YOU might imagine that a four-day festival organized by British Muslim activists to showcase Islamic culture and engage in political debate with Muslims and non-Muslims alike would be welcomed by anyone who cares about the future of community relations in Britain.
IslamExpo, which has been running in London’s Olympia for the past three days, has certainly lived up to its billing: More than 40,000 people have already attended an extraordinary celebration of the diversity of Muslim art and culture, while the range of discussion about some of the most contentious issues surrounding the Muslim community has been impressive by any reckoning.
US academic specialists like John Esposito, John Voll and Robert Leiken have debated political Islam with the likes of Tariq Ramadan and Rached Al-Ghannouchi, who played a crucial role in reconciling mainstream Islamism with democratic principles in the 1990s.
In a panel on the media chaired by Rageh Omar on Friday, I spoke alongside Peter Oborne of the Daily Mail, Wadah Khanfar, head of the Al-Jazeera network, and the Evening Standard’s Andrew Gilligan.
But instead of taking part in the dialogue they all claim to believe in, several front-line politicians pulled out of the event at the last minute, including the Employment Minister Stephen Timms, International Development Minister Shahid Malik and Sayeeda Warsi, Tory community cohesion spokeswoman.
The trigger for their sudden withdrawal from a rare opportunity to engage with thousands of British Muslims (others such as the Liberal Democrat Simon Hughes resisted the pressure to withdraw) seems to have been an Evening Standard article by the increasingly extreme anti-Islamist campaigner Ed Husain comparing the event to a British National Party rally. The net result of all this is that organizers of IslamExpo — who have shown themselves to be committed to pluralism and ready to engage in a dialogue with their harshest critics — have been handed the political and moral high ground. The New Labour and Tory frontbenchers and their ideological spine-stiffeners, on the other hand, have been left looking craven, small-minded and unable to face up to some of the most pressing demands of our time.
