LONDON, 25 June 2004 — The question of how Muslim women dress has become a hugely contentious issue in Britain. Last week, Britain’s High Court ruled that 15-year-old Shabina Begum was not entitled to attend school wearing hijab. A pupil at Denbigh High School in Luton, she has missed two years’ formal schooling because of her refusal to compromise with the school’s dress code and is reported to be devastated by the court’s verdict.
The school, a multifaith state comprehensive with a large intake of Muslims, has adopted what it believes to be a flexible policy on dress, allowing pupils to wear the shalwar kameez. The case has sharply polarized opinion. Shabina Begum’s legal team regard the verdict as an example of institutionalized Islamophobia. Others, including not a few Muslims, believe that to permit the wearing of hijab in state schools would be to set a dangerous precedent.
Shabina Begum’s determination to cover herself highlights a trend that is sweeping Muslim Britain. Some British Muslim women indeed are not satisfied with covering everything but their faces. The other day, the BBC television program Panorama talked to a young Muslim woman in Lancashire who of her own accord has gone to the length of wearing the burqa, the shroud that leaves only a lattice slit for the eyes. She was one of four women profiled by the program who have chosen to wear veils and who see the act of doing so not as evidence of oppression but as a badge of independence and cause for pride.
What was striking about these well-educated and articulate women was their conviction that they are not just thoroughly Muslim but thoroughly British as well. Yet the number of Britons who would be willing to accept them as such remains small. For controversy over the veil is part of a growing crisis of acceptance facing Islam in Britain (and other European countries). To many British people, the wearing of veils is apt to look like a deliberate provocation, a bloody-minded flaunting of difference which indicates that Muslims are troublemakers who make no effort to fit in.
The success of the nationalistic UK Independence Party in the recent European elections sprang from the party’s furious “little Englander” opposition to the European Union but was bound up, too, with a more general xenophobia, with the sense that the British way of life is being undermined by aliens — obstreperous Muslims prominent among them. It is safe to say that the party’s supporters include people even more hostile to Muslims than they are to the French and the Germans. Not for nothing is the leading UKIP member, the ex-television chat show presenter Robert Kilroy-Silk, identified with the view that Arab culture (for which read the Muslim world in its entirety) is inherently backward and barbarous.
The sense that Islam poses a peculiar threat to the British way of life is far from new. The Rushdie affair of the late 1980s — which saw some Muslims endorsing the Ayatollah Khomeini’s death sentence against the author of the Satanic Verses — inflicted much damage on the image of Muslims in Britain. It may be that the effect of Sept. 11 has been simply to confirm a widespread British tendency to view Islam as a fundamentally intolerant religion which breeds murderous fanatics. Certainly, Islamophobia has become increasingly entrenched.
It is also true that “official” Britain has done very little to challenge it. A well-researched new report on Islamophobia in Britain edited by Robin Richardson is scathing about the failure of politicians and race relations bodies to take seriously the mounting evidence that British Muslims are being victimized simply because they are Muslims. There have even been instances where British politicians, pandering to popular prejudice, have implied that terrorism and Islam are practically synonymous — as when the minister for Europe, Denis MacShane, declared that Muslims needed to choose between the “British way” and the “terrorist way”. Moreover, scarcely a day passes without some attempt at demonizing Muslims by Britain’s tabloid press.
Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper, The Sun, has been especially Islamophobic, persistently portraying the demagogic, London-based imam, Abu Hamza — who now awaits extradition to the US — as typical of the Muslim community at large.
It is against this background that public faith in the 1960s ideal of “multiculturalism” seems to have all but collapsed. The current report on Islamophobia has appeared at an unfortunate moment in the history of race relations in Britain, when the political establishment, along with large sections of the media, is setting its face against the whole notion of difference and taking exception to ethnic and religious minorities which make too much of their separateness. It was predictable that Murdoch’s Sunday Times — aimed at a more educated readership than The Sun but in many respects hardly more liberal — would disparage the report as the work of race relations zealots determined to burden blameless, right-thinking Britons with gratuitous feelings of guilt. In the Panorama program, the young woman wearing the burqa reproached the BBC’s interviewer for supposing that when it comes to “integration” the onus is on people like her to adjust to the prevailing social norms. Her point was that integration ought to be a reciprocal process. This was an opinion which might once have seemed uncontroversial enough but which now — at a time when the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, Trevor Phillips, speaks about multiculturalism with frank impatience — seems nothing short of confrontational.
Yet the question arises: What, in 2004, is the British way of life which many are so anxious to defend, and to which Muslims and others are expected to conform? Quizzed on these matters, ordinary Britons often appear stuck for an answer and end up making pathetic references to traditional staples of the British diet such as “steak and kidney pie” and “fish and chips”. At a more sophisticated level, champions of the British heritage talk of democracy, the rule of law and free speech — though it’s not clear in what way these characteristics serve to distinguish the British way of life from many others.
As for the thing which used to epitomize that heritage above all else, Christianity, it is seldom mentioned by such people — for the obvious reason that it barely impinges any longer on the national consciousness. The truth is that contemporary Britain, a post-Christian, post-imperial society contending with the challenges of globalization and home to minorities and cultural identities galore, has become a bewilderingly heterogeneous and complicated place. Britain is now defined by nothing so much as its sheer social diversity. This is chiefly true of London, today one of the most cosmopolitan and polyglot cities in the world. If there is a new and strident emphasis in Britain on the obligation to conform, it is precisely because of deep-seated confusion and uncertainty about what being British actually means.
The crisis facing Muslims in Britain is real enough. In some ways, however, British Muslims like the young women featured in the Panorama documentary, may be rather more confident about who they are than many other British people; they may even, to a degree, be objects of envy. The positive view of the Muslim settlement in Britain is that it is throwing into relief outdated notions of national identity and helping to fashion a fresh and altogether more adventurous concept of Britishness.
