FOR British Muslims, it seemed an epoch-making moment when, in 2010, the Conservative lawyer, Sayeeda Warsi, became Britain’s first female Muslim Cabinet minister in the Conservative-Liberal Democrat government of Prime Minister David Cameron.
Five years on, “Baroness Warsi” is an ex-minister, having resigned from government last year over Britain’s “morally indefensible” position on Gaza. Though still dedicated to the Conservative Party, she alienated many fellow Conservatives when, in 2011, she alleged that hostility to Muslims had passed the “dinner party test,” meaning that it had become acceptable in polite British society to denigrate Muslims.
It has been a source of dismay to Warsi, as to many others, that the British government’s engagement with the UK’s more than 3 million Muslims appears confined to haranguing them to demonstrate that they are law-abiding patriots. Now she has issued a furious protest at a government letter, sent to more than 1,000 British mosques in the wake of January’s Paris attacks and urging them to do more to tackle extremism.
The letter — which was signed by the UK Communities Secretary Eric Pickles and his colleague Lord Ahmad — has ignited outrage among Muslims, with the Muslim Council of Great Britain deploring its picture of British Muslims as “inherently apart from British society.” Reflecting this outrage in an article for the Observer, Warsi remarked that the letter was never likely to evoke a positive response, since it was not preceded by any significant effort by government to build friendship and trust. It seemed to her especially ill-considered because it went to mosques linked to organizations blacklisted by the British government. The letter, she believes, will simply add to the bitterness among Muslims provoked, for example, by obsessive official checks on the backgrounds of guest lists to Eid events and the pointed refusal of ministers to attend events that might be addressed by speakers deemed to hold unpalatable opinions.
Warsi is warning the British government that its conception of engagement with the Muslim community is “dangerously narrow,” with the potential to incite rather than pre-empt radicalism. Certainly, many Muslims are liable to conclude that David Cameron’s government is constitutionally incapable of viewing them as anything except a threat. This after all is a point at which, in the aftermath of the Paris attacks, there is endemic alarm about the prospect of a pan-European backlash against Muslims. Yet though Muslims have manifest cause to feel threatened themselves, their fears — in stark contrast to the fears of British Jews — have scarcely been addressed at all.
Muslims are bound to contrast how they are treated with the British government’s routine readiness to engage with Jewish groups. David Cameron presides over an annual formal meeting with British Jewish leaders to discuss their concerns — though he has declined to accede to requests to hold such a meeting with leaders of Muslim and other faith groups. Since the Paris attacks, moreover, his government has gone to great lengths to show solidarity with Britain’s Jewish community and re-affirm its abhorrence of anti-Semitism — even as it has left Muslims with the sense that it regards them as fundamentally a national security problem.
The intervention of Warsi, herself the quintessential “moderate” Muslim, is a measure of how high feeling is running among British Muslim community over the government’s letter. The chances of a fresh radical attack in Britain are hardly to be minimized; the security services maintain that a major attack is inevitable. Yet it is precisely because of the combustibility of the situation following events in France that it is more than usually desirable that the British government be seen to be acting toward all communities with unimpeachable even-handedness. Indeed, one might argue that it is an abrogation of common sense, not to mention democracy, for elected politicians to display conspicuous solicitude toward one embattled community while giving another such community to understand that it is an object of chronic official suspicion.
The British Council has for years dispatched its officers round the world to instruct developing countries in the art of “good governance.” When it comes to dealing with its own Muslim citizens, it is the British government itself that often seems to require such instruction.
