Britain's Muslims Confront Their Destiny

By Neil Berry,
albionroad@tiscali.co.uk
Sunday, 13, May, 2007
(25, Rabi` al-Thani, 1428)
ArabNews

Tony Blair came to power in 1997 as a champion of national cohesion. Presenting himself as a healer, the architect of New Labour pledged to restore the social solidarity that sustained British people through two world wars.

Yet it is not for reviving a common sense of national purpose but for his divisive foreign policy, his decision, in the teeth of mass opposition, to join US President George W. Bush in declaring war on Iraq, that Blair is most likely to be remembered.

Britain has become a demonstrably less equal, and therefore less united, country under Blair.

The social commentator Suzanne Moore speaks for many in judging that Blair’s domestic legacy is a Britain atomized and alienated as perhaps never before.

It is British Muslims who perhaps have most reason to feel cheated by Blair’s talk of national unity, his promise to create an “inclusive” Britain with a newly affirmative attitude toward ethno-religious minorities.

Indeed, this week’s news that after leaving office, Blair plans to travel the world as a builder of bridges between the major religions will have been greeted by Muslims (and by others, too) with derision.

The truth is that the situation of Muslims in Britain has deteriorated dramatically during the Blair era, with disaffection among Muslim youth rampant both because of discrimination against them when it comes to employment and because of the pursuit of a foreign policy in Iraq that is felt by many to be essentially racist, a war waged against Muslims by an ostentatiously Christian British prime minister in concert with an ostentatiously Christian US president.

And thanks to the increasing targeting of Muslims as suspected terrorists in the wake of the 7/7 London suicide bombings, the feeling has grown that Muslims are being deliberately demonized as the “enemy within”. Certainly Blair and his colleagues have done little to discourage such scapegoating.

The conviction of five Muslim terrorists, the so-called “fertilizer bomb plotters”, in London last week was a further setback for British Muslims, strengthening the popular impression of them as a subversive element.

Yet the revelation at the close of the trial that Britain’s security services knew more about the 7/7 bombers than was previously acknowledged has also served to undermine faith in the British government on the part of the public at large.

It is hardly surprising if there is a mounting clamor for an independent public inquiry that could throw light on the reasons why MI5 apparently blew the opportunity to foil the 7/7 plot.

What has become clear is that homegrown British Muslim terrorist cells constitute a far bigger and more dangerous phenomenon than many previously supposed.

As it happens, the conclusion of the fertilizer bomb trial coincided with the publication of a highly pertinent book, The Islamist, by an articulate young British Muslim, Ed Husain...Husain underplays the scourge of Islamophobia and says too little about the legitimacy of Muslim anger at the bloodbath in Iraq.

All the same, he has written a book that deserves to be widely read as it raises important questions about the long-term future of British Islam.

He concludes with the observation that “amid the clamor of lifestyle choices, political demands, social confusion and religious extremisms, many British Muslims are quietly developing a rich, vibrant Muslim subculture in Britain, incorporating the best aspects of their multifaceted heritage: Ethnic ancestry, British upbringing, Islamic roots”.

But Ed Husain is in no doubt that this is a critical juncture, a moment when, for good or ill, the historic destiny of British Muslims is being decided.