction of Europe’s Muslims, and the same is true of other fundamentalist groups from other faiths. To suggest otherwise is to give such groups unwarranted importance and representative prestige.

In effect, these cumulative conflations have the rhetorical effect of emptying out the chaotic, unorganized, highly fluid and mutable middle ground of ‘real life’ in favour of a spurious polarization. It is precisely this middle ground that offers the necessary room for accommodation between different ideological trends in the ‘Pluropa’ that Kaufmann rightly forecasts; in erasing it, Kaufmann denies the very possibility of accommodation between different sets of beliefs. Actually, far from relying purely on analysis of ‘hard’ data, Kaufmann’s argument in fact rests on an interpretative metaphor, that of divergence rather than convergence. There are, of course, undeniable trends towards ideological divergence in contemporary Europe, but there are also counter-trends towards convergence. Islamisms, for instance, are declining as an ideological force amongst European Muslims at grassroots level, as other forms of Europeanized Islam emerge to challenge and confront it. These have converged towards rather than diverged from European ideological norms.

The point is, in order to penetrate the fog of complexity that surrounds social life in Europe today, demography may help but it is almost certainly insufficient. Quantitative social analysis of this kind has its place – and Kaufmann uses it well where it is appropriate – but a proper understanding of our social relations also requires painstaking qualitative analysis of what people actually think, feel and believe – and the ways in which they express them. Having said that, qualitative social analysis, which does take into account the hermeneutic tradition to varying degrees, is also subject to the failure of knowledge to which I have referred. As with the kind of quantitative analysis epitomized by Kaufmann, we should be careful to avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and to acknowledge the rich insights that qualitative research has produced – including insights about precisely the kind of ‘excess’ that demonstrates the limits of the very disciplinary knowledge that produced them. When Reina Lewis, in her analysis of ‘how e-commerce and forms of fashion med...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Researching young Muslim lives in contemporary Britain
• 2. Child sexual exploitation and young British Muslim men: a modern moral panic?
• 3. Do young British Muslim women need rescuing?
• 4. Urban young Muslims: cross cultural influence in the face of religious marginalisation and stigmatisation
• 5. Finding a voice: young Muslims, music and religious change in Britain
• 6. Religious values and political motivation among young British Muslimsh
• 7. Virtual youth: Facebook Groups as identity platforms
• 8. Digital Orientalism: Muslim youth, Islamophobia and online racism
• 9. Re-fashioning the Islamic: young visible Muslims
• Notes on contributors
• Index