British Muslims: Within and between Islam and the West

Tariq Modood is the director of the University Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship at the University of Bristol, UK. An extended adaptation of this article appears in Critical Views of September 11: Analyses from around the World, ed. Eric Hershberg and Kevin W. Moore (New York: New Press, 2002).

In the aftermath of 11 September, the rhetoric associated with Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilisations” thesis is thick in the air. Despite official protestations to the contrary, many in the West think that the underlying problem is not terrorism or even Islamic fundamentalism but Islam as a rival and inferior civilisation.

 

This pointing the finger at Muslims clearly will not go away and its denials—though politically important—are disbelieved by many Muslims around the world. Their disbelief arises partly because all the countries, organisations and individuals being targeted by the US-led “war against terrorism” are Muslim (for example, no one mentions the Tamil Tiger separatists in Sri Lanka, even though they pioneered the use of “suicide bombers”). But Muslim disbelief in Western disclaimers of hostility towards Islam is also partly due to the fact that Islam is so clearly invoked by many terrorist and jihadi organisations (Osama bin Laden is perhaps the greatest proponent of the clash of civilisations thesis). Hence, the thesis poses a real danger of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy at a time when we are all trying to make sense of what is happening in the world, who is to blame and how justice and peace can be furthered.

 

The idea of Islam as something separate from a Judaeo-Christian West is, however, as false as it is influential. Islam, with its faith in the revelations of Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Mohammad, belongs to the same tradition as Christianity and Judaism. It is, in its monotheism, legalism and communitarianism, not to mention specific rules of life, such as dietary prohibitions, particularly close to Judaism. During the Crusades and in other eras, Jews were slaughtered by Christians and their secular descendants and protected by Muslims. The Jews remember Muslim Spain as a golden age. Islam, indeed, was then a civilisation and a genuine geopolitical rival to the West. Yet even in that period Islam and Christendom were not discrete, neither were they mere competitors. They borrowed and learned from each other, be it in relation to scholarship, philosophy and scientific enquiry, or medicine, architecture and technology. Indeed, the classical learning of ancient Athens and Rome, which had been lost to Christendom, was preserved by the Arabs and transmitted to western Europe by Muslims (as was the institution of the university). In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that the critical rationalism and humanism, produced through engagement with ancient Greek texts, which lie at the heart of the Renaissance, Reformation and modern science, were born in Arab universities, even though they came to bear fruit in western Europe. That Europe defined its civilisation as a renaissance of Greece and Rome, excising the Arab contribution to its foundations and wellbeing, is an example of racist myth-making that has much relevance today. It is a great tragedy that Muslims turned their backs on this intellectual current and that Europeans appropriated it without acknowledgement. One step towards intercivilisational dialogue and less exclusive definitions of Europe and of Islam would be to excavate this history.

The Impact of the West

If in the Middle Ages the civilisational current was mainly one-way—from Muslims to Christians—in later periods the debt has been repaid. Yet this later epoch of West–Islam relations has been marked not by the geopolitics of civilisational blocs but by a triumphant West. In terms of power, Muslim civilisation collapsed under Western dominance and colonialism and it is a moot point whether it has since revived or suitably adjusted itself to Western modernity. In any case, the idea of a clash of civilisations obscures the real power relations that exist between the West and Muslim societies. Whatever is happening in the latter today occurs in a context of domination and powerlessness—a context in which Muslim populations suffer depredations, occupation, ethnic cleansing and massacres, with little action by “the international community”. Indeed, the latter, especially American power and military hardware, is often the source of the destruction and terror. As with Iraq following its invasion of Kuwait in 1990, it is no small irony that the United States and its allies have waged war against a Taliban in Afghanistan that was supplied with weapons—and indeed a jihadi ideology—by the United States itself only a decade earlier.

 

Meanwhile, the creation of Israel, as atonement for the Holocaust and more generally for Europe’s historical persecution of the Jews, along with ongoing Israeli military expansion, have resulted in a continuing and deepening injustice against Palestinians and others. The Palestine conflict has many of the motifs of late twentieth- and early twenty-first century barbarities: ethnic cleansing, state terrorism against civilian populations, and guerrilla action against civilians, increasingly in the form of suicide bombings. All this, and yet no intervention by any international alliance for justice because of the power of the pro-Israel lobby in the United States. This cannot be challenged for domestic electoral reasons, regardless of the harm it does to American interests and a balanced policy in the Middle East. Now that the terror has come home, it must be time to review this disastrous policy and seek justice.

 

For the murder and terrorising of civilians as policy does not begin with the acts of 11 September. It occurs regularly in a number of places in the world and is sometimes carried out, or at least supported, by Western states. The perception of the victim populations is often that they matter less than when Westerners are the victims. This deep sense that the West exercises double standards, a source of grievance, hate and terrorism, is perhaps the most important lesson of 11 September, not the division of the world into rival civilisations, civilised and uncivilised, good and evil. This perception has to be addressed seriously if there is to be dialogue across countries, faiths and cultures, and foreign and security policies need to reviewed in the light of the understanding that is achieved. Our security in the West, no less than that of any other part of the world, depends upon, to adapt a phrase, being tough on terrorism and tough on the causes of terrorism.

 

The issues are not just to do with foreign policies. Over the weekend of 15–16 September 2001, a Muslim storekeeper in Dallas and a Sikh storekeeper (no doubt presumed to be a Muslim on account of his brown skin, turban and beard) in Arizona City were killed in drive-by shootings. Since then, attacks, harassment and vandalism against Muslims and their property have been reported in all parts of the United States and throughout Europe. The clash of civilisations thesis furthers racist stereotyping and all attendant evils within what aspire to be multicultural societies. Consequently, the presence of Muslims in the West, in the current atmosphere, may come to be seen, even by themselves, as alien, whereas it can actually be an asset.

 

A crucial component of this reckoning must be to review the history and contemporary presence of large Muslim populations in the West, and to reject the idea that they are following a disruptive agenda of their own. One way of coming to see that Muslims in the West are not culturally and politically alien to the West is to study their political assertiveness and identify the values that are being appealed to. A good case for this exercise is Britain, which has a significant number of recently settled Muslims and where Muslims are politically active.

The Struggle for Equality in Britain

The way the Muslim presence is currently being viewed and views itself can be nicely illustrated by looking at the media and political discourses in Britain in the wake of 11 September. Yet before such a survey, it should be noted that to date the politics of Muslim activism parallels other anti-discrimination struggles in Britain and is a form of “catching-up” with these domestic struggles rather than a derivation from international Islamism. South Asians form the majority of Muslims in Britain and are the most socio-economically deprived group as defined by race, ethnicity or religion. Initially, they came to Britain from predominantly rural origins with limited educational and work histories. They disproportionately constituted the manual workforce of the textile mills of the northern English towns, which suffered mass closures in the late 1970s and early 1980s, leaving many South Asians unemployed. Some never found full-time regular paid employment again. Moreover, these communities have large families and most married women are not in paid employment outside the home.

 

The combination of these several factors means that South Asian Muslims are easily the most deprived of all non-white groups in Britain, with most households living in poverty.¹ One result has been their participation in campaigns against racial discrimination and related political activism. Over time they have come to challenge the secular assumptions of these politics, especially the common view, originally imported from the United States, that discrimination is about “colour” and not about religion. It is now widely accepted in Britain that besides colour-racism there are also cultural racisms and that one of the most prominent of these is anti-Muslim racism or “Islamophobia”.² Muslims and others have focussed on this and have extended terms like “discrimination”, “equality”, “inclusion”, “multiculturalism” and “recognition” to cover specific policy demands. These demands have three dimensions, which get progressively “thicker”:

1. No Religious Discrimination

The most basic demand is that religious believers, no less than people defined by race or gender, should not suffer discrimination in job and other opportunities. So, for example, those trying to dress in accordance with their religion or who project a religious identity, such as Muslim women wearing a headscarf (hijab), should not be discriminated against in any area of social life. The British legal system leaves Muslims particularly vulnerable because, while discrimination against yarmulke-wearing Jews and turban-wearing Sikhs is deemed to be unlawful racial discrimination, Muslims, unlike these other faith communities, are not deemed to be a racial or ethnic group. Nor are they protected by the legislation against religious discrimination that does exist in the United Kingdom, for that, being explicitly designed to protect Catholics, only covers Northern Ireland.

 

After some years of arguing that there was no evidence of religious discrimination, the British government was forced to change tack by Article 13 of the European Union’s Amsterdam Treaty (1999), which includes religious discrimination in the list of the forms of discrimination that all member states are expected to eliminate. The British government has recently announced its intention to implement a European Commission directive to outlaw religious discrimination in employment in 2003. A Muslim organisation concerned with these issues is the Forum against Islamophobia and Racism, set up in 2000 “for the purpose of raising awareness of and combating Islamophobia and racism, monitoring specific incidents of Islamophobia and racism, working towards eliminating religious and racial discrimination, [and] campaigning and lobbying on issues relevant to Muslim and other multi-ethnic communities in Britain”.

2. Parity with Native Religions

Many minority-faith advocates interpret equality to mean that minority religions should get at least some of the support from the state that older established religions receive. British Muslims have led the way on this argument too, and have made two particular issues politically contentious, namely, the state funding of “faith schools” and the law on blasphemy.

 

On the first issue, the government, after a political battle, recently agreed to fund four Muslim schools on the same basis enjoyed by thousands of Anglican and Catholic schools and some Methodist and Jewish schools. (In England and Wales, over a third of state-maintained primary schools and a sixth of secondary schools are run by a religious group, but all have to deliver a centrally determined national curriculum.)

 

On the question of blasphemy, Muslims failed to persuade the courts to interpret the existing statute to cover offences beyond what Christians hold sacred, but some political support exists to make incitement to religious hatred an offence, mirroring the existing laws against incitement to racial hatred. The government, indeed, inserted such a clause in its post–11 September security legislation in order to conciliate Muslims who, with others, were strongly opposed to the new powers of surveillance, arrest and detention that were being proposed. As it happened, most of these new powers became law, but the proposal to criminalise incitement to religious hatred was defeated in Parliament.

3. Positive Inclusion of Religious Groups

The demand here is that religion in general, or at least “Muslim” in particular, should be a category by which the inclusiveness of social institutions is judged, just as anti-racists use “black” and feminists use “female” to judge such inclusiveness. Thus, employers should have to use explicit monitoring backed up by appropriate policies, targets, managerial responsibilities, work environments, staff training, advertisements, outreach, etc., to demonstrate that they don’t discriminate against Muslims. Similarly, local authorities should employ appropriately sensitive policies and staff, especially in relation to (non-Muslim) schools, and social and health services. They should also fund Muslim community centres or Muslim youth workers in addition to the Asian and Caribbean community centres and the Asian and black youth workers they already fund.

Muslim Activism

These policy demands may seem odd within the terms of the French or US “wall of separation” between state and religion. They may also make British secularists uncomfortable, but it is clear that they virtually mirror existing anti-discrimination policies in the United Kingdom. In an analysis of some Muslim policy statements in the early 1990s, following the activism stimulated by the Rushdie affair, I maintained that the main lines of argument were captured by the following three positions:

 

1. a “colour-blind” approach to human rights and human dignity;

 

2. an approach based on extension of the concepts of racial discrimination and racial equality to include anti-Muslim racism;

 

3. a Muslim-power approach.

 

I concluded that these “reflect not so much obscurantist Islamic interventions into a modern secular discourse, but typical minority options in contemporary Anglo-American equality politics, and employ the rhetorical, conceptual and institutional resources available in that politics”.³

 

All three approaches are present today, though some high-profile radicals have made a Muslim-power approach more prominent, not dissimilar to the rise of black power activism after the height of the civil rights period in the United States. This approach is mainly nourished by despair at the victimisation and humiliation of Muslims in places such as Palestine, Iraq, Bosnia, Chechnya, Kashmir, Kosovo and Afghanistan. For many British Muslims, the military disasters and humanitarian horrors endured by their fellow Muslims in these conflicts evoke a strong desire to express solidarity with them through the political idea of the umma, the worldwide community of Muslims, which must defend and restore itself as a global player. To take the analogy with US Black Power a bit further, one may say that just as this later found ideological expression in black nationalism and Afrocentrism, so political Islamism may be seen as an ideological expression of the search for Muslim dignity and power.

 

But Muslim assertiveness, although triggered and intensified by what are seen as attacks on Muslims, is not primarily derived from Islamism but from contemporary Western ideas about equality and multiculturalism. Politically active Muslims in Britain are likely to be part of domestic currents of multiculturalism and equality. They emphasise themes such as direct, indirect and institutional discrimination in relation to educational and economic opportunities, political representation, the media, and the provision of healthcare and social services. They advocate remedies which mirror existing legislation and policies on sexual and racial equality.⁴

British Muslims and 11 September

In opposition to the US-led attack against those Washington held responsible for the atrocities of 11 September, a not negligible minority of Muslims in Britain voiced support for the Taliban, even for bin Laden. There were many media reports that some young men had gone to Afghanistan to fight for the Taliban and had been killed in the US attacks. A British Muslim in Pakistan claimed to have helped recruit more than two hundred British volunteers to fight for the Taliban and a number of the captives from Afghanistan brought to the US prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, were Britons.

 

Several commentators have noted that the young Britons who seem to have got involved in these international networks were not necessarily from the large Muslim underclass but were just as likely, or even more likely, to be students or graduates and professionals.⁵ This is not in itself surprising and is not inconsistent with my claim that racism and anti-racism, broadly conceived, are a primary source of Muslim assertiveness in Britain. It is a feature of many contemporary equality movements—such as feminism—that they are led by intellectuals and public sector and media professionals, and that they focus on glass-ceiling issues rather than on severe deprivation. There is also a focus on unconscious racism and sexism, the counterparts of which are likely to be acutely felt by educated Muslims and can be a direct or indirect source of oppositional activism. This is particularly relevant because Muslims get self-pride and oppositional energy from their personal faith and collective solidarity. For example, Pnina Werbner has carefully brought out how certain kinds of Islamic millenarianism, originating from the Sufism of rural Pakistan, give succour and redemptive hope in the light of contemporary domestic and international humiliations and powerlessness.⁶ Yet she also shows that this discourse, popular among migrants, does not offer a political agenda.

 

Such an agenda can, of course, be found in a militant Islamism—journalistically known as Islamic fundamentalism—which was absent among Asian Muslim migrants but is increasingly attractive to some of the second generation, especially the better educated. Islamism, then, offers an alternative source of political mobilisation to egalitarian multiculturalism, or perhaps a complementary one, with Islamism focussing on the international and multiculturalism on the national. It is too early to say what effect the emergence of Islamism will have on the discourse of multiculturalism among British Muslims and among Britons generally.

 

11 September and its aftermath are not the first time that British Muslims have found themselves a vulnerable and besieged group, entangled in international Islamic causes and geopolitics. That “first” was the Rushdie affair, when British Muslims launched a campaign in the late 1980s against Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses, which they took to be sacrilegious against the Prophet Mohammad and Islam, and then found themselves having to deal with a fatwa from Iran’s leader Ayatollah Khomeini that said all Muslims had a duty to kill the author and the publishers. As then, so in 2001, British Muslims asserted themselves publicly, at times defiantly. As noted above, some expressed vociferous support for the Taliban and/or al-Qaeda (just as some had done for Khomeini’s fatwa in the earlier case). Most British Muslims, while condemning the terrorist attacks on America, opposed the bombing campaign in Afghanistan, as did many non-Muslims, and some Muslims and the Left organised joint anti-war protests. (In this respect, Muslims—except for those bound by Labour Party constraints—and other British citizens were more volubly opposed to their government’s military actions than their counterparts in the United States). There was a broad consensus in the op-ed pages of the national papers that the price for bombing Afghanistan was a just solution for the Palestinians, a position that Muslims of all stripes heartily endorsed, and which meant that they were on some occasions part of the political mainstream. As during the Rushdie affair, the media gave massive and disproportionate coverage to Muslim extremists, regardless of the limited support they enjoyed among Muslims.

The ‘Hijacked’ Religion

There was, however, at least one new aspect to the media debates. While in the late 1980s there were virtually no self-identified Muslims with a platform in the national media (as opposed to persons of Muslim background), by 2001, partly because Muslims had achieved notoriety as a political “problem”, there were a couple of broadsheet columnists who did explicitly affirm their Islamic identity. They, together with other occasional Muslim contributors, voiced collective self-criticism, which was absent in the Rushdie affair. While maintaining a strongly anti-US foreign policy stance, they expressed shock at the extent to which anger and latent violence had become part of British Muslim, especially youth, culture, arguing that West-hating militant ideologues had “hijacked” Islam and that the moderates had to denounce them. (The “hijacking” theme was in fact most notably introduced by a charismatic, white US Muslim, Hamza Yusuf, who was consulted by President George W. Bush and taken up by Q News, the magazine of young British Muslim professionals in its November 2001 issue.) The following quotation from the head of the Islamic Educational Trust, Yusuf Islam (the pop singer Cat Stevens before his conversion to Islam), who had been wrong-footed by the media in relation to Khomeini’s fatwa in 1989, nicely captures this shift in the position of the moderates:

 

I was still [during the Rushdie affair] learning, ill-prepared and lacking in knowledge and confidence to speak out against forms of extremism ... Today, I am aghast at the horror of recent events and feel it a duty to speak out. Not only did terrorists hijack planes and destroy life, they also hijacked the beautiful religion of Islam.⁷

 

Such Muslim intellectuals issued “fatwas” against the fanatics, describing the Muslim revolutionaries as “fascists” and “xenophobes” with whom they did not want to be united in the term “British Muslims”.⁸

 

While in the Satanic Verses affair moderate Muslims argued against what they took to be anti-Muslim bias—a failure even by liberals to extend the ideas of equality and respect for others to include Muslims—moderates to this line of defence now added a discourse about the urgency of reinterpreting Islam. This is variously taken to entail a re-excavation of the Qur’an as a charter of human rights which, for example, abolished slavery and gave property rights to women more than a millennium before either of these was achieved in the West; a restoration of the thirst for knowledge and rational enquiry which characterised medieval Muslim societies; a re-centring of Islam on piety and spirituality, not political ideology; and a “reformation” that would make Islam compatible with individual conscience, science and secularism. Ziauddin Sardar, one of the most prominent of the moderate Muslim intellectuals, identified the failure of the Islamist movements of the 1960s and 1970s as being among the causes of the contemporary distortions of political Islam. Such movements, he argued, had started off with an ethical and intellectual idealism but had become intellectually closed, fanatical and violent. As today’s middle-aged moderates had encouraged the earlier Islamic renewal, they must take some responsibility for what had come to pass and must do something about it.⁹

Loyal Subjects?

From the non-Muslim side there has been widespread questioning, once again echoing the Rushdie affair, about whether Muslims can be and are willing to be integrated into British society and its political values. This questioning took various forms. Anxiety was expressed about terrorist cells and networks recruiting alienated young Muslims for mischief abroad and as a “fifth column” at home. Doubts were voiced whether Muslims were willing to give loyalty to the British state rather than to transnational Muslim leaders and causes. The commitment of Muslims to what were taken to be the core British values of freedom, tolerance, democracy, sexual equality and secularism was queried.

 

Many politicians, commentators, letter-writers and phone-callers to the media, from across the political spectrum, not to mention the home secretary, blamed the very fact that these questions had to be asked on the cultural separatism and self-imposed segregation of Muslim migrants and on a “politically correct” multiculturalism that had fostered fragmentation rather than integration and Britishness. The New Labour government was at the forefront of this trend, as were many others prominent on the centre–left who had long-standing anti-racist credentials. For example, the Commission for Racial Equality published an article by the left-wing pseudonymous author Kenan Malik, arguing that “multiculturalism has helped to segregate communities far more effectively than racism”.¹⁰ Hugo Young, the leading liberal columnist of the centre–left Guardian newspaper, went further, writing that multiculturalism “can now be seen as a useful bible for any Muslim who insists that his religio-cultural priorities, including the defence of jihad against America, overrides his civic duties of loyalty, tolerance, justice and respect for democracy”.¹¹ More extreme again, Farrukh Dhondy, an Asian who had pioneered multicultural broadcasting on British television, wrote, in what might be described as a local version of the clash of civilisations thesis, of a “multicultural fifth column” which must be rooted out. He urged that state funding of multiculturalism be redirected into a defence of the values of freedom and democracy.¹²

 

One specific issue that has come to be a central element of this debate is that of faith schools. These state-funded schools are run by religious organisations rather than local authorities. While they must teach a national curriculum and are inspected by the central government, they can give some space to religious instruction, though not all do so. They are popular with parents for their ethos, discipline and academic achievement, and so can select their pupils, often giving priority to children whose parents can demonstrate a degree of religious observance. Violent disturbances in some northern English cities in the summer of 2001, in which Asian Muslim men were among the central protagonists, were officially blamed on the fact of segregated communities and segregated schools. Some of the latter were church-run schools and were more than 90 per cent Christian and white. Others were among the most under-resourced and under-achieving in the country, their pupil intake more than 90 per cent Muslim. They came to be called “Muslim schools”, even in official reports.

 

In fact, they were nothing of the sort. They were local, bottom-of-the-pile comprehensive schools which had suffered from decades of under-investment and “white-flight”, but were run by white teachers according to a secular national curriculum. “Muslim schools” then came to be seen as the source of the problem of divided cities, cultural backwardness, riots and lack of Britishness, and as a breeding ground for militant Islam. Genuinely Muslim-run schools were lumped into this category of “Muslim schools” even though all the evidence suggested that their pupils (mainly juniors and girls) did not engage in riots and terrorism and, despite limited resources, achieved better exam results than local authority “secular” schools. On the basis of these “Muslim school” and “faith school” constructions, prominent columnists launched tirades in the broadsheets against allowing state-funding to any more Muslim-run schools, or even to church-run schools. Demands were once again voiced to make the British state entirely secular. It was argued that a precondition of tackling racial segregation was that religion “should be kept at home, in the private sphere”.¹³

Muslims in the West

In this highly charged debate, which is now as much among advocates of tolerance and equality as between them and opponents of these values, it is important to continue to interpret inclusion, recognition and respect in a way that is not biased against religious people. For religious discrimination is no less contrary to the principles of democratic multiculturalism than are other forms of discrimination; and, similarly, racial, ethnic and sexual identities ought not to be favoured over religious identities. Specifically, Muslims, now seen as an alien presence, can be a positive asset to countries such as Britain. What we need today is greater understanding of the dispossessed and the powerless, especially when they seem culturally alien and mobilise around their group identities. In promoting this understanding, diasporas in the West can be a crucial source of dialogue and bridge-building. Muslims in the West can be part of transcultural dialogues, domestic and global, that might make our societies live up to their promise of diversity and democracy. Such communities can thus facilitate communication and understanding in these fraught and potentially destabilising times.

 

Dialogue of this sort—at personal, local, national, transnational and international levels—seems a tall order but there are grounds for hope. One is that while the sense of besiegement and insecurity felt by contemporary Islam and Muslim societies is certainly not conducive to dialogue, this can change. The so-called closed-mindedness of Islam has had much to do with colonialism and Western dominance. When Muslims do not feel threatened and powerless, they have been outward-looking and expansive, generous and universal; it is powerlessness that has made them closed-minded and repressive (especially in relation to women), suspicious of new ideas and influences. Hence, dialogue is possible but it must be under conditions of mutual respect, in a world order which addresses inequalities of wealth and power and allows Muslims the political freedom to develop their own societies rather than imitate the West or suffer dictatorships that further Western (oil-related) interests.

 

As a student in the early 1970s, I underwent my intellectual and political formation at a time when many intellectuals and students were attracted to and energised by an ideology committed to the overthrow of capitalism. For the most part this was confined to hero-worship of far-away “freedom fighters” (those ubiquitous posters of Che Guevara, for example), dangerous utopianism and violent slogans—attitudes common among many Muslim students and intellectuals today. But there were also physical confrontations in the street, seizures of buildings (leading to a temporary breakdown of government in Paris in 1968) and domestic terrorism in Europe by Germany’s Bader–Meinhof gang and the Italian Red Brigades. Some of my generation still look back fondly at that era, but I think most of us are relieved that the militant Marxism passed away. This gives me some hope that the same can happen with militant Islamism—though of course armed resistance will often be justifiable, especially against foreign occupation or a brutal regime. For all ideologies, secular and religious, are capable of “fundamentalism”, and the resort to violence is often due to specific political and social conditions rather than a belief system per se.

 

Bridge-building, however, does not simply mean asking moderate Muslims to join and support the new project against terrorism. Muslims must also ask where Western governments are when moderate Muslims call for international protection and justice in Palestine, Bosnia, Chechnya and Kashmir, or for the easing of sanctions against Iraq after it became apparent that it was the weak and the poor who were bearing the brunt of the embargo. Western policy in relation to the Muslim world and many other parts of the globe has been far from moderate. Now that the United States has suffered a terrible tragedy, Washington is asking moderate Muslims to get on side. The fundamental question, however, is whether the West has recognised the need to review and change radically its attitude to Muslims. As for domestic politics, the involvement of a small number of British Muslims in international terrorism should not lead us to overlook the need for policies that further the democratic inclusion of Muslims in Britain, any more than the existence of the Irish Republican Army was a reason to neglect the democratic inclusion of Catholics in Northern Ireland. In each case, the opposite is true.

 

Endnotes

1. See Tariq Modood et al., Ethnic Minorities in Britain: Diversity and Disadvantage (London: Policy Studies Institute, 1997).

 

2. See Tariq Modood, “‘Difference’, Cultural Racism and Anti-Racism”, in Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multi-Cultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-Racism, ed. Pnina Werbner and Tariq Modood (London: Zed Books, 1997); see also the report by the Runnymede Trust Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia, Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All (London: Runnymede Trust, 1997).

 

3. Tariq Modood, “Muslim Views on Religious Identity and Racial Equality”, New Community 19, no. 3 (April 1993), p. 518.

 

4. Tariq Modood, “The Place of Muslims in British Secular Multiculturalism”, in Muslim Europe or Euro-Islam: Politics, Culture, and Citizenship in the Age of Globalization, ed. Nezar Alsayyad and Manuel Castells (New York: Lexington Books, 2002).

 

5. See Alison Shaw, “Why Might Young British Muslims Support the Taliban?”, Anthropology Today 18, no. 1 (February 2002).

 

6. Pnina Werbner, “Divided Loyalties”, Times Higher Educational Supplement (London), 14 December 2001.

 

7. Cat Stevens (Yusuf Islam), “They Have Hijacked My Religion”, Independent (London), 26 October 2001.

 

8. See Ziauddin Sardar, “My Fatwa on the Fanatics”, Observer (London), 23 September 2001; Sardar, “We Have Failed to Teach True Message”, Evening Standard (London), 5 November 2001; and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, “We British Muslims Must Reclaim Our Faith from the Fanatics”, Independent, 5 November 2001.

 

9. Ziauddin Sardar, “Islam Has Become Its Own Enemy”, Observer, 21 October 2001.

 

10. Kenan Malik, “The Real Value of Diversity”, Connections, winter 2001–2 (London: Commission of Racial Equality).

 

11. Hugo Young, “A Corrosive National Danger in Our Multicultural Model”, Guardian (London), 6 November 2001.

 

12. Farrukh Dhondy, “Our Islamic Fifth Column”, City Journal 11, no. 4 (autumn 2001).

 

13. Polly Toynbee, “Religion Must Be Removed from All Functions of State”, Guardian, 12 December 2001.