LONDON, 5 April 2004 — Here we go again. The arrest of nine British Muslims on suspicion that they were planning a terrorist attack has led to yet another media circus. Pundits, columnists and community spokesmen are running around in circles as they theorize, condemn and then proceed to pat each other on the back. Alas, at the end of all this, it is unlikely that anybody will be the wiser or that our society will be any safer.
Most of our mosques and our imams don’t have a clue about what is going on. So the call last week by the Muslim Council of Britain, for members of the community to report anything “mischievous”, is, in the eyes of most British Muslims, deeply offensive and parochial.
Is the holding of contrary political views a good reason for calling up the police? What about those who resent British government policy in Iraq or condone the use of suicide bombings in Palestine? Perhaps criticizing the self-appointed Muslim leadership in Britain and its closeness to the corridors of power will land someone on a watch list?
As much as many of us would like to help the anti-terrorist cause, there is a profound mistrust of authority. If we were to turn in “suspicious” people or the militant few, we would be turning them over to a police force that detains without charge, a justice system that can bypass due process and a media that is ruthless. Few will be willing to take that risk.
There has been a failure to face up to the fact that there is growing alienation of young Muslims from their Britishness and their lack of confidence in conventional Muslim leadership.
Believe it or not, mosques are irrelevant when it comes to this matter. They are at best peaceful and uneventful places of congregational worship and at worst testosterone-driven institutions led by megalomaniacs acting as tribal leaders. Fewer and fewer young people go to mosques for “Islamic guidance”: Instead they queue up outside bookshops well stocked with all kinds of weird books on Islam and surf the Internet where even stranger sites misguide them.
They also meet in kebab shops, at private gatherings and street corners where they feel safe and comfortable talking about the many issues that affect them, including their depressing economic situation, their poor educational performance and their dislike for mullas who always preach but rarely listen.
As Osama Saeed of the Muslim Association of Britain pointed out, the idea of mosques as centers of terrorism is an urban myth. “I have never seen any terrorists recruiting or organizing in mosques,” he says. “If someone told me to weed these people out, I wouldn’t know where to start. What is needed is a debate about the root cause of terrorism, which is our country’s foreign policy.” As part of a truly globalized community, many young British Muslims carry the burden of struggles elsewhere — Palestine, Iraq and Kashmir.
Asif Hanif, one of two young British Muslim suicide bombers in Tel Aviv last year, had no shortage of Islamic guidance. I know, because I knew him. He was intelligent and he kept the company of bright, young and peace-loving friends and had the best of spiritual teachers. Something still went wrong.
The absence of a genuine British-born leadership that is connected with the realities of being a young global Muslim is being filled rapidly with a variety of worrying quick-fix Islamisms — the black-and-white world of militant groups, the rise of an unforgiving “pure Islam” funded by foreign dollars, and foreign movements whose political ideology calls for a Utopian Islamic state. Whether we like it or not, extremist positions are comforting because, if nothing else, their vision of the future is clearly articulated. They describe the city on the hill and have a plan to get there.
The truth is that Muslim individuals and organizations working at the grassroots level have for years warned that disenfranchisement, along with militancy in the Muslim community, is growing and needs to be addressed constructively. Much of the Muslim leadership has not only denied the problem, it has maligned and ostracized those who have attempted to address it — accusing them of airing the community’s dirty laundry in public. On March 7, the MCB’s media spokesperson emphatically said on Radio Five Live that any suggestion that there is growing militancy in the Muslim community was nothing more than a myth created by an Islamophobic media. The reaction to the current situation says more about the roots of British Muslim leadership more than it says about its vision for British Islam, however well-intended. Muslim leaders are largely middle-aged men belonging to the economic elite. Many, young and old, have political roots in foreign Islamic movements from the Middle East and the subcontinent which are well past their “best before” dates.
If there are any who have an organic and relevant agenda for British Islam here and now, they should come forth and make themselves heard. We need a radical change in vision if we are to save the community from a downward spiral of economic disadvantage and social exclusion in an increasingly polarized and complicated global context.
For just a few weeks, let’s have a moratorium on all pronouncements, pack our bags and spend a few weeks living with typical British Muslim families — not the progressive, affluent ones which are paraded as success stories, but the poor, the ghettoized and those struggling to make ends meet. Internally, British Muslims need to have the “big” conversation.
Let’s have Muslim town-hall gatherings across the United Kingdom where the young and old can talk freely, challenge conventional wisdom, criticize their leadership and make their concerns known. We need to know why large segments of the community feel disconnected from the society they live in. What is preventing them from being Muslims of Britain, rather than Muslims in Britain?
— Fareena Alam is managing editor of the magazine Q-News.
