LONDON, 5 September 2004 — It could hardly be more embarrassing: the British Council, charged with promoting British values throughout the world, is forced to fire a senior press officer this week after he penned an extraordinary series of attacks on Islam. For those who doubt the very concept of Islamophobia, the columns of Will, aka Harry, Cummins in the Sunday Telegraph should be a set text. His brand of virulent paranoia combines racism — “all Muslims, like all dogs, share certain characteristics” — with a particularly vicious aggression — the massacres in Bosnia were “more a tribute to (Muslims’) incompetence than their humanity”.
This is very nasty stuff and one wouldn’t want to give it more space in another newspaper but for the fact that there is still a well-meaning, but fatally blind strand of opinion which refuses to accept the phenomenon of Islamophobia. Refuses to see how it represents a mutated form of racism, and refuses to see how such comments about Jews or blacks would be quite rightly regarded as unprintable.
What makes the Cummins case so disturbing is that he didn’t lurk in the backroom of British National party offices, writing Nick Griffin’s speeches. No, he was at the very heart of a quintessential British institution. It exposes, in a way which can no longer be denied, how deep the worm of Islamophobia has crawled.
It’s time for a clear reckoning of what Islamophobia is, and just why it represents a major challenge in our time — comparable to the rise of anti-Semitism in the 20th century, comparable to the racism which we have spent several decades trying to confront.
Islamophobia is not a fantasy phenomenon to head off criticism of the religion. Surely it’s not beyond the wit of (wo)man to distinguish between legitimate debate and the grotesque rubbish pedaled by Cummins.
But the key criteria for that legitimate debate on Islam is that it must be rooted in knowledge. The majority of people in this country still have only the haziest, and often prejudiced, understanding of this religion, a 1,500-year-old ethical tradition with a huge range of interpretations across hundreds of cultures around the globe — and a lamentable lack of interest in putting that right.
This is no accident; the biggest component of Islamophobia’s long history in European consciousness is what the writer Ziauddin Sardar describes as a “constructed ignorance” in which Islam is willfully ignored, neglected and distorted. Take one example: The particular association of Islam with violence is a colonial hangover, dating back to the 1857 Indian Mutiny, when Muslims rebeled against British imperialism. The huge military machines of Germany and America in the 20th century were both the product of Christian, democratic countries, but few talk of Christianity being inherently violent.
Islamophobia is a hybrid beast and it calls on another equally powerful strain of European thinking — racism. It is racism, pure and simple, which lies behind the permutations of the “swamping” thesis which we’ve seen from BNP literature and Cummins to the front cover of the Spectator; of how Muslims want to take over the world, and take over Britain — an absurd fantasy when only three percent of Britain is Muslim.
There is a particular responsibility for those who frame the debate on Islam in this country to break out of the “constructed ignorance”.
It means developing a deep knowledge of Islam and of the ongoing struggles within it to reform and renew itself. It means a determination to get beyond the distortions of a media fascinated with the likes of Abu Hamza, of a media which can convey the horrific barbarity of the hostage-takers in Beslan — presumed to be Muslim — better than the comparable cruelty meted out by the Russians in Chechnya over the last decade.
A vigilant awareness is required in public debate, of the resonances in popular consciousness which certain comments are likely to trigger.
Would a critical examination of Leviticus’ prescriptions for the uncleanliness of women in the Old Testament have been appropriate in 1936 in Germany? Context is crucial and the context now, in the UK, is of an impoverished, excluded community (over 60 percent of Bangladeshi and Pakistani families live in poverty) upon whom the anti-terrorism laws are weighing very heavily. The hostility toward Islam needs little fanning, and on the street, it is visited disproportionately on women whose hijabs identify them as Muslims.
It is for these kinds of reasons that we may well need new legislative tools, such as a law on incitement to religious hatred, to combat a new and virulent demonization of the Other which is sheltering, at present, under the banner of free speech.
