Every year, thousands of British Muslims go on Haj to re-affirm their faith. This year, for the first time, a British TV crew was granted a visa by the Saudi authorities to record the progress of some of these pilgrims. Among those filmed by Channel 4 News undergoing the agony and ecstasy of Haj was 27-year-old British career woman Kosser Sheikh. A well-educated financier, she is struggling, like many British Muslims, to reconcile barely compatible aspects of her existence: How to adhere to Islam in a largely secular culture; how to be true to her plain-living faith while wearing expensive fashions and working as an executive in a London-based US investment bank.
In common with the Saudi authorities, Channel 4 News is committed to demonstrating that the majority of Muslims are devout and peace-loving. The urgency of the message scarcely needs to be spelled out. This is a time when Islam and its followers are facing growing misunderstanding and intolerance. The recent apprehension of North African asylum-seekers in London and Manchester on suspicion of terrorist activities has exacerbated anti-Muslim public feeling in Britain. And the current British high security alert — prompted by a perceived threat of a major terrorist attack — is likely to exacerbate it still further.
Public hostility to British Muslims was mounting even before the present state of emergency — thanks not least to the antics of the imam Abu Hamza. Much given to voicing inflammatory anti-Western sentiments, this strident fundamentalist has been a gift to Britain’s xenophobic popular newspapers: he is the “mad mullah” of their lurid dreams. When last month police shut down his favorite mosque in London’s Finsbury Park, many wondered why the authorities had been so slow to take action against the place where Hamza had been propagating extremism.
Seldom out of the public eye, Abu Hamza has come to personify the Muslim community in the eyes of ill-informed Britons. In PR terms, the consequences could not have been more damaging.
In order to counter negative public perceptions of Muslims, the magazine Q-news organized a meeting on Feb. 8, which was addressed by prominent community leaders and clerics. Entitled “Immigration, Asylum and Refuge: the Lessons of Madinah,” the discussion ranged over the issues thrown up by the history of the Muslim settlement in Britain.
Chairing the meeting, Dr. Zaki Badawi was at pains to emphasize that “asylum” (like “immigration” a word charged with racist connotations) is a subject with implications for all British Muslims. He went on to point out what an asset Muslims and other immigrants have been to Britain: an authoritative audit carried out by the Economist magazine in the late 1990s revealed that the country had actually made a net profit out of immigration. The question why so many people have been motivated to migrate to Britain in the first place is rarely asked. The answer, Dr. Badawi said, was because of the grossly inequitable terms of trade between the affluent West and societies the West has contrived to keep in a state of underdevelopment. Immigration would only stop when the world’s poor enjoyed adequately rewarded employment in their own countries.
The combative Tower Hamlets councilor and race relations adviser Kumar Murshid feared that this was a “critical time” for Muslims both locally and globally. Hopes that the fortunes of Muslims in Britain would improve under a Labour government had been comprehensively betrayed. Muslims were being demonized by leading politicians and media figures (among them people who were themselves of immigrant background). Yet British Muslims were now something like two-million strong without wielding anything like the influence of Britain’s far smaller Jewish community. It was, declared Murshid, high time that they began punching in accordance with their numerical weight and engaging the British government in a “robust” public debate about their rights.
As befitted their status as scholars and thinkers, Sheikh Adbdal-Hakim Murad and Sheikh Hasan le-Gai Eaton ruminated on the destiny of Islam at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The author of many articles about Islam in contemporary society, Murad observed that Muslims were at the center of the ongoing European debate about identity, raising the question what is now meant by “Britishness” or “Europeanness”, and he did not doubt that in the fullness of time a characteristically British version of Islam would emerge — just as distinctive versions of Islam had taken shape in places like Africa and Malaya.
Perhaps the most conservative contributor to the discussion, and certainly the most venerable, the former British diplomat Sheikh Hasan le-Gai Eaton argued that the British Islamic community would do well to discourage further immigration by unwesternized Muslims until it had consolidated its own specifically British identity. Meanwhile, he counseled Muslims already settled in Britain would be wise to refrain from quarrelling among themselves. If they did not hang together, Eaton warned, they would hang apart.
The charismatic American lecturer Sheikh Hamza Yusuf (who like the two previous speakers is a white convert to Islam) spoke about how the eclecticism of Western popular culture was in many ways anticipated by Islam, with its readiness to embrace diversity.
What was vital in the present circumstances, he insisted, was that the well-meaning of all persuasions forged an “alliance of virtue”. And while acknowledging that things were “looking ominous out there,” he made much of the sustaining power of belief, reminding his listeners how Christianity, embattled as it had been under the once mighty Romans, nevertheless long survived the collapse of the Roman Empire: religious faith is if anything strengthened by persecution. Was the notion of asylum, Yusuf finally asked, not fundamental to all the great religions? What, after all, were Moses, Jesus and the Buddha if not asylum-seekers?
The speakers assembled by Q-News furnished much food for thought. It was a pity that the several hundred mostly young people who comprised their audience included so few non-Muslims. The real challenge confronting articulate Muslims now is to dispel among the British public at large the suspicion and animosity with which Islam is increasingly viewed.
— Neil Berry, a London-based freelance journalist since 1980, is the author of “Articles of Faith: The Story of British Intellectual Journalism”.
