The other day, the BBC’s current affairs flagship, Panorama, reported on the British security services’ new counterterrorism strategy. No longer will they seek dialogue with Muslim extremists. The new policy is to challenge and isolate all extremists, every Muslim who preaches against tolerance and British democratic values. The program was presented by Richard Watson, who has been reporting on Muslim extremism for eight years. The credibility of his warning about the enduring danger to Britain of Muslim terrorism is not in question. Yet there is little doubt, either, that Watson has done much to entrench the prevailing sense that Britain’s Muslims are, pre-eminently, a “security problem.” His journalism may even be contributing to the problem it purports to be combating — as may the new official approach to terrorism, which threatens to criminalize mere dissent, in the process exacerbating Muslim disaffection. The arrest last week of nine British men traveling to join British MP George Galloway’s Gaza aid convoy, who were quickly released, was perhaps a foretaste of its counterproductive potential.
Rageh Omaar has written that since the July 7, 2005, bombings in London, he has struggled to recognize himself and his fellow Muslims in the way they are portrayed in the British media. It is just such a reaction that Watson’s somewhat zoological reporting of Muslims is likely to have provoked in many viewers. Conspicuously missing from it is the sense that great numbers of Muslims are upright British citizens who interact comfortably with their compatriots. Even allowing that it is no part of Watson’s brief to address the wider issue of how Muslims are represented, it is striking how seldom Muslims who are not confrontational zealots figure in his work.
Iqbal Wahab is an eminently integrated British Muslim who agonizes about Muslim extremism, while also sharing Omaar’s dismay at the media’s penchant for crude stereotypes. Formerly a journalist, this shrewd British restaurateur supports the latter-day British consensus that “multiculturalism” was a mistake which has aggravated segregationist tendencies among Muslims. However, he believes that no progress will ever be made toward eradicating such tendencies if the inequalities that dog Muslims are not tackled systematically. Indeed, he is convinced that the story of British Muslims can largely be told in terms of the ill-consequences of social exclusion.
Wahab traces Britain’s failure to ward off Muslim extremism back to the Salman Rushdie affair, arguing that behind the outrage generated by “The Satanic Verses” 20 years ago lay chronic Muslim grievances about racial attacks, lack of Muslim schools, lack of Muslim MPs and lack of jobs and decent housing. “With no progress on these fronts, radicalization was inevitable,” he insists. “Unless and until economic and social inequalities between Muslims and the rest of society are ironed out, there will always be a tendency toward extremist behavior and activity. If Islamists are having a field day recruiting Muslims in schools, colleges and prisons, it is because they can plausibly make the case that British society does not treat them equally.
“The fact is that a British Muslim is three times more likely to be unemployed, that one-half of Muslim children live in poverty and that nearly one-tenth of the prison population is Muslim. By not being treated equally on the home front, foreign policy issues take on a deeper significance because the activists can say: If you don’t believe me then why does this government not do anything to stop Israel bombing Muslims in Gaza or Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
Richard Watson’s Panorama program was called “Muslim First, British Second.” Wahab, who identifies himself above all as a Londoner, advocates a concerted national effort to break down the Muslim/non-Muslim divide in Britain. His own public-spiritedness is reflected in his commitment to Mosaic, the organization launched in 2007 by the Prince of Wales, with the objective of exploring how young British Muslims can take advantage of the possibilities British society has to offer. Much of what Wahab has to say is common sense of a sort often woefully absent from public discussion about Muslims in Britain: “If there was more scope for buy-in on citizenship issues revolving round fair treatment in schools, jobs and housing then foreign policy issues would not affect us so much.”
That Muslim extremism might be connected with anything so elementary as British society’s inherent unfairness few seem disposed to consider. This pervasive state of denial is of a piece with the disinclination of even the more enlightened sections of the media to portray Muslims in other than menacing terms. It is bound up, too, with the exiguous exposure afforded to the “silent majority,” to measured Muslim voices like Wahab’s. It may be the case that moderate Muslims have been culpably slow to assert themselves; but it is also true that the media have hardly helped to further their cause, preferring to pander to popular paranoia about Muslims as the “enemy within.”
Wahab agrees it is vital to encourage Muslims to “out” extremists. But his key point is that targeting extremism in isolation will achieve nothing: “We have to look at the causes of where we are today, otherwise we will be in even more trouble for not having done so. We have to be able to show that Britain is committed to fairness for people of all faiths and none and to engage with Muslims from all spheres of life, not just professional Muslims who claim community leadership.”
What seems plain is that the skewed media portrayal of Muslims is compounding the alienation and resentment on which extremism feeds. Iqbal Wahab speaks for many in wishing that far more attention were accorded to the positive contribution that Muslims are making in every area of British society: In politics, sport, the media and the arts, and every species of commerce. The truth is that if extremism among British Muslims needs to be checked, so does a different kind of extremism: The kind that would much rather demonize Muslims than embrace their common humanity and achievements.
