DON’T PANIC! All Muslims have not now, nor have they ever, gone over to the Dark Side. The peaceable majority is much spoken about these days. Unfortunately, they remain invisible, an abstraction, invoked when necessary, but still largely unknown by their anxious fellow citizens.
The Dark Side, as every devotee of blockbuster culture knows, is seductive but deceptive. The problem for British Muslims is that it sets the baseline for every discussion. “Islamic terrorism”, “radicalisation”, “alienation”, “jihadis”, “al-Qaeda”, the whole dark panoply, are the focus of all attention.
This is a lopsided picture. It needs to be balanced with the perspective of the quiet life of ordinary Muslim folk, the simple deeds of honest people. Without this perspective it is impossible to distinguish and differentiate who is who. The reality of the majority recedes, while the extremists thrive in the oxygen of attention and publicity.
So, it is time we looked at the bright side. Take Leeds. It is now infamous as the home of suicide bombers. But the Beeston area of Leeds is also the home of Faith Together, one of the most innovative community organisations in Britain. It is an interfaith network drawing in regeneration funding to provide facilities and services for the residents of a deprived multi-faith and multi-ethnic community. Its Muslim co-founder, Hanif Malik, has said: “We are all doing what our religions require us to do, serve the needs of others.” The organisation has been emphasising common religious principles, values and goals to tackle common community problems.
Take Islamic schools. They are criticised for promoting a ghetto mentality. But when a new school was to be built in Toxteth, Liverpool, local Muslims took a different approach. They negotiated with the council and other faith groups to make Kingsley Primary School a state school with an Islamic ethos. Islamic ethos was translated as self-discipline, respect for teachers, and the creation of an environment where pupils learn to respect each other, whatever their faith or background. The school provides a prayer room for parents and pupils, has Muslim governors and Muslims from the community help at the school. But when it opened its headmaster and staff were non-Muslims, as were 40 per cent of its pupils.
I can go on and give other positive examples of the hundreds of local welfare organisations in Muslim communities across Britain. Such activity is a traditional part of Muslim life everywhere. Many are tradition-bound and inward-looking. But many are also beginning the process of adapting, becoming relevant to the Muslim predicament in Britain. In the process they are defining the terms of a British Muslim identity that integrates the values of Islam as part of the landscape of contemporary Britain.
The problem is that the bright side has been eclipsed, largely because the very people who are shaping the new British Muslim identity are seen by the entrenched leadership of their community as a problem. As Amir Karim, a youth worker from Birmingham, told Sky News, stigmatising the most vulnerable youngsters who are dealing with all the normal difficulties of adolescence and identity creates the very alienation it seeks to define.
The British Muslim population is predominantly young. There is a new generation in its twenties and thirties of educated and articulate people who were born and bred here. They are proud of their identity as Muslims; comfortable with their Britishness. They work in the professions, in law, medicine, business, in social work and youth work but share one overriding fate. They are not in the front rank of any Muslim organisations. This advance guard, a pioneer generation of British Muslims, are being deliberately shielded from public view.
Traditional Muslim organisations — whether mosques, community or political groups — are run by obscurantist leaders. These people came to the fore in the 1960s and Seventies; many have been made “life presidents”. The archaic language of tradition and authority they speak is quite incomprehensible to the young. Even the so-called “democratic” Muslim bodies, such as the Muslim Council of Britain, are run by ageing cliques, working behind the scenes. The situation is made worse by the arrival of government-sponsored leaders — the peers and MPs — who are seen as agents of new Labour; the Muslim “Task Force” consists largely of such people.
No wonder most of our brightest young men and women are not to be found in mosques or other traditional community organisations. If disaffection is the problem, then it begins within the Muslim community itself. And the first step to alleviating it has to be a generational shift in leadership.
Britain ought to be proud of the moral conscience shown by young Muslims, even if it seems alien or dramatically expressed. This is the prerogative of youth — the polar opposite of political and social apathy. All the pains of the dysfunctional Muslim world, all the stultification of being trapped between false divides of tradition and modernity, Islam and the West, authenticity and authority, should make our young people rage. But what they are reaching for are the elegant light sabres of ideas, not the bombs of the Dark Side. We can only nurture these seedlings of hope if we listen carefully to their grievances and have confidence in their ability to redefine a contemporary British Muslim identity. But, above all, we need to accept that the moral values that guide them really do have a place in Britain.
Ziauddin Sardar is the author of Desperately Seeking Paradise: Journeys of a Sceptical Muslim
