Kenan Malik | ukwatch.net

Mistaken Identity

tim — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 17:44:53 +0000

It is one of the biggest complaints about globalisation: that as market forces sweep across the world, so does Western culture. In the end, many fret, whether you are in New York, Rome, Beijing or Mumbai you will buy the same pair of jeans in the same shopping mall, drink the same overpriced latte in the same coffee shop, and watch the same dreary Hollywood blockbuster. Local culture will be no more.

Ironically, though, the greatest Western cultural export is not Disney or Starbucks or Tom Cruise. It is the very idea of local culture. A notion that originated in late-eighteenth century Europe, in the Romantic backlash against the Enlightenment, has today the whole world in its grip. Every island in the Pacific, every tribe in the Amazon, has its own culture that it wants to defend against the depredation of Western cultural imperialism. You do not even have to be human to possess a culture. Primatologists tell us that different groups of chimpanzees each has its own culture. No doubt some chimp will soon complain that its traditions are disappearing under the steamroller of human cultural imperialism.

We’re All Multiculturalists Now observed the American academic, and former critic of pluralism, Nathan Glazer. And indeed we are. The celebration of difference, respect for pluralism, avowal of identity politics – these have come to be regarded as the hallmarks of a progressive, antiracist outlook and as the foundation of modern liberal democracies.

At the heart of most multicultural philosophies is the belief that an individual’s cultural background frames their identity and helps define who they are. If we want to treat individuals with dignity and respect we must also treat with dignity and respect the groups that furnish them with their sense of personal being. We cannot, in other words, treat individuals equally unless groups are also treated equally. And since, in the words of the American theorist Iris Young, ‘groups cannot be socially equal unless their specific, experience, culture and social contributions are publicly affirmed and recognised’, so society must protect and nurture cultures, ensure their flourishing and indeed their survival.

One expression of such equal treatment is the growing tendency in some Western nations for religious law – such as the Jewish halakha and the Islamic sharia – to take precedence over national secular law in civil, and occasionally criminal, cases. Another expression can be found in Australia, where the courts increasingly accept that Aborigines should have the right to be treated according to their own customs rather than be judged by ‘whitefella law’. According to Colin McDonald, a Darwin barrister and expert in customary law, ‘Human rights are essentially a creation of the last hundred years. These people have been carrying out their law for thousands of years’. Some multiculturalists go further, requiring the state to ensure the survival of cultures not just in the present but in perpetuity. The philosopher Charles Taylor suggests that the Canadian and Quebec governments should take steps to ensure the survival of the French language in Quebec ‘through indefinite future generations’.

The demand that because a cultural practice has existed for a long time, so it should be preserved, is a modern version of the naturalistic fallacy – the belief that ought derives from is. For nineteenth century social Darwinists, morality – how we ought to behave – derived from the facts of nature – how humans are. This became an argument to justify capitalist exploitation, colonial oppression, racial savagery and even genocide. Today, virtually everyone recognises the falsity of this argument. Yet, when talking of culture rather than of nature, many multiculturalists continue to insist that ‘is’ defines ‘ought’.

Part of the problem here is a constant slippage in multiculturalism talk between the idea of humans as culture-bearing creatures and the idea that humans have to bear a particular culture. Clearly no human can live outside of culture. But then no human does.

To say that no human can live outside of culture, however, is not to say they have to live inside a particular one. To view humans as culture-bearing is to view them as social beings, and hence as transformative beings. It suggests that humans have the capacity for change, for progress, and for the creation of universal moral and political forms through reason and dialogue.

To view humans as having to bear specific cultures is, on the contrary, to deny such a capacity for transformation. It implies that every human being is so shaped by a particular culture that to change or undermine that culture would be to undermine the very dignity of that individual. The biological fact of Jewish or Bangladeshi ancestry, it suggests, somehow make a human being incapable of living well except as a participant of Jewish or Bangladeshi culture. This would only make sense if Jews or Bangladeshis were biologically distinct – in other words if cultural identity was really about racial difference.

The relationship between cultural identity and racial difference becomes even clearer if we look at the argument that cultures must be protected and preserved. The political philosopher Will Kymlicka argues that since cultures are essential to peoples’ lives, so where ‘the survival of a culture is not guaranteed, and, where it is threatened with debasement or decay, we must act to protect it’. For Charles Taylor, once ‘we’re concerned with identity’, nothing ‘is more legitimate than one’s aspiration that it is never lost’.

But what does it mean for a culture to decay? Or for an identity to be lost? Kymlicka draws a distinction between the ‘existence of a culture’ and ‘its “character” at any given moment’. The character of culture can change but such changes are only acceptable if the existence of that culture is not threatened. But how can a culture exist if that existence is not embodied in its character? By ‘character’ Kymlicka seems to mean the actuality of a culture: what people do, how they live their lives, the rules and regulations and institutions that frame their existence. So, in making the distinction between character and existence, Kymlicka seems to be suggesting that Jewish, Navajo or French culture is not defined by what Jewish, Navajo or French people are actually doing. For if Jewish culture is simply that which Jewish people do or French culture is simply that which French people do, then cultures could never decay or perish – they would always exist in the activities of people.

If a culture is not defined by what its members are doing, what does define it? The only answer can be that it is defined by what its members should be doing. And what you should be doing, for cultural preservationists, is what your ancestors were doing. Culture here has become defined by biological descent. And biological descent is a polite way of saying ‘race’. As the American writer Walter Benn Michaels puts it, ‘In order for a culture to be lost… it must be separable from one’s actual behaviour, and in order for it to be separable from one’s actual behaviour it must be anchorable in race.’

The logic of the preservationist arguments is that every culture has a pristine form, its original state. It decays when it is not longer in that form. There are echoes here of the concept of ‘type’ that was at the heart of nineteenth century racial science. For all the talk about culture as fluid and changing, multiculturalism, no less than old-fashioned racism, invariably leads people to think of human groups in fixed terms. Both sides of the race debate have their own dialect of difference. The right has appropriated the language of diversity to promote its message of racial exclusion. Liberals often turn to the idiom of exclusion to articulate a pluralist idea of culture.

‘Every society, every nation is unique’, claimed Enoch Powell, the most vocal opponent of black immigration in postwar Britain. ‘It has its own past, its own story, its own memories, its own languages or ways of speaking, its own – dare I use the word – culture.’ This is why, he argued, immigrants, who belong to different cultures and different traditions, could never be fully British. In France the far right has astutely exploited the idea of cultural differences to promote its anti-Muslim message. ‘It is a tragic mistake to want to have communities representing different civilisations live together in the same country’, argued former Gaullist minister Michel Poniatowski. ‘I love North Africans’, Jean-Marie Le Pen has declared, ‘but their place is in the Mahgreb’. Through the language of diversity, racism has been transformed into just another cultural identity.

If the right has taught itself the grammar of diversity, liberals have adopted the idiom of racial identity. Will Kymlicka is anything but a xenophobe. Yet his pluralism leads him to adopt the language of exclusion. ‘It is right and proper’, Kymlicka believes, ‘that the character of a culture changes as a result of the choices of its members’. But, he goes on, ‘while it is one thing to learn from the larger world’, it is quite another ‘to be swamped by it’. What could this mean? That a culture has the right to keep out members of another culture? That a culture has the right to prevent its members from speaking another language, singing non-native songs or reading non-native books?

Kymlicka’s warning about ‘swamping’ should make us sit up and take notice. The right has long exploited fears of cultural swamping to promote the idea that Western nations should pull up the drawbridge against immigrants whose cultural difference make them unsuitable. It is an argument that Kymlicka undoubtedly abhors. Yet once it becomes a matter of political principle that cultures should not be swamped by outsiders, then it is difficult to know how one could possibly resist such anti-immigration arguments.

Historically, antiracists challenged both the practice of racism and the process of racialisation; that is, both the practice of discriminating against people by virtue of their race and the insistence that an individual can be defined by the group to which he or she belongs. Today’s multiculturalists argue that to fight racism one must celebrate group identity. The consequence has been the resurrection of racial ideas and the imprisonment of people within their cultural identities. Racial theorists and multiculturalists, the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut observes, have ‘conflicting credos but the same vision of the world’. Both fetishise difference. Both seek to ‘confine individuals to their group of origin’. Both undermine ‘any possibility of natural or cultural community among peoples’. Challenging such a politics of difference has become as important today as challenging racism.

Debating Immigration

Tim Holmes — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 00:43:08 +0000

The following talk was given to a seminar on ‘The Political and Cultural Debates Surrounding Migrant Workers in the UK’ at the Advanced Leadership Development Programme at the University of Oxford, 8 November 2007.

Policy debates about immigration generally focus on two broad themes: the impact of immigration upon the economy, and its social and cultural impact. The arguments in favour of immigration are generally couched in economic terms (though, of course, there are, and always have been, economic arguments against mass migration). The social impact of immigration , on the other hand, has usually been seen as negative. Immigrants are seen as taking up valuable resources, making it more difficult to cohere communities and undermining a sense of national identity.

As a result, policy makers have seen their role as balancing the economic need for migrants against the social problems they create. The ‘cross-departmental’ government report on The Economic and Fiscal Impact of Immigration published last month, for instance, expresses broad support for immigration’s positive effect on Britain’s economy but fears about its negative impact on the country’s social fabric. Why does immigration inevitably lead to fears about its social consequences? Largely because the presence of immigrants helps crystalise already existing social anxieties, particularly anxieties about national identity and social cohesion. To understand this better I want to take a brief look at the history of the debate about immigration and race relations in postwar Britain and to compare the debate about the first set of mass immigrants in Britain in the 1950s with the debate about the new wave of immigrants today.

The onset of mass immigration from India, Pakistan and the Caribbean in the late 1940s and the 1950s coincided with the dismantling of the British Empire, and the decline of Britain’s global status. Immigration became the focus for the debate about these broader shifts. While policy makers welcomed the influx of new labour, there was at the same time considerable unease about the impact that such immigration may have on traditional concepts of Britishness. As a Colonial Office report of 1955 observed, ‘a large coloured community as a noticeable feature of our social life would weaken… the concept of England or Britain to which people of British stock throughout the Commonwealth are attached.’ These fears translated themselves into a concern about the need to control immigration. Immigration controls were seen, not as a means of matching immigrants to jobs, but of preventing the presence of too many non-white immigrants from tarnishing Britain’s racial identity.

The problem for policy makers, however, was that they could not explicitly say so. To have introduced such discriminatory legislation would have caused moral outage at home and abroad and undermined Britain’s standing in the world. The experience of Nazism and revulsion against the Holocaust had created hostility to openly racist legislation. This was particularly so because inhabitants of Britain’s colonies were British subjects and had the legal right to live and work in this country. The story of British immigration laws is the story of the legal attempt o prevent British subjects of the wrong skin colour from exercising their legal rights.

The dilemma that policy makers faced was well expressed in a secret 1950 Cabinet committee report:

Any solution depending on an apparent… colour test would be so invidious as to make it impossible for adoption… Nevertheless, the use of any powers taken to restrict the free entry of British subjects to this country would, as a general rule, be more or less confined to coloured persons.

In other words, immigration controls only made sense if they were discriminatory but they could not be openly seen to be so. The solution was found when Britain introduced its first immigration law in 1962. Formally, the law insisted that any immigrant to this country must first possess an employment voucher – so it appeared non-racial, simply matching people to jobs. But in private, policy makers were clear that the real aim was to stop non-white immigration. As Richard Crossman, a leading Labour Party thinking, wrote in his diaries, ‘we have become illiberal… at a time of acute shortage of labour’. Or as the Conservative spokesman Reginald Maudling put it, ‘The problem arises quite simply from the arrival in this country of many people of wholly alien cultures, habits and outlooks’. This tactic of presenting social concerns about immigration in the guise of a concern about numbers or job availiability has continued over the past 50 years.

The perception that immigrants were alien to the British way of life ensured that the relationship between immigrants and the British state was defined largely by hostility, racism and confrontation. Not only was immigration policy driven by the desire specifically to keep out non-whites, but the state also viewed non-white immigrants settled in Britain as undesirables. Immigrants were the problem, and that problem had to be policed. This led both to discrimination against blacks and Asians in every sphere of social life, including housing, education and employment, and to confrontations with the police, confrontations that came to an explosive climax in a series of major riots in Britain’s inner cities in the late 1970s and the early 1980s. The authorities recognised that unless black and Asian communities were given a political stake in the system, their frustration could threaten the stability of British cities.

In response to the riots, the authorities, initially at the local level, and subsequently at the national level, pioneered a new strategy of inclusion. They organised consultations with minority communities, set up new political structures to allow dialogue between state institutions and minority organisations, recognised community leaders as genuine political representatives and channelled public funding through such leaders and organisations.

This process also helped redefine the idea of Britishness. It had been recognised for some time that the old notion of Britishness, rooted in ideas of race and Empire, could not be sustained. But nothing new had come to replace it. In the 1980s, this absence came to be take as something positive. Britain came to be seen not as a unitary nation, but as a multicultural society: a ‘community of communities’ as the Parekh report put it. Minorities, many came to argue, should not be forced to accept British values, or to adopt a British identity. Rather different peoples should have the right to express their identities, explore their own histories, formulate their own values, pursue their own lifestyles.

Cultural difference came to be seen not as a threat to national identity, as it had been in the 1950s, but as an affirmation of it. Britishness had become reformulated as the toleration, even celebration, of cultural differences. What was once seen as the inability of immigrants to integrate, now became viewed as the flourishing of a multicultural society, part of the patchwork of what it was to be British.

These developments, from the 1980s onwards, transformed the debate about immigration by transforming the relationship between the state and the non-white minorities. The racism that marked Britain when I was growing up now barely exists. This is not to say discrimination has disappeared. But racism is not what defines the relationship between the state and minorities as it had previously.

But the new Britain has created a new set of problems and anxieties. The transformation of Britain has taken place not so much because minorities have come to be treated as everyone else but more because, in a way, everyone else has come to be treated like minorities. In the postwar years immigrants were seen as different and therefore a threat to Britishness. Today difference has become the lingua franca of politics and, indeed, of Britishness itself.

Multiculturalism gave an institutional form to what we now call identity politics. Policy makers came to treat people less as British citizens than as members of particular racial, ethnic, cultural or faith groups, and to define policy largely in terms of the perceived needs and desires of those groups. And people came to see themselves in that way too – not as British citizens but as Muslims, or African Caribbeans, or Scottish.

Two consequences flowed from these developments. First, there has been increasing conflict between identity groups. Britain today is less defined by confrontation between the state and minority groups, than by conflict between those groups. Because Britain is seen as a community of communities, so each group seeks to maximise its interests at the expense of others, creating animosity.

Second, there is a greater disengagement between individuals and the political process. Because individuals are often treated not as citizens but as members of particular groups, so they feel less inclined to think of themselves as citizens or to see to political process as being of great value. This is particularly so because elected politicians have effectively abandoned their responsibility for engaging directly with Britain’s communities. Instead they have subcontracted their responsibilities out to so-called community leaders who act as intermediaries. When the Prime Minister, for instance, want to find out what Muslims thinks about a particular issue, or wants to get a message to ‘the Muslim comunity’, he invites the British Council of Muslims to No 10 (or at least he did until the MCB fell out of political favour). It is an approach that suggests that of all the interests British Muslims may have – in health, education, etc – only their faith really matters. Rather than appealing to Muslims as British citizens, and attempting to draw them into the mainstream political process, politicians prefer to see them as people whose primarily loyalty is to their faith and who can be politically engaged only by other Muslims.

The creation of new tensions and conflicts, and the greater degree of political disengagement, has led to a new debate about social cohesion and national identity. These new debates have coincided with the arrival of a new wave of migrants, largely from Eastern Europe. Just as in the 1950s, the presence of the new immigrants has become a lightning rod for the wider concerns. So, rather than see the problems of political disengagement and social conflict as the result of policy decisions taken over the past two decades, they have come to be seen as the result of immigration creating too much diversity.

Unlike in the 1950s, immigrants to Britain today are generally of the same skin colour as indigenous Britons; and black and Asians Britons are, ironically, often as hostile to the newcommers as are white Britons. The fear today is not that the new immigrants will undermine a racial conception of Britishness, but that too much cultural diversity will undermine social cohesion and make it more difficult to create a common national identity. Hence the government has introduced Britishness tests to ensure that immigrants know what it is to be British and citizenship ceremonies make them feel part of the national story.

But perhaps the most striking difference between now and the 1950s, is that 50 years ago the fear was of immigrants becoming permanently attached to Britain. Ironically, many of the initial immigrants were single men who expected to return home after a short time working here. But once the 1962 Immigration Act came into force they had no choice but to settle here and bring their families over, because if they left they might never have been able to get back in again.

Today, on the other hand, migrants from the EU have, in principle at least, freedom of movement. Poles, for instance, can flit between Britain and Poland as they wish – the so-called Ryanair migrants. As a result a much lower proportion of the new immigrants are likely to settle. And that is what concerns today’s critics of immigration: that Ryanair migrants will make Britain more fragmented, less integrated. In reality of course, they are not the cause of fragmentation, simply a symbol of the anxieties about social cohesion.

In the 1950s, immigration controls were viewed as a means of preserving a racialised form of British identity. Today they are seen as tools, not of preserving racial identity, but of managing cultural diversity and creating a more coherent society. But one thing that debates about immigration throughout the past half century have had in common is that they have not really been about immigration at all. There is an important debate to be had about immigration. Unfortunately it is the not the debate in which politicians, policy makers and the public have been engaged.

Born in Bradford

Thu, 13 Oct 2005 09:15:03 +0000

It was February 1988. I was in Bradford, a few weeks after the demonstration on which a copy of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses had been burnt. I had gone there to interview Sher Azam, president of the Bradford Council of Mosques, and the man who had torched the book. Waiting in the drab building that housed the Bradford Council of Mosques, I heard a familiar voice.

‘Hello Kenan, what are you doing here?’

It was Hassan, a friend from London, whom I had not seen for a couple of years. ‘Good to see you Hassan. I’m doing some interviews about Rushdie’, I said. ‘What are you doing in this God-forsaken place?’

‘ Trying to make it less God forsaken’, said Hassan. ‘I’ve been up here a few months, helping in the campaign to silence the blasphemer.’

‘You what?’

‘No need to look so shocked. I’ve had it with the white left. I’d lost my sense of who I am and where I came from. So I came back to Bradford to rediscover it. We need to defend our dignity as Muslims, to defend our values and beliefs, and not allow anyone – racist or Rushdie – to trample over them.’

I was astonished. The Hassan I knew in London had been a member of the Socialist Workers party (as I had been for a while). Apart from Trotskyism his other indulgences were sex, Southern Comfort and watching Arsenal. We had marched together, chucked bricks together at the National Front, been arrested together. I had never detected a religious bone in his body. But here he was in Bradford, an errand boy to the mullahs, inspired by book-burners.

Today ‘radical’ in an Islamic context means someone who espouses a fundamentalist theology. Twenty years ago it meant the opposite: a secularist who challenged the power of the mosques within Muslim communities. The expunging of that radical secularist tradition has played an important part in the rise of Islamic militancy in this country. Hassan embodied this mutation from left-wing activist to Islamic militant. And he was not alone. A surprising number of anti-Rushdie demonstrators were young. Few were religious, let alone fundamentalist. Many did not attend mosque, only a handful could recite the Koran, and most flouted traditional Muslim taboos on sex and drink. They felt resentful about the treatment of Muslims, disenchanted by leftwing politics and were looking for new ways of expressing their disaffection. While many began as secularists, they formed the pool of discontents into which radical Islamic organisations dipped. It was in the late 1980s and early 1990s that militant Islamic groups like Hizb-ut-Tahrir began organising in this country, particularly on campuses. Like Hassan, many of their recruits came from the ranks of former leftwing activists.

The Rushdie affair was a turning point in the relationship between British society and its Muslim communities. It was the moment that Islamic militancy announced itself as a major political issue. It was also the moment that Britain realised it was facing a new kind of social conflict. From the Grunwick dispute in 1977 to the Broadwater Farm riot in 1986, blacks and Asians had often been involved in bitter conflicts with authority. But these were political issues, or issues of law and order. The Rushdie affair was the first major cultural conflict, and one that seemed to question the very possibility of social integration.

For me personally, the Rushdie affair was a turning point in another way. It made me question my own relationship to the left and to the antiracist movement. The transformation of Hassan mirrored a wider transformation that was taking place on the left itself, a transformation from a belief in secular universalism to the defence of ethnic particularism and group rights. Once the left had been a champion of Enlightenment rationalism and humanism. It had believed in the ideas of a common humanity and universal rights, argued that everyone should be treated equally despite their racial, ethnic, religious or cultural differences and looked to social progress as a means of overcoming cultural differences. Today many on the left decry the Enlightenment as a Eurocentric project. They promote the idea of multiculturalism and of group rights, argue that different people should be treated differently because of their racial, ethnic, religious and cultural differences and worry that social progress is undermining cultural authenticity. ‘You have to treat people differently to treat them equally’, Lee Jasper, race adviser to London Mayor Ken Livingstone told me when I interviewed him for a Channel 4 documentary. Or as Labour MP Keith Vaz has put it, ‘Britishness cannot be imposed on people of different races, cultures and religions.’

In the aftermath of Rushdie, I came to realise that as important as challenging racism was tackling this ‘politics of difference’. A decade and a half later, as we debate how British Muslims could turn into savage terrorists, understanding that retreat from secular universalism is as important as ever.

The roots of the politics of difference can be found in the new forms of radicalism that emerged in the 1960s. Traditionally even revolutionaries who were hostile to capitalism saw themselves as standing in the Western intellectual tradition. I denounce European colonialism, CLR James once wrote, But I respect the learning and profound discoveries of western civilisation. James was one the great radicals of the 20th century, an anti-imperialist, a superb historian of black struggles, a Marxist who remained one even when it was no longer fashionable to be so. Today , though, many on the left would dismiss James’ defence of ‘Western civilisation’ as insufferably Eurocentric, even racist. To be radical has come to mean the rejection of all that is ‘Western’ in the name of marginality or difference. The modernist project of pursuing a rational, scientific understanding of the world – a project that James unashamedly championed – is now widely decried as a dangerous fantasy that must be resisted.

The pursuit of difference has always been at the heart of the racist agenda. It was always conservatives who decried reason and sought refuge in what Edmund Burke called ‘wholesome prejudice’. Reactionaries have long sought to block the advance of science and modernity in the name of tradition. So how did the left end up embracing difference, decrying reason, and defending tradition against modernity, all in the name of multiculturalism?

The postwar left was shaped by the experience of Nazism, the failures of old-style class politics and the emergence of new struggles such as the civil rights movement and feminism. For Marxists such as CLR James, their universalism was rooted in their class politics. James believed in a universally valid notion of progress. The key to emancipation, he argued, was the same everywhere. The working class was the ‘universal class’ because it would help bring about such emancipation. But from the Soviet Union, where the workers’ state had turned into a tyranny, to the West where, in the words of historian H Stuart Hughes, the proletariat seemed to prefer ‘creature comforts to heroism and kitsch to the elevation of its intellect’, the class that Engels had called the ‘heirs of classical philosophy’ was not behaving in the manner that radicals expected of it. In the postwar years, the radical intelligentsia’s relationship to the working class was, as Terry Eagleton once observed, a bit like the Virgin Mary’s to the baby Jesus, reverently acknowledging his divinity but harbouring no illusions after cleaning up his shit.

Disenchantment set in not just with class politics but with the very ideas of Enlightenment rationality and progress. Postwar radicals had asked why it was that Germany, a nation with deep roots in the Enlightenment, should succumb so completely to Nazism. The answer seemed to be that it was the logic of Enlightenment rationalism itself that gave rise to such barbarism. As Thedor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, founders of the Frankfurt school, put it in their seminal work, Dialectic of Enlightenment, ‘Enlightenment is totalitarian’. Or as Herbert Marcuse, one of the Marxist gurus of the 1960s student revolt, explained: ‘Concentration camps, mass exterminations, world wars and atom bombs are no “relapse into barbarism” but the unrepressed implementation of the achievements of modern science, technology and domination.’

‘Testifying at the trial against barbarism’, the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut’s memorably observed, postwar intellectuals came to ‘identify the Enlightenment with the defence and not with the prosecution’. The roots of barbarism, many argued, lay in Western arrogance and the roots of Western arrogance lay in an unquestioning belief in the superiority of Enlightenment rationalism and universalism. Antiracism, therefore, came to be defined as treating all peoples and all cultures with equal respect, and seeing none as backward, primitive, irrational. Radicals, Finkielkraut suggests, came to believe that ‘the so-called civilised ones should come down from our imaginary heights and recognise with humble clarity that we were only another kind of native’. Increasingly relativism came to be a defining feature of postwar radicalism.

Both these themes – disenchantment with class politics and a hostility to Enlightenment rationalism – were at the heart of the New Left that emerged in the 1960s. The New Left was a loose association of groups and individuals that was self-consciously opposed to the ‘old left’ of the communist parties and trade unions. Where the old left looked to the working class as the agency of change, the New Left found new, surrogate proletariats in the so-called New Social Movements – third world liberation movements, civil rights organisations, feminist groups, campaigns for gay rights, and the peace movement. Where the old left talked of class and sought to raise class consciousness, the New Left talked of culture and sought to strengthen cultural identity. Culture was the defining feature of groups and the means by which one group differentiated itself from another. Every group, whether Cuban peasants, black Americans or women, had a specific culture, rooted in its particular history and experiences. That culture gave shape to an individual’s identity. For an individual identity to be authentic, collective identity must be too. That required the group to be true to its own culture, to pursue faithfully the traditions that mark out that culture as unique and rebuff the advances of modernity and of other cultures.

These ideas echo the late 18th-century Romantic backlash against the Enlightenment. Whereas Enlightenment philosophes saw progress as civilisation overcoming the resistance of traditional cultures with their irrational prejudices and outmoded institutions, for the romantics the steamroller of progress was precisely what they feared. For Johann Gottfried Herder, the 18th-century German philosopher who best articulated the Romantic notion of culture, each people or volk was unique and this uniqueness was expressed through its volksgeist – the unchanging spirit of a people refined through history. Rejecting the Enlightenment belief that the same institutions and forms of governance would promote human flourishing in all societies, Herder held that the values of different cultures were incommensurate but equally valid. Every culture was authentic in its own terms, each adapted to its local environment.

The Romantic idea of culture flowered in the 1960s initially through the idea of self-organisation, a concept that emerged from the struggle for black rights in the US. In the 1960s, black America was squeezed between an intensely racist society, on one hand, and, on the other, a left largely indifferent to its plight. Many activists accused the left of indifference to their cause and argued that blacks must take matters into their own hands. They ceded from integrated civil rights organisations and set up separate black groups. Black self-organisation soon gave way to the idea of black identity. Blacks had to organise separately not as a political strategy but as a cultural necessity. ‘In Africa they speak of Negritude’, wrote black power activist Julius Lester. ‘It is the recognition of those things uniquely ours which separate ourselves from the white man.’

Soon, not just blacks, but everyone had an identity that was uniquely theirs and that separated them not just from the white man, but from every other kind of man and from men in general. Using the template established by black power activists, Native Americans, Puerto Ricans, Chicanos, Chinese Americans, not to mention a myriad of white ethnics all set up their separate cultural organisations. Women and gays became surrogate ethnics, each with their own particular cultures, identities and ways of thinking. ‘The demand is not for inclusion within the fold of “universal humankind” on the basis of shared human attributes; nor is it for respect “in spite of one’s differences”’, wrote feminist and sociologist Sonia Krups. ‘Rather, what is demanded is respect for oneself as different.’

‘The very language of commonality’, American cultural critic Todd Gittlin observes, ‘came to be perceived by the new movements as a colonialist smothering – an ideology to rationalise white dominance’. The irony is that the politics of identity itself drew on the most reactionary of ideas – the claim that one’s political beliefs and ways of thinking should be derived from the fact of one’s birth, sex or ethnic origins.

Social and political developments over the next two decades helped entrench such ideas. The weakening of both social democratic and Stalinist parties, the demise of Third World national liberation movements and the transformation of many third world countries into tyrannies and, finally, the end of the Cold War all added to the belief that radical social transformation was a chimera. The New Social Movements themselves had largely disintegrated by the 1990s. All that was left was the sense of difference. Social solidarity became increasingly defined not in political terms – as collective action in pursuit of certain political ideals – but in terms of ethnicity or culture. ‘Stripped of a radical idiom’, the American critic Russell Jacoby writes, ‘robbed of a utopian hope, liberals and leftists retreat in the name of progress to celebrate diversity. With few ideas on how a future should be shaped, they celebrate all ideas.’ Multiculturalism, Jacoby concludes, ‘has become… the ideology of an era without ideology’. What began in the 1960s as a way of organising against oppression had ended up by the nineties as way of rationalising the left’s impotence. Romanticism was born in the late 18th century out of the fear of the radical change unleashed by the Enlightenment and the French revolution and out of the desire for the safe anchor of ancient traditions. In the late 20th century, it was the fading of the possibilities of social transformation that led many radicals, albeit unwittingly, back to a Romantic view of the world.

It is against this background that we must understand the transformation of someone like Hassan from leftwing activist to Islamic militant. In Britain the black and Asian population is smaller than in the US, and its political and economic clout less significant. The attempts at self-organisation have been much weaker, while the authority of both the moderate and extreme left in Britain has been much greater. As a result, until the 1980s, the influence of identity politics remained weak.

First generation black and Asian immigrants were concerned less about preserving cultural differences than about fighting for political equality. They recognised that at the heart of that fight were shared values and aspirations between blacks and whites, not an articulation of unbridgeable differences. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, three big issues dominated the struggle for political equality: opposition to discriminatory immigration controls; the fight against racist attacks; and the issue of police brutality. These struggles radicalised a new generation of black and Asian activists and came to a climax in the inner city riots of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

In April 1976, 24 people were arrested in pitched battles in the Manningham area of Bradford, as Asian youths confronted a National Front march and fought police protecting it. It was seen as the blooding of a new movement. The following year the Asian Youth Movement was born. Built on the model of self-organisation, the AYM was nevertheless more outward looking, working closely with other anti-racist and radical organisations. AYM activists did not distinguish themselves as Muslim, Hindu or Sikh; indeed many did not even see themselves as specifically Asian, preferring to call themselves ‘black’ which they viewed as an all-inclusive term for non-white immigrants. They challenged not just racism but also many traditional values too, particularly within the Muslim community, helping establish an alternative leadership that confronted traditionalists on issues such as the role of women and the dominance of the mosque.

The next few years brought further conflict between Asian youth and the police, culminating in the trial of the Bradford 12 in 1982. Twelve young Asians faced conspiracy charges for making petrol bombs to use against racists. They argued they were acting in self-defence – and won.

Faced with this growing militancy, Bradford council drew up a new antiracist strategy, based on a template pioneered by Ken Livingstone’s Greater London Council. It established race relations units drew up equal opportunities policies, and dispensed millions of pounds in grants to black and Asian community organisations. Bradford’s 12-point race relations plan declared that every section of the ‘multiracial, multicultural city’ had ‘an equal right to maintain its own identity, culture, language, religion and customs’. At the heart of this multicultural strategy was a redefinition of racism built on the insights of identity politics. Racism now meant not simply the denial of equal rights but the denial of the right to be different. Black and Asian people, many argued, should not be forced to accept British values, or to adopt a British identity. Rather different peoples should have the right to express their identities, explore their own histories, formulate their own values, pursue their own lifestyles. Through this process the politics of difference became institutionalised
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Multiculturalism transformed the character of antiracism. By the mid-1980s the focus of antiracist protest in Bradford had shifted from political issues, such as policing and immigration, to religious and cultural issues: a demand for Muslim schools and for separate education for girls, a campaign for halal meat to be served at school, and, most explosively, the confrontation over the publication of The Satanic Verses. Political struggles unite across ethnic or cultural divisions; cultural struggles inevitably fragment. As different groups began asserting their particular identities ever more fiercely, so the shift from the political to the cultural arena helped to create a more tribal city. Secular Muslims were regarded as betraying their culture (they belonged to the ‘white left’) while radical Islam became not just more acceptable but, to many, more authentic.

This process was strengthened by a new relationship between the local council and the local mosques. In 1981, the council helped set up and fund the Bradford Council of Mosques and looked to it as a voice of the community. This helped marginalise secular radicals – the Asian Youth Movement eventually broke up – and allowed religious leaders to reassert their power. As the secular tradition was squeezed out, the only place offering shelter for disaffected youth was militant Islam.

Multiculturalism did not create militant Islam, but it helped create a space for it within British Muslim communities that had not existed before. It fostered a more tribal nation, undermined progressive trends within the Muslim communities and strengthened the hand of conservative religious leaders – all in the name of antiracism. It is true that since 9/11. and particularly since 7/7 there has been growing questioning of the consequences of multiculturalism. From former Home Secretary David Blunkett to CRE chief Trevor Phillips many have woken up to the fragmenting character of pluralism and have talked of the need to reassert common values. Yet the fundamental tenets of the politics of difference remain largely unquestioned. The idea that society consists of a variety of distinct cultures, that all these cultures should be respected and preserved and that society should be organised to meet the distinct needs of different cultures – these continued to be regarded as the hallmarks of a progressive, antiracist outlook. The lesson of the past two decades, however, is this: a left that espouses multiculturalism makes itself redundant. In a world of narrow, competing interest groups there is little room for a progressive vision. Back in the 1980s, my old friend Hassan may well have taken to militant Islam because of his disenchantment with the left. But it was the disenchantment of the left with its own secular, universalist traditions that helped ease his path to the mosque – and the path of many others since.

Multiculturalism Fans Islamic Extremism's Flames

Mon, 01 Aug 2005 16:35:32 +0000

One was a loving father. Another helped out in his parents’ fish and chip shop. All apparently chatted away as if they were going on holiday as they walked through King’s Cross station with their deadly rucksacks. It is the contrast between the ordinariness of the London bombers’ lives and the savage barbarism of their actions that is so shocking. But then, few recent terrorists have resembled the caricatures of mad mullahs, bearded fanatics and foreign zealots that people the press. Many have been Western born, Western educated, and seemingly ordinary.

The shoe bomber Richard Reid was brought up in south London. His fellow conspirator British-born Sajid Badat was educated at the prestigious Crypt Grammar School for Boys. Ahmed Omar Sheikh, convicted in Pakistan of the murder of American journalist Daniel Pearl, lived in east London and was educated at the LSE. Asif Hanif and Omar Sharif, the two Britons who carried out a suicide bombing mission in Israel became friends at university. The most detailed study yet on Al-Qaeda supporters shows that the majority are middle class with good jobs. Most are college educated, usually in the West. Fewer than one in 10 have attended religious school.

There was nothing extraordinary, then, about the background of the London bombers. So, why are these men, born and brought up in Britain, gripped by such a fanatic zeal for an irrational, murderous dogma, and seemingly possessed with a hatred for such virtues as democracy and decency? Muslims have been in Britain large numbers since the 1950s. Only recently has fanaticism taken hold. The first generation of immigrants faced greater hardships and more intense racism than do today’s Muslims. Yet most thought of themselves as British and were proud to be here.

While that first generation often put up with racism, the second generation (my generation) challenged it head on, often leading to fierce confrontations with the police and other authorities. But however fierce those confrontations, we recognised that to fight racism we needed to find a common set of values, hopes and aspirations that united whites and non-whites, Muslims and non-Muslims, not separate ourselves from the rest of society.

It has only been over the past decade that radical Islam has found a hearing in Britain. Why? Partly because, in this post-ideological age, the idea that we can change society through politics has taken a battering. And partly because the idea that we should aspire to a common identity and set of values has been eroded in the name of multiculturalism.

Over the past week, much has been said about the strength of London as a multicultural city. What makes London great, mayor Ken Livingstone pointed out, was what the bombers most fear – a city full of people from across the globe free to pursue their own lives. I agree, and that is why I choose to live here. Multiculturalism as lived experience enriches our lives. But multiculturalism as a political ideology has helped create a tribal Britain with no political or moral centre.

For an earlier generation of Muslims their religion was not so strong that it prevented them from identifying with Britain. Today many young British Muslims identify more with Islam than Britain primarily because there no longer seems much that is compelling about being British. Of course, there is little to romanticise in old-style Britishness with its often racist vision of belongingness. Back in the fifties policy makers feared that, in the words of a Colonial Office report, ‘a large coloured community would weaken… the concept of England or Britain.’

That old racist notion of identity has thankfully crumbled. But nothing new has come to replace it. The very notion of creating common values has been abandoned except at a most minimal level. Britishness has come to be defined simply as a toleration of difference. The politics of ideology has given way to the politics of identity, creating a more fragmented Britain, and one where many groups assert their identity through a sense of victimhood and grievance.

This has been particularly true of Muslim communities. Muslims have certainly suffered from racism and discrimination. But many Muslim leaders have nurtured an exaggerated sense of victimhood for their own political purposes. The result has been to stoke up anger and resentment, creating a siege mentality that makes Muslim community more inward looking and more open to religious extremism – and that has helped transform a small number of young men into savage terrorists.

There is nothing new, of course, in the use of terror tactics. What is new is the arbitrary, nihilistic brutality. In the past, whether we are talking Palestinians hijacking aircraft or the IRA bombing British shopping centres, terror was always in pursuit of political or strategic aims. No longer. The London bombers – like those in Madrid, Bali, and New York before them – issued no warnings, made no demands, left no list of grievances. Four men simply sneaked onto three tubes and a bus and without a word created carnage. For them, terror was an end in itself, not a means to an end. In this post-ideological age, few believe in political ends, or have a vision of political change. Few actually believe in anything, or can articulate what they believe in political terms. All they feel is a sense of anger or resentment or rage. So terrorists just lash out without any sense of what for. And without anything to believe in, without the moral restraints imposed by political activism, or the sense of responsibility to a cause or to a people, the unthinkable becomes possible. As in London last Thursday.

Different Drugs for Different Races?

Thu, 07 Jul 2005 16:26:21 +0000

This week a US government advisory panel recommended that the Food and Drug Agency grant a licence to a drug called BiDiL which helps treat congestive heart failure. The decision has kicked off a huge controversy because BiDiL will be the first racially-targeted drug. BiDiL seemed proved ineffective when tested on the general population. But when given to African Americans it appeared to cut death rates from heart failure by 43 per cent. So it’s being marketed as a black drug. Critics charge that the study was flawed and that NitroMed, the makers of BiDiL, are exploiting race for financial reasons – its patent for the general use of BiDiL has run out but it has won a new patent until 2020 for the use of the drug on African Americans.

The BiDiL debate gets to the heart of one of the most explosive issues in current medicine. Does race matter in medicine? Or should medicine be colourblind? The prestigious New England Journal of Medicine has argued that ‘race is biologically meaningless’ and that doctors should be taught about ‘the dangers inherent in practicing race-based medicine.’ Other disagree. The psychiatrist Sally Satel believes that in medicine ‘stereotyping often works’. In her Washington drug clinic, Satel prescribes different amounts of Prozac to black and white patients because, she says, the two groups seem to metabolise antidepressants at different rates.

So who is right? As with much else in debates about race, the answer is both and neither. Different populations certainly show different patterns of disease and disorder. North Europeans, for instance, are more likely to suffer from cystic fibrosis than other groups. Tay Sachs, a fatal disease of the central nervous system, particularly affects Ashkenazi Jews. Beta blockers appear to be less effective on African Americans than on those of European descent.

Yet race is not necessarily a good guide to disease. We all know, for instance, that sickle cell anaemia is a black disease. Except that it isn’t. Sickle cell is a disease of populations originating from areas with high incidence of malaria. Some of these populations are black, some are not. The sickle cell gene is found in equatorial Africa; in parts of southern Europe; in southern Turkey; parts of the Middle East; and in much of central India. Most people, however, know that African Americas suffer disproportionately from the trait. And, given popular ideas about race, most people automatically assume that what applies to black Americans also applies to all blacks and only to blacks. It is the social imagination, not the biological reality, of race that turns sickle cell into a black disease.

Genetic studies show that humans comprise a relative homogenous species and that most of our genetic variation is at individual, not group, level. Imagine that some nuclear nightmare wiped out the entire human race apart from one small population – say, the Masai tribe in East Africa. Virtually all the genetic variation that exists in the world today would still be present in that one small group. That is a dramatic way of expressing what geneticists have discovered about human differences. Around 85 per cent of human variation occurs between individuals within single populations. A further 10 per cent or so differentiates populations within a race. Only around 5 per cent of total variation distinguishes the major races. This is why many scientists reject the idea of race as meaningful.

Since most variation exists at the individual level, doctors ideally would like to map every individual’s genome to be able to predict better their potential medical problems and their responses to different drugs. Such individual genotyping is currently both practically unfeasible and too costly. Therefore, doctors often resort to using surrogate indicators of an individual’s risk profile – such as his or her race.

Until recently people were more likely to marry a neighbour than someone who hailed from distant lands. As a result the further apart two populations are geographically, the more distinct they are likely to be genetically. Icelanders are genetically different from Greeks, but they are genetically closer to Greeks than they are to Nigerians. The difference is tiny, but it can have a medical impact. Knowing the population whence your ancestors came can provide hints as to what genes you might be carrying. Hence race, Sally Satel suggests, is a ‘poor man’s clue’ in medicine.

But a poor man’s clue may be as reliable as an intelligence dossier from the British secret service. First, because there are no hard and fast divisions between populations. Every population runs into another and no gene is unique to one population. Cystic fibrosis may be more common among North Europeans but it is not confined to North Europeans. One of the dangers of marketing BiDiL as a black drug is that it may be given to American Americans who won’t respond to it, but denied to non-blacks who would benefit.

Secondly, different genes are distributed differently among populations. The pattern of distribution of the genes for cystic fibrosis is not the same as that of sickle cell genes. Which population differences are important varies from one disease to another. Finally, many medical differences associated with race or ethnicity are likely to be the result of environmental rather than genetic differences, or to be a combination of the two. In the case of BiDiL no one knows which is more important.

What all this suggests is that the question of whether medicine should be colourblind depends on the particular problem we want to address. It is a pragmatic issue, not one rooted in scientific or political principle. Race, however, is such a contentious issue that pragmatism rarely enters the debate. On the one side, so called race-realists think that population differences are so important that all medicine should be colour-coded. On the other side, many antiracists want to ban race-based research entirely for fear of its social consequences. Both are wrong. It’s time everyone calmed down and took a grown up view of the issue.

Myths of the Strangers at the Gate

Tue, 22 Mar 2005 19:11:21 +0000

There is supposed to be debate about immigration. It’s certainly passed me by. A debate pits one set of ideas against another. But when it comes to immigration, all sides agree on the fundamentals: there are too many immigrants entering Britain, many are feckless scroungers and we need more robust controls. The only ‘debate’ appears to be about how best to keep them out.

The one question that could spark a proper debate is one that no one seems willing to ask: why do we need to control immigration at all? The idea of abandoning immigration posts and throwing open our borders would undoubtedly strike most people as mad or reckless. That’s only because no one has challenged the myths of immigration that are used to justify controls.

Myth 1: ‘If we have an open door the whole world would walk in’. It’s obvious, isn’t it? Britain is rich, much of the world is desperately poor. Open the borders and the hordes would descend upon us.

Well, actually, they wouldn’t. Given the great global disparities of wealth what is striking is not that so many people move to richer climes but that so few do. Emigrating is not like going on holiday. You can’t just pack your bags and take the next easyJet flight out. You often have to abandon your family, your friends, the life and culture that you know for an alien country with strange habits and customs and where the people are often hostile. People who emigrate tend to work for a period, earn money and return home. And generally they’re not the poorest, but those who are better off, speak a foreign language and find it easier to make their way in an alien culture.

Ironically it is not an open border, but tight immigration controls, that make people move in large numbers and settle. In the 1950s, when Britain had a virtual open door, many of the initial immigrants were single men and women who expected to return home after a short time working here. Once the government began discussing the possibility of controls in the late 50s migrants started arriving in larger numbers, to try and beat the closing door. And once the 1962 Immigration Act came into force they had no choice but to settle here and bring their families over, because they knew that if they left they might never get back in again. Open borders allow people to move in and out according to need. Closed borders compel people to settle, even if they have no desire to.

Myth 2: ‘They take all our jobs’. OK, say the critics, even if the whole world doesn’t want to come here, those immigrants who do deprive indigenous workers of jobs because they provide cheap labour. Wrong again. Migrants don’t take jobs from locals, they do jobs that locals won’t do or can’t do. Two years ago the Home Office commissioned an independent report on the impact of immigration on local workers. The report looked at numerous international surveys and conducted its own study in Britain. ‘The perception that immigrants take away jobs from the existing population, or that immigrants depress the wages of existing workers’, it concluded, ‘do not find confirmation in the analysis of the data laid out in this report.’

Myth 3: ‘They’re a burden on the welfare state’. The people who make most use of state services are the young and the old. Those aged between 18 and 60 generally have less need of hospitals, schools and benefits – but pay the taxes necessary for their provision. Almost by definition, migrant workers fall into this category. The ‘benefit tourist’ is largely to be found in the imaginations of Middle England. Some ninety thousand East Europeans came to Britain last year in the first five months following EU enlargement in May. Just 15 claimed any form of benefit. Only someone who has never had to claim benefit could suggest that Britain’s social security system is an easy touch for foreigners.

Perhaps the biggest myth of all is the idea that a government can control immigration. Take, for instance, the Tory plan for an annual quota on economic migrants. Will there be some bureaucrat sitting in a Ministry of Silly Numbers deciding that we will let in 1417 strawberry pickers and 586 steel erectors next year? And what happens when we need extra pickers and erectors? Will the government say to employers, ‘tough, you’ll just have to sell less fruit and build fewer houses’? Or will employers continue, as now, to rely on illegal workers who are forced to labour in appalling conditions, for derisory wages and with no legal protection?

I’m no free marketer. I believe that the introduction of market forces into the NHS and education has had a disastrous impact. But the notion that governments are best placed to predict labour demand and hence regulate labour flow is a fairly tale. However, when it comes to the question of immigration, the apostles of the free market on both sides of the political spectrum suddenly become cheerleaders for the policies of a command economy.

For all the myths about immigration, what really drives the debate is not concern about anything so tangible as jobs or benefits. Rather it is a sense of fear – a fear that Britain is changing, identities are eroding, and communities are disintegrating. And immigrants have become the scapegoats for this sense of loss. Yet even if no immigrant had come to Britain, we would still be living in a vastly different nation from half a century ago. Feminism, consumerism, increased social mobility, greater individual freedom, the decline of traditional institutions such as the Church – all have helped transform Britain, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. It’s immigrants, however, who now get the blame for all our social ills, but little credit for the benefits they’ve brought us.

The Islamophobia Myth

Mon, 14 Feb 2005 21:04:36 +0000

Ten years ago no one had heard of Islamophobia. Now everyone from Muslim leaders to anti-racist activists to government ministers want to convince us that Britain is in the grip of an irrational hatred of Islam – a hatred that, they claim, leads to institutionalised harassment, physical attacks, social discrimination and political alienation. Former Home Office Minister John Denham has warned of the ‘cancer of Islamophobia’ infecting the nation. The veteran anti-racist Richard Stone, who was a consultant to the Stephen Lawrence inquiry, suggests that Islamophobia is ‘a challenge to us all’. The Director of Public Prosecutions has worried that the war on terror is ‘alienating whole communities’ in this country. The government is so concerned that it is introducing a new law outlawing incitement to religious hatred.

But does Islamophobia really exist? Or is the hatred and abuse of Muslims being exaggerated to suit politicians’ needs and silence the critics of Islam? The trouble with Islamophobia is that it is an irrational concept. It confuses hatred of, and discrimination against, Muslims on the one hand with criticism of Islam on the other. The charge of ‘Islamophobia’ is all too often used not to highlight racism but to stifle criticism. And in reality discrimination against Muslims is not as great as is often perceived – but criticism of Islam should be greater.

In making a film on Islamophobia for Channel 4 what became clear is the gap between perception and reality. Islamophobia driven by what people want to believe is true, rather than what really is true. A good example is the debate about police harassment of Muslims. Last summer the Home Office published figures that revealed a 300 per cent increase in the number of Asians being stopped and searched under Britain’s anti-terror laws. Journalists, Muslim leaders and even the Home Office all shouted ‘Islamophobia’. ‘The whole Muslim community is being targeted by the police’, claimed Khalid Sofi of the Muslim Council.

Certainly, the bald figure of a ’300 per cent increase’ suggests heavy handed policing and continual harassment. But dig a little deeper and the figures reveal something very different. They show that just 3000 Asians had been stopped and searched in the previous year under the Terrorism Act. Of these probably a half were Muslim. In other words around 1500 Muslims out of a population of more thtan 1.6 million had been stopped and searched under the terror laws – hardly a case of the police targeting every Muslim.

A total of 21,577 had been stopped and searched under the terror laws. The vast majority of these – 14,429 – were in fact white. Yet when I interviewed Iqbal Sacranie, general secretary of the Muslim Council of Britainhe insisted that ’95-98 per cent of those stopped and searched under the anti-terror laws are Muslim’. The real figure is actually 15 per cent. But however many times I showed him the true statistics he refused to budge. I am sure he was sincere in his belief. But there is no basis for his claim that virtually all those stopped and searched were Muslim – the figures appear to have been simply plucked out of the sky.

There is disproportion in the treatment of Asians. Asians make up about 5 per cent of the population, but 15 per cent of those stopped under the Terrorism Act. Could this be because of anti-Muslim prejudice? Perhaps. It’s more likely, however, to be the result of majority of anti-terror sweeps taking place in areas – near Heathrow Airport, for instance – where there happen to be higher numbers of Asians. Almost two thirds of terrorism stop and search operations took place in London, where Asians form 11 per cent of the population.

The claims of Islamophobia become even less credible if we look at all stop and searches. Stop and searches under the Terrorism Act form only a tiny proportion of the 900,000 stop and searches that took place last year. If there was widespread Islamophobia within the police force we should expect to find Asians in disproportionate numbers in the overall figures. We don’t. Asians are stopped and searched roughly in proportion to their population once age structure is taken into account.

All these figures are in the public domain and easily available. Yet not a single reputable journalist challenged the claim that Asians were being disproportionately stopped and searched. So pervasive is the acceptance of Islamophobia, that no-one even bothers to check if it is true.

As it happens, there is evidence that stop and search is used in a racist way. But the victims are not Asian. Theyre black. Blacks form 3 per cent of the population but 14 per cent of those stopped and searched. Youre five times more likely to be stopped and searched if youre black than if youre Asian – not that youd know from all the hoo-hah about Islamophobia. One of the consequences of the exaggeration of anti-Muslim prejudice is to hide the real discrimination.

In the debate about police harassment, there are objective statistics against which to check claims about Islamophobia. When it comes to physical attacks, however, the truth is harder to discern. What constitutes racist attack has changed dramatically over the past 20 years. These days everything from name-calling to brutal assaults are included in the statistics. The problem is compounded by the fact that in the wake of the McPherson Inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence, the police are obliged to accept the victim’s perception of the attack. If the victim believes it to be a racist attack the police have to treat it as such, leading to a large subjective element in the reporting.

If statistics for racist attacks are difficult to compile, it is even more difficult to define what is an Islamophobic attack. Should we treat every attack on a Muslim as Islamophobic? If an Afghan taxi driver is assaulted, is this a racist attack, an Islamophobic incident or simply a case of random violence? Such uncertainty gives licence to peddle all sorts of claims about Islamophobia. According to Iqbal Sacranie of the Muslim Council of Britain, Muslims have never faced greater physical danger than they do now. The editor of Muslim News Ahmed Versi similarly believes that ‘after September 11th we had the largest number of attacks ever on Muslims’.

Both personal experience, however, and such statistics as do exist, challenge these claims. When I was growing up in the 70s and 80s racism was vicious, visceral and often fatal. Stabbings were common, firebombings almost weekly events. In May 1978, 10,000 Bengalis marched in protest from Whitechapel to Whitehall in protest at the murder of garment worker Altab Ali near Brick Lane – one of 8 racist murders that year. In the decade that followed there were at least another 49 such killings. For Muslims, the end of the 80s, in the period from the Salman Rushdie affair to the first Gulf War, was particularly tough. I remember having to organise patrols on East London estates to protect Asian families from racist thugs.

Britain is a very different place these days – even for Muslims. Certainly there are racist attacks, and vicious assaults on Muslims. Early in December, for instance, three young Muslims were beaten up in Manchester by a 15-strong gang in what the police described as a ‘dreadful racial attack’. Yet, despite such incidents, we’ve moved a long way from the 70s and 80s, and I get little sense of the intensity of racism that we faced then.

What statistics are available lends weight to this personal perception. The European Union was so concerned about Islamophobic attacks that it commissioned a special report in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. In the four months following the attack on the World Trade Centre, the EU discovered around a dozen serious physical attacks on British Muslims. That is certainly a dozen too many attacks, but it does not speak of a climate of vicious Islamophobia. ‘There were very few serious attacks’, acknowledges the report’s author Chris Allen. Islamophobia ‘manifested itself in quite basic and low level ways.’

Even Muslim organisations that campaign against Islamophobia find it difficult to make the case for there being widespread attacks on Muslims. The Islamic Human Rights Commission monitored 344 attacks on Muslims in the year after September 11, most of which were relatively minor incident such as shoving or spitting. For the victim, each attack is nasty and distressing. But taken together they do not suggest a climate of uncontrolled hostility towards Muslims.

What all this suggests is a huge gap between perception and reality. And it’s a gap that’s exploited by both Muslim leaders and mainstream politicians. For Muslim leaders, inflating the threat of helps consolidate their power base, both within their own communities and within wider society. British Muslims have long looked with envy at the political power wielded by the Jewish community, and by the status accorded to the British Board of Deputies. One of the reasons for setting up the Muslim Council of Britain was to try to emulate the political success of the Board of Deputies. Muslim leaders talk about using Islamophobia in the same way that they perceive Jewish leaders have exploited fears about anti-Semitism.

Exaggerating anti-Muslim prejudice is also useful for mainstream politicians, and especially for a government that has faced such a political battering over the war on Iraq and its anti-terror laws. Being sensitive to Islamophobia allows them to reclaim some of the moral high ground. It also allows Labour politicians to pitch for the Muslim vote. Muslims may feel ‘betrayed’ by the war on Iraq, trade minister Mike O’Brien wrote recently in The Muslim Weekly. But ‘the Labour government are trying to deliver an agenda that has shown consideration and respect for Muslims.’ According to O’Brien ‘Iqbal Sacranie, the General Secretary of the Muslim Council, asked Tony Blair to declare that the Government would introduce a new law banning religious discrimination. Two weeks later, in the middle of his speech to the Labour Party Conference, Tony Blair promised that the next Labour Government would ban religious discrimination. It was a major victory for the Muslim community in Britain.’

Pretending that Muslims have never had it so bad might bolster community leaders and gain votes for politicians, but it does the rest of us, whether Muslim or non-Muslim, no favours at all. The more that the threat of Islamophobia is exaggerated, the more that ordinary Muslims come to accept that theirs is a community under constant attack. It helps create a siege mentality, stoking up anger and resentment, and making Muslim communities more inward looking and more open to religious extremism. Muslim leaders constantly warn that Islamophobia is alienating Muslims and pushing many into the hands of extremists. However, it’s not Islamophobia, but the perception that it blights lives, that is often the bigger problem. In making my Channel 4 documentary I asked dozens of ordinary Muslims across the country about their experience of Islamophobia. Everyone believed that police harassment was common though no one had been stopped and searched. Everyone insisted that physical attacks were rife, though few had been attacked or knew anyone who had.

What is being created here is a culture of victimhood in which ‘Islamophobia’ has become one-stop cause of the myriad of problems facing Muslims. Take, for instance, the social problems which beset Muslim communities. The figures are truly appalling. Bangladeshis and Pakistanis (who comprise most of Muslims in this country) are two and a half times more likely to be unemployed than are whites. Average earnings among Muslim men are 68 per cent that of non-Muslim men. 65 per cent of Bangladeshis are semi-skilled manual workers compared with 23 per cent among other ethnic minorities and 15 per cent among white Britons. Fifty four per cent of Pakistani and Bangladeshi homes receive income support. In 2000, 30 per cent of Pakistani students gained five or more good GCSEs, compared with 50 per cent in the population as a whole.

It has become common to blame all of this on Islamophobia. According to the Muslim News, ‘media reportage and public discourse on Islam and Muslims have a huge impact on Muslim labour market performance’. Islamophobia shapes ‘how Muslim children are treated in schools’, the ‘self-esteem on Muslim children’ as well as ‘their educational achievements’. Unemployment, poverty and poor educational standards is not, however, a new phenomenon in Muslim communities in this country. And the causes are myriad. Racism certainly plays a part. So does class. The social profile of Pakistanis and Bangladeshis is closer to that of Afro-Caribbeans than it is to Indians or Chinese. That is because while the latter are often from middle class backgrounds, most Banglandeshis, Pakistanis and Afro-Caribebans originally came from poor working class or rural, with few resources, especially to combat the intense racism they faced in this country. Class plays as important a role as race or religion in explaining the poor performance of Muslims. Indeed, Indian Muslims tend to be far better of than those from Bangladesh or Pakistan – and conversely Bangladeshi and Pakistani non-Muslims tend to be worse off.

Some also point the finger at cultural practices within some Muslim communities. ‘By and large’, the journalist Yasmin Alibhai Brown acknowledges, ‘the lowest achieving communities in this country are Muslim. When you talk to people about why this is happening the one reason they give you, the only reason they give you, is Islamophobia.’ It’s not an argument that Alibhai Brown accepts. ‘It is not Islamophobia that makes parents take 14 year old bright girls out of school to marry illiterate men, and the girl has again to bring up the next generation who will again be denied not just education but the value of education.’

Alibhai Brown disagrees with me about the extent of Islamophobia, believing that it is a major force shaping Muslim lives. But, she adds, it has also become ‘a convenient label, a figleaf, a reason that is so comfortable for Muslims whenever they have to look at why they aren’t in the places that they have to be. All too often Islamophobia is used as an excuse in a way to kind of blackmail society.’

What all this suggests is the need for an open, frank debate about Muslims and their relationship to wider British society. There is clearly prejudice and fear of Islam in this country. Muslims do get harassed and attacked because of their faith. At the same time the degree of hatred and discrimination is being exaggerated to suit particular political agendas, stoking up resentment and creating a victim culture.

The likelihood of such a frank, open debate is, however, not very high. ‘Islamophobia’ has become not just a description of anti-Muslim prejudice but also a prescription for what may or may not be said about Islam. Every year, the Islamic Human Rights Commission organises a mock awards ceremony for its ‘Islamophobe of the Year’. Last year there were two British winners. One was the BNP’s Nick Griffin. The other? Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee. Toynbees defence of secularism and womens rights, and criticism of Islam, was, it declared, unacceptable. Isn’t it absurd, I asked the IHRC’s Massoud Shadjareh, to equate a liberal anti-racist like Polly Toynbee with the leader of a neo-fascist party. Not at all, he suggested. ‘There is a difference between disagreeing and actually dismissing certain ideologies and certain principles. We need to engage and discuss. But theres a limit to that.’ It is difficult to know what engagement and discussion could mean when leading Muslim figures seem unable to distinguish between liberal criticism and neo-fascist attacks.

It would be tempting to dismiss the IHRC as a fringe organisation. It’s not. It is a consultant body to the UN. Its work has been praised by the CRE. More importantly its principal argument – that in a plural society, free speech is limited by the need not to give offence to particular religious or cultural groups – has become widely accepted. So, for instance, the government is proposing new legislation to outlaw incitement to religious hatred. The Serious and Organised Crime and Police Bill will make it an offence to knowingly use words, behaviour or material that is threatening, abusive or insulting with the intention or likely effect that hatred will be stirred up against a group of people targeted because of their religious beliefs Supporters of the law claim that it will extend to Muslims, and other faith groups, the same protection that racial groups already possess. Sikhs and Jews are already by the Race Relations Act. The new law is aimed squarely at meeting Muslim concerns that they seem to have been left out.

In fact it is already an offence to perpetrate religious hatred. The 1986 Public order Act was amended in 1998 to include the offence of ‘religious aggravation’. A person commits and offence if he ‘displays any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening abusive or insulting, within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress.’ The offence ‘may be committed in a public or private place.’ Shortly after 9/11, Mark Norwood, a BNP member, was convicted under this law after he placed a poster in his window with a picture of the World Trade centre in flames and the slogan ‘Islam out of Britain’.

In any case, there is a fundamental difference between race and religion. You can’t choose your skin colour; you can choose your beliefs. Religion is a set of beliefs. I can be hateful about other beliefs, such as conservatism or communism. So why can’t I be hateful about religion too? It’s a question that supporters of the law have continually ducked.

In practice the law could be a nightmare to enforce. Every Muslim leader I’ve spoken to wants to use the law to ban Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. Several believe that my own articles on Islam and free speech are Islamophobic and should fall under the scope of the law. Ahmed Versi, the editor of Muslim News, thinks that Margaret Thatcher should have been prosecuted for suggesting that after September 11 there had not been ‘enough condemnation of terrorism from Muslim priests’.

Ten years ago the then Conservative government rejected a similar law precisely because ministers feared that it could be used to ban The Satanic Verses. Today Home Office Ministers and the Director of Public Prosecutions assure everyone that this won’t happen. ‘We will still be free to insult each other’, the DPP Ken Macdonald told me. In which case many Muslims are not going to be satisfied. Having encouraged exaggerated fears about anti-Muslim prejudice, and led Muslims to believe that the new law has been designed to meet their concerns, ministers might find it difficult to dampen Muslim demands. The current view of the courts is that material that encourages public disorder can be seen as inciting racial or religious hatred. The new law may actually create greater public disorder as disgruntled groups attempt to censor what they consider to be offensive works. The scenes in Birmingham outside the Sikh play Behzti may well be repeated many times over.

In a sense, though, the flaws in the proposed law are irrelevant, because its real value is not practical but, in the words of the Director of Public Prosecutions, ‘symbolic’. The legislation sets out, not to provide legal remedy for a real problem, but to make a moral statement about what is and is not socially acceptable. The real aim of the law is not to censor us, but to get ourselves to censor ourselves.

In fact, we already live in a culture of growing self-censorship. A decade ago, the Independent asked me to write an essay on Tom Paine, the eighteenth century English revolutionary and freethinker. It was the 200th anniversary of his great polemic, The Age of Reason. I began the article with a quote from Salman Rushdies The Satanic Verses to show the continuing relevance of Paine’s battle against religious authority. The quote was cut out because it was deemed too offensive to Muslims. The irony of censoring an essay in celebration of freethinking seemed to elude the editor.

These days it is becoming increasingly common for liberals to proclaim free speech is necessary in principle – but also to argue that in practice we should give up that right. Ruminating in the Guardian about the fallout from the Behzti affair, Ian Jack, editor of Granta magazine, suggested that whatever liberals believe in principle, in practice we need to appease religious sensibilities. ‘The state has no law forbidding a pictorial representation of the Prophet’, he pointed out, ‘But I never expect to see such a picture. On the one hand, there is the individual’s right to exhibit or publish one; on the other hand, the immeasurable insult and damage to life and property that the exercise of such a right would cause.’ He added that ‘In this case, we understand that the price is too high – even though we, the faithless, don’t understand the offence.’

John Mortimor has described this as ‘tiptoeing around doing our best not to irritate other people by disagreeing with their opinions’. The irony of this approach is that it actually undermines what is valuable about living in a diverse society. Diversity is important, not in and of itself, but because it allows us to expand our horizons, to compare and contrast different values, beliefs and lifestyles, and make judgements upon them. In other words, because it allows us to engage in political dialogue and debate that can help create more universal values and beliefs, and a collective language of citizenship. But it is precisely such dialogue and debate, and the making of such judgements, that contemporary multiculturalism attempts to suppress in the name of ‘tolerance’ and ‘respect’.