The anchorman of Channel 4 News, Jon Snow, is the face of Britain’s embattled liberal establishment. Urbane and genial, Snow is an old-fashioned gentleman who operates on the assumption that differences can be settled by means of civilized dialogue. Last week, Snow presented a Channel 4 “Dispatches” documentary on young British Muslims. Wearing his trade mark white suit and looking a bit like a benevolent colonial governor, the veteran presenter ambled round Britain seeking the opinions of young Muslims about their relationship with Britain in the aftermath of last year’s London bombings and the anti-terror legislation that has since been introduced. The program proved all too topical. Three days later came the major security alert at British airports which was accompanied by the arrest of 24 British Muslims and which is bound to have reinforced the Western perceptions that terrorism and Islam are inextricably linked.
Snow’s conclusion was that the younger generation of British Muslims is apt to be much less liberal than their parents but also more religious and more politicized. The young men and women whom Snow met left him in no doubt that they were totally out of sympathy with British foreign policy and appalled by the lack of official concern in Britain about the mounting Muslim death toll in the Middle East. At the same time, many believe that 9/11 was a conspiracy got up by the US and Israel and that Princess Diana did not simply die in a road accident but was assassinated because the British ruling class was horrified at the prospect of the mother of royal heirs marrying a Muslim. This evidence of growing alienation was reinforced by a poll conducted for the program. It suggested half of Britain’s Muslims do not identify Britain as their country.
Anger at British foreign policy Snow was perhaps able to take in his stride. What plainly disconcerted him was the discovery of how far young Muslims were from sharing his own liberal convictions on social issues. A Muslim woman in her twenties impressed him as being just like other young British woman, enjoying the popular down-market television show Big Brother, but Snow bridled when she disclosed that her attitude toward homosexuality was one of extreme intolerance. From another encounter he came away looking shaken after being told by a young Muslim man that it was Britain that ought to bend to Islam, not the other way round. It is a measure of how polarized opinion has become that even a liberal diehard like Snow now believes that with respect to Muslims (in contrast to Sikhs and Hindus) integration has come to a standstill. Voicing what is becoming orthodoxy, he remarked that the conventional wisdom, that after two or three generations Britain’s Muslims would become integrated, seemed no longer tenable. His impression was that for the moment most Muslims are “onside” but his program did not rule out the possibility that the radicalization of a section of British Muslims could yet become endemic. One contributor to it, the sociologist Tariq Madood, emphasized that Britain had reached a crossroads in relation to its Muslim community. If, said Madood, the British political establishment cannot find common cause with moderate Muslims over issues where broad consensus exists, then moderates too will become radicalized. Snow’s final verdict was that there is an urgent need to restart the process of integration.
Yet what exactly does Snow mean when he speaks of Muslims being “onside”? More conservative than he perhaps cares to admit, he seemed to be positing the existence of a decent right-thinking British majority with whom Muslims are irreconcilably at odds. The truth is, though, that if British foreign policy is the defining issue, then a great many non-British Muslims, possibly the majority, are not “onside” either; certainly, opposition to the war in Iraq, and now to Blair’s endorsement of US support for Israel’s attack on Lebanon, encompasses whole swathes of British society. As for the notion that Muslims are out-of-step with the rest of Britain in relation to British freedoms, that too is a moot point, for in so far as those freedoms have become typified by anti-social behavior, by drunkenness, sexual license and contempt for authority, huge numbers of British people are probably no more in favor of them than are most Muslims. Indeed, Snow’s observation that British Muslims are “not at ease” with Britain has to be set against the fact that British society as a whole is hardly at ease with itself. If it is true that Muslims need to think carefully about their relationship with Britain, it is also true the British in general need to think anew about their modus vivendi. Not least do they need to resolve the issue of whether they accept Prime Minister Tony Blair’s disposition to regard Britain as nothing more than an appendage of the United States. As it happens, no group is raising that question more insistently than Muslims. In this sense they could be considered true British patriots.
What is really needed is an effort at mutual accommodation; but positions on both sides of the argument are in danger of becoming rigidly entrenched. Last week, Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Tarique Ghaffur, Britain’s most senior Muslim police officer, spoke out against the way the anti-terror legislation is being applied; at a time, he said, when the cooperation of law-abiding Muslims never mattered more, excessive stopping and searching of Muslims is in danger of becoming counterproductive, of simply engendering distrust and hostility. The response of “middle Britain”, as personified by Daily Mail columnist Richard Littlejohn, was blunt. Muslims, he argued, are no more subject to discrimination than anybody else under current security arrangements, adding that everybody is inconvenienced by the war that the co-religionists of moderate Muslims, the “Islamonazis”, have declared on “our civilization”. Littlejohn’s message to Muslims is that if they hate British democracy and British freedoms, they can always leave. As he points out, hundreds of thousands of Britons are in fact emigrating every year, and some may wonder why the ill-tempered Littlejohn, who views Britain as a politically correct hellhole, does not join them.
However, it is undeniable that Muslims are being subjected to disproportionate harassment by the police. A vicious circle has sprung into existence whereby the more Muslims are targeted by the police, the more angry and alienated they become and the more they are therefore targeted. What would happen if there were to be another terrorist strike in Britain, with large loss of life, for which Islamists, British or otherwise, were found responsible? The future of Muslims in Britain (as in other Western countries) can look ominous indeed. Yet what was happening on the cricket field in Leeds last week told a different story. England were beating Pakistan, thanks in no small part to the contributions of two new stars, the Sikh spin bowler Monty Panesar, and the fast bowler, Sajid Mahmood, who is of Muslim background. The Conservative politician, Norman Tebbitt, once raised the question whether Britain’s ethnic minorities passed the cricket test: Was their fundamental loyalty to England or to their ethnic roots? Here were ethnic minority Britons who are not merely supporting but representing England and being held up furthermore as national heroes. For a moment, it seemed as if Britain might not be such a divided and paranoid place after all.
