From Multiculturalism to Integration

Muslim Women and Preventing Violent Extremism Policies in the UK, 2001–2016

Abeeda Qureshi

• Editore: Routledge India
• Anno: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000452068
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Categoria: Öffentliche Ordnung

This book is key to the debates surrounding the achievement of Preventing Violent Extremism (PVE), a crucial aspect of SDG16 – 'Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions'. It examines the role of Muslim women activists in the implementation of ethno-religious minority policies in the UK. It presents a comprehensive analysis of Muslim women's engagement with political and governance processes over the years, especially the execution of PVE policies in the aftermath of the 7/7 bombings in the UK. It studies the extent to which the government has been successful in its policy of involving Muslim women in governing contexts, by referring to changes that these women have brought about as part of the government's consultative forums and meetings. Drawing on evidence based on documentary analysis and in-depth elite interviews, the author highlights the positive role of non-elected Muslim women in the wider debate on countering extremism and radicalization.

An important contribution to the study of minority policies in the UK, the book will be useful for students and researchers of security studies, public policy, minority studies, politics, multiculturalism, terrorism, race and ethnic studies and sociology.

1
INTRODUCTION

DOI: 10.4324/9781003213291-1

The 2001 riots in Oldham, Burnley and Bradford between residents of Pakistani origin and the neighbouring White communities are considered to be the most serious riots on British soil ever. The inquiry reports published in the aftermath of these riots blamed the lack of social cohesion and integration among different communities for the disturbances (Cantle, 2001). Government policy based on multiculturalism was considered responsible for home grown terrorism and for fostering segregation and undermining a sense of ‘British identity’ or ‘Britishness’ based on common values, where some religious minorities did not think of themselves as British and subscribed to other identities (ibid.). The findings of the report entitled ‘Community; Cohesion’ suggested a more integrationist policy approach in managing the growing diversity in Britain’s population.

The 7 July 2005 suicide bombings in London (also referred to as 7/7), executed by four Islamic extremists, killed fifty-two civilians and injured more than 700. The fact that those involved in the terrorist acts were the product of a multicultural Britain, brought national security to the top of the government agenda, with its focus on the Muslim community. In response, the British government announced the Preventing Violent Extremism (PVE) policy to deal with the growing alienation and radicalisation among young Muslims communities. As part of the strategy, the British government became more involved with the Muslim community (DCLG, 2007). An important element in the PVE approach was the priority given to engagement with Muslim women besides the faith groups and male community leaders. Prominent Muslim women who were in a position of leadership and had extensive experience of working at the grass roots level were made part of several government-backed initiatives aimed at tackling the issues of extremism and radicalisation. Considering the socio-economic status of British Muslims in British society (Barnes et al., 2005:18; Ahmed et al., 2003:22; Dale et al., 2002; Abbas, 2003; DCLG, 2008a; Dale et al., 2006:22–37; Dwyer, 1999; Ray, 2010:219; Dwyer and Shah, 2009; Basit, 1997; Dyke and Lucy, 2009; Dale, 2008), the policy of engagement with Muslim women represented a paradox, hence leading to academic interest in the subject.

Speaking in a similar vein, the Communities and Local Government Report ‘Empowering Muslim Women: Case Studies’ (DCLG, 2008a:2–25), evaluated that 66% of 80,000 Muslim women in the UK were unemployed in 2008, which is an alarming number as compared to the total women in general which was around 26%. Added to this, 40% of the British Muslim women were illiterate. The report further states that they were not only absent from the labour force, but they didn’t volunteer either (ibid.). The studies (Dale et al., 2006:22–37) also highlighted the presence of institutional and individual racism and stereotypes associated with Muslim women in Britain, especially with the ones who wear headscarves. They are labelled as fanatics in their beliefs and reluctant to adapt to their environment. This allegation has reduced Muslim women’s opportunities for professional employment and better job prospects. Furthermore, domestic violence, forced marriages (Siddiqui, 2003) and veiling sparked intense debate between the defenders of multicultural policies and those who supported more integrationist policies. For example, Prime Minister David Cameron’s address at a security conference in Germany referred to the practice of forced marriages among particular communities as ‘counter to British values’. This highlighted the failure of ‘state multiculturalism’ in the UK by ‘encouraging different cultures to live separate lives from mainstream communities’ (Cameron, 2011).

Certainly, as Muslims in the UK settled and proceeded with the second and third generations of British Muslims, a change, though slow, was visible. The younger Muslim women were more informed and took a more active part in British society (Elshayyal, 2014) that led to prominence in their communities. In this regard, the role of Muslim women activists as liberal and moderate voices within the community (Massoumi, 2015:19) has been recognised by a number of scholars. For example, Cooke reasons that Muslim women have been instrumental on the one hand in challenging the traditional hold of men, who used to represent the umma before and, on the other hand, have been reinterpreting and changing traditional understanding of women’s role in the society (Cooke, 2008:91). Muslim women, however, do not call it a feminist struggle but describe this as reclamation of their faith and believe that they have been accorded with equal human rights in foundational Islamic text, but these have been disallowed by the cultural interpretations of these texts (Contractor, 2014). It is further discussed that Muslim women’s activism through grass root organisations and socio-political campaigns also had a positive impact on their lives (Contractor, 2014:86). The internet has helped Muslim women in ‘creating networks and transnational space for intellectual reflection on Islamic norms and identity’ and in redefining their self-identity (Massoumi, 2015:97). O’Toole and Gale (2013:212) further emphasised the significant role of the state in shaping the ethnic minority and young Muslims’ lives, especially in the post-7/7 period of political uncertainty towards the Muslim community. The inclusion of Muslim women in the policy process, as Narzanin Massoumi (2015:3–19) debates, has shown ‘progressive gender politics of the movement against the “War on Terror” and helped in refuting the impression that the movement relied only on intolerant Muslims’. Contractor (2014:86) further highlights a positive impact of women’s activism through grass root organisations and socio-political campaigns based on the lives of Muslim women (Contractor, 2014:86).

The United Kingdom’s post-2001 and post-7/7 policy response towards its ethno-religious minorities, especially its Prevent policy, has been discussed and debated among the scholars of sociology, public policy, political science and international relations. The scholars on the subject are broadly divided into two groups. The first group criticises the government’s enhanced dependence on the police for large-scale surveillance of British Muslims (Kundnani, 2001, 2009). They emphasise that Prevents focus on Islam making the Muslim community ill-advised and deeply counter-productive (Stevens, 2011) which they state ignores the wider socio-economic inequalities and a link between growing extremism and radicalisation to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and other parts of the Muslim world (Gallis et al., 2005:7).

The second group of scholars, on the other hand, appreciates the government’s securitisation agenda for ‘surprisingly creative outcomes and for reflecting locally specific and highly dynamic settlement between the local state and Muslim communities’ (Lowndes and Thorp, 2010) and claims that the PVE initiatives helped in building collective resilience towards terrorism via ‘capacity building’ and ‘empowerment’. Iacopini (2011:6), likewise, bring forth how the Prevents’ money had helped in strengthening locally run, less established community organisations that work with different groups in their communities such as the Somali community, but sadly never had access to state funding.

Whilst the aforementioned scholars look at the overall policies, there are other studies which focus on women’s involvement in the government’s securitisation agenda. Although Muslim organisations informed public policies even beforehand, yet Muslim women’s inclusion in consultations, forums and networks was seen as frustrating and alienating, casting Muslim women in a limited set of roles, for example, to meet the agenda of preventing extremism (Allen and Guru, 2012; Jones et al., 2014) and for using Muslim women’s identities in the movement against terrorism (Massoumi, 2015:12–19). The inclusion of Muslim women and their organisations has been criticised for believing that they being liberal are in a position to counter ‘masculine Islamic extremism’ (Brown, 2008:473). Scholars further criticised the government for making an alliance with high profile and prominent Muslim women and their organisations to meet their limited and narrowly defined policy target in the wake of the post-7/7 security milieu (Rashid, 2014:589). Hence, these women’s claims to represent the richly diverse community of Muslim women was questioned (Ray, 2010:220–221). Therese O’Toole and Richards Gale (2013:217), nevertheless highlight ‘the fluidity of activism’ which they debate can be ‘obscured by a conceptual focus on forms of mainstream and electoral participation alone’.

Although the topic received great attention, it needs a more comprehensive analysis for a more nuanced understanding of Muslim women’s engagement with political and governance processes. It is, however, important to reinforce that this book does not focus on analysing the success and failure of these policies in achieving their objectives; rather, this book has limited its analysis to the role of British Muslim women in the execution of the aforementioned policies that have become increasingly visible in policy debates and discourses. I would rather examine how the government–Muslim women’s relationship worked in practice along with the extent to which the government has been successful in its policy of involving Muslim women in governing contexts; and the role Muslim women have been playing in the development of the policies by referring to the changes that the women might have brought about as part of the government’s consultative forums and meetings. Last but not least, I would examine the authenticity and legitimacy of Muslim women’s ‘representation claims’ who were questioned for claiming to represent the richly diverse community of British Muslim women.

Muslim Community: The Muslim community in the United Kingdom, however, can not be categorised as a unified group, as it is very diverse. Its members have migrated from different parts of the world, speak different languages and adhere to different socio-cultural values. More than half of Britain’s ethno-religious population is of South Asian descent and is a result of immigration from Commonwealth countries from the 1950s onwards in search of ‘growing industries’ (Fetzer and Soper, 2005:26; Modood et al., 2006:38). Britain’s cosmopolitan centres, especially London, received another wave of rich and professional classes from the Middle East after 1970. Most of them had made large investments in property in the city. During this period, there also had been waves of political refugees from other parts of the Muslim world, notably from Somalia, Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq (ibid.). The sectarian cleavages are also very prominent and further divide the British Muslim community along sectarian lines. Prominent among them are the Sunni,¹ Shia,² Sufi³ and Wahabi⁴ (Robinson, 1999; Jones, 2009; Guillaume, 1954). Whilst the socio-cultural norms and values were easy to ignore, the sectarian divisions, sometimes, became hard to overcome. Historically, In Britain, the sectarian denominations had remained insignificant while supporting and funding any organisation or whilst determining a policy trajectory vis-à-vis the Muslim community. With growing extremism and the radicalisation of British society, British policy makers started to give special attention to the religious thought that formed the sectarian denominations.

The variations within the group made it difficult for the researcher to agree on an operational definition. The lack of clarity sometimes confuse the researcher and it becomes hard to present an analysis for such a complex group of people. As we need to operationalise the term for empirical and analytical purposes, the term needs to be defined in a clear and unambiguous way. In this book, I refer to Muslims as a Muslim community that includes those groups who self-identify themselves as Muslims, regardless of their ethnic and sectarian orientation. However, it does not necessarily mean that the diversity and variation within the group has been ignored. The reason for selecting the former rather than the latter is that in recent years, the Muslims in Britain have emerged as a unified group, especially with the second and third generations of immigrants who ‘seem to think of themselves in terms of “Muslim” and/or “British”’ (Modood, 2007:108) rather than in terms of Pakistani, Bangladeshi or any other ethnicity. With the passage of time, their socio-cultural and ethnic bonds have become weaker, and as a result, their religious identity has taken precedence over other allegiances (Sinno and Erem, 2008). A broad definition may help to focus on issues that a group of people faces rather than narrowing the focus to sub-groups within the group, especially when there are many diversities available.

Methodology: In order to explain the topic under study, this book employed an interpretive policy analysis (IPA) (Bevir and Rhodes, 2004; Dowding, 2004; Finlayson, 2004; Hay, 2004). The interpretive policy analysis (IPA) challenges the foundationalism in philosophy and human science and encourages the researcher to decentre government and explore ways in which the activities of particular individuals make and remake governmental institutions (Bevir, 2000; Bevir and Rhodes, 2004, 2003:40). The approach begins from the premise that to ‘understand actions, practices and institutions, we need to grasp the relevant meanings, the beliefs and preferences of the people involved’ (ibid.:1). Bevir and Rhodes (2003, 2006) call it ‘interpretations of interpretations’ and hold that when we explore actions or practices as informed by beliefs or discourses, we interpret interpretations (Bevir and Rhodes, 2006). The approach thus encourages us to master the practice of learning by telling stories and listening to them (Rhodes, 2007:1257, 2000). We observe that interpretation works on two levels and offers insights into how a given person, in a given context, makes sense of a given phenomenon. The approach, having its origin in phenomenology and hermeneutics, is developed and applied in political science by Bevir and Rhodes (2003, 2006). Since the interpretive policy analysis (IPA) acknowledges the utility of qualitative data in understanding the social construction of reality, I have arrayed qualitative techniques of data collection in outlining the research design: documentary analysis and elite interviewing.

Documentary or archival sources (Burnham et al., 2008; Platt, 1981) are especially important for this research, as I am relying on policy documents and government reports. I mostly relied on the documents and reports published by the Department of Communities and Local Government and the Home Office as this is where the policies were detailed. I was also given access by council officials to the documents that were not available for the general public.

The advantage of using government documents and reports is that they reveal the ‘complete range of influences to which the government was subjected at any given time, but also what did not change’ (Lowe, 1997:240–241). In other words, documentary sources ‘allow greater contextualization’ (ibid.). Lowe (1997:241–242) highlighted four main advantages of using public records: First, they ‘contain the widest range of information upon which the policy is based’; second, it is at this level that policy is implemented and decisions by the ‘core executive’ are explicitly acknowledged, discussed and refined; third, ‘ministers and officials can be more frank about their underlying assumptions and reasons in memoranda which they know will not be circulated outside the departments or divisions’; and finally, these documents often help a researcher ‘to identify an important variable in policy making, a distinctive “departmental view” transcending individual ministers and officials’ (ibid.).

The government documents and reports thus played an important role in understanding policies at different points of time and under different governments. Denscombe (2010:221), however, stated that documentary sources should never be accepted at face value and their validity needs to be established rather than taken for granted. A comparative analysis of reports and documents helped me understand changes over time and, with changes in government, from one party to another. Since the documents and reports were from different time periods, I took pains to situate them in context to understand their meaning. The approach forced me to discover the socio-political conditions under which the policy documents were produced and, on that basis, to make sense of the situation and the intentions behind a particular policy.

Since this research covers an extended period of race relations in Britain, it has been a challenging job to handle these documentary sources. The analysis started by employing a ‘system of classification’ (Burnham et al., 2008:187) and deciding which sources needed to be incorporated in the research. The most common distinction was between ‘primary’, ‘secondary’ and ‘tertiary’ sources (ibid.). The documentary sources were, further, evaluated keeping in view four basic criteria: authenticity, credibility, representativeness and meaning; literal and interpretive understanding (Scott, 1990:6–8). Authenticity here refers to whether ‘the evidence is genuine and of unquestionable origin’. Authenticity of the evidence for analysis is the fundamental criterion in any research as ‘questionable sources of evidence can mislead the researcher’ (ibid.). Credibility refers to the authenticity of the evidence and if it is free from distortion and error. Representativeness refers to whether the documents consulted are representative of the totality of the relevant documents. Meaning is explained in terms of literal and interpretive understanding of the text. According to Scott (1990:30), ‘the literal meaning of the words in a document gives only its “face value” meaning; they are the raw material from which its real significance must be reconstructed’. In an interpretive understanding, the researcher ‘relates the literal meaning to the contexts in which the documents are produced in order to assess the meaning of the text as a whole’.

Keeping in view the aforementioned criteria, ample attention was paid to make sure that the documents consulted during the course of this study were genuine, credible and representative and were analysed in the context in which they were produced. Since most of the documents and reports used in this research were downloaded from government websites, official archives or published by relevant government departments; a large number of documents were official documents and were prepared independently beforehand or were handed over to me by the government officials in a couple of cases. Hence, they could be characterised as representative documents. Therefore, they cannot be distorted to mislead the public, which establishes the authenticity and credibility of the sources.

As far as the questions around the literal and interpretive understanding of the texts was concerned, I employed an interpretive approach to relate the literal meaning to the contexts in which the documents were produced in order to assess the meaning of the text as a whole (ibid.). There are a number of approaches to interpretative und...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 A decentred approach to policy making
• 3 Multiculturalism to integration: conceptualising key terms and concepts
• 4 British policies towards its minorities (pre-2001): historical background and context
• 5 The role of British Muslim women activists in informing and implementing post-7/7 PVE policies of the British government
• 6 Luton: a community development approach to PVE
• 7 ‘Representation claims’ of Muslim women activists: authenticity or authorisation?
• 8 Conclusion
• Appendices
• Bibliography
• Index