The Muslim community in Britain should abandon its retreat into a “victim culture”, a leading Conservative Muslim peer said yesterday.

Baroness Warsi, the Shadow Minister for Community Cohesion, attacked “hardliners and hotheads” who claimed that it was un-Islamic to vote or for women to have access to schools and jobs.

She said that Muslims had a particular responsibility to defeat extremism in Britain as the extremists claimed to be acting in the name of Islam. British Muslims should not allow misunderstandings about their religious duties and obligations to cut them off from wider society.

She told a conference on race equality in London that it was possible to be proud to be British and a Muslim.

Lady Warsi, who last week helped to secure the release of Gillian Gibbons, the teacher who was jailed in Sudan for allowing her class to name a teddy bear Mohamed, said that Muslims needed to ensure that they did not confuse what were really social expectations about how they should behave - “often pretty dubious ones” - with genuine religious requirements.

“I’ve got a clear message for the hardliners and hotheads who claim to speak for British Muslims. When you say that voting is un-Islamic, you’re wrong,” she said.

“When you say that women should not have access to education or employment, that women’s equality is unIslamic, or that women should not adopt leadership positions like politics, you’re wrong, wrong, wrong.”

Islam was unambiguous in its condemnation of forced marriages, she said, and the perpetrators of so-called honour killings should not be allowed “to hide behind any faith”. It was important to engage robustly with such cultural opinions where they threatened to cause real divisions between communities in Britain.

“When it comes to Islam, the majority of Muslims understand the difference between culture and religion. It’s not for others to tell Muslims what is and isn’t Islam. It’s for the community.”

She added: “We must accept that we’re all in this together – but Muslims have an added responsibility to defeat extremism, because extremism is claimed in the name of Islam.”

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