Daily Mail, December 10 2001

At last a politician is beginning to speak the truth about one of the most sensitive issues of our time. As the Home Secretary David Blunkett has now acknowledged, too many minority citizens feel they don’t belong to Britain.

His response is not to sink further into the multicultural mire that has promoted disharmony, but to propose robustly that minorities must do more to give their children and grandchildren a sense of what it is to be British.

In particular, he says that people seeking citizenship should learn English, and that practices such as forced marriages or female circumcision are incompatible with British values. All too predictably, the knee-jerk response from certain quarters has been to whine that such remarks will only promote racism.

But anyone really attuned to the pressures behind racism and alienation will understand that Blunkett is charting some compass points for the difficult path minorities have to tread between preserving their own culture and subscribing to a common and over-arching citizenship.

Tomorrow, [Tues] a clutch of reports is being published arising from recent disturbances in northern mill towns involving Muslim youths and racist groups. In addition, there have been Muslim attacks on churches in Bradford and upon Sikhs elsewhere.

As tomorrow’s reports will say, although the riots in northern towns were sparked by extremist groups like the National Front or British National Party fomenting trouble, the root problem was that Muslims there had come to live in virtually segregated ghettoes which gave rise to suspicion and resentment.

There is no doubt that Muslims are being subjected to often vicious assaults motivated by prejudice. But there is also no doubt that they have a problem of alienation which is not shared by other minorities such as Jews, Hindus or Sikhs.

Muslims have great difficulty accepting their minority status within a British culture rooted in values which are in some crucial respects different from theirs. Instead, they not only keep themselves separate from British society but expect it to change to accommodate their own values.

The real problem, though, is that many Muslims don’t accept this is a problem. They react aggressively to any such suggestion, claiming it is an attack upon Islam. Moderate Muslims, they insist, are vastly in the majority. The problem, therefore, lies with British ‘islamophobia’.

But the current issue of Q News, the magazine of Muslim youth, features prominently three young Muslims who say they support Osama bin Laden, blame the Jews for being behind a ‘conspiracy’ against Islam and praise the ‘boys going for jihad’. So why are these British-born young Muslims so alienated from the values of their country?

The root cause is surely that Islam teaches hostility towards modernity and corrupt western values of materialism and individualism. Some of this criticism happens to be shared by many others who are also concerned about the breakdown in western morality.

But there is a crucial difference. For many Muslims conceive western values as an attack on the Islamic way of life. They are taught that western culture is colonialist and racist, a message amplified catastrophically by the ideologues and useful idiots who have promoted the multiculturalist agenda.

Since Muslims are under a duty to defend their faith against attack, this analysis effectively provides a justification for aggression. But it can also be a force for social good.

Tomorrow, Blunkett plans to visit Balsall Heath in Birmingham. This is a significant choice for the day when everyone will be discussing minority alienation. For Balsall Heath is a model of ethnic and religious co-operation. Its Muslim residents have played an essential role in rebuilding a community of which they are very much an integral and involved part.

It was the area’s Muslims who, by showing an energy and moral purpose completely lacking among other residents of different faiths or none, drove out the social nuisance of kerb-crawling and street prostitution from their area and brought about a remarkable drop in crime.

But the other side of this coin is the Muslims’ expectation that where values clash, the majority culture should give ground but Islam should not compromise at all. So, for example, one Muslim cleric in Birmingham had to restrain members of his flock from trying to prevent any non-Muslim writers from producing articles critical of Islam.

Now, though, Blunkett has stated not only that those who accept Britain’s hospitality must accept its ‘norms of acceptability’ but that the English should ‘celebrate their roots and identity’.

This is a statement of great significance. For first time in recent memory, a politician has dared assert the primacy of English cultural traditions within Britain. Blunkett has thus declared war upon the multicultural approach which says the very idea of a dominant culture is racist and that all cultures must have equal status.

This approach has been an unmitigated disaster. It has deprived both indigenous and minority children of any common culture which binds them together, instead dissolving social bonds into often viciously competing fragments.

The logic of Blunkett’s remarks should mean that schools once again transmit British identity through the teaching of British political history, English language and literature and an understanding of the Christian values on which western democracy is based. This would be a revolution indeed.

There is, though, a powerful secular majority which wants to run religion out of public life altogether. On the horizon looms the prospect of European-wide attempts to outlaw ritual slaughter and male circumcision, which would be a direct attack on the legitimate religious practices of both Muslims and Jews.

This secular intolerance is currently coalescing around a campaign to stop the expansion of faith schools to which the government is committed. But like Christian or Jewish schools, Muslim schools should be encouraged in the state sector because they bring added value to a regulated system.

What’s more alarming, and more difficult to deal with, is what children may be learning in the private Muslim schools or madrasahs – many of which are funded by Saudi Arabia to promote a fundamentalist and extremist message.

There is now an intense debate being conducted among Muslims who are hideously embarrassed by the alienation of their young and by the lethal impression that they are not committed to Britain.

In another part of Q News, a young Muslim writes about the bankruptcy of ‘mosque Islam’ and its politicised self-obsession and anger which have so damaged relations between Muslims and the wider community.

Everything should be done to support courageous Muslims like these who are trying to reform their faith. It is entirely possible to adhere to a public culture of citizenship and still preserve religious or ethnic traditions through family and the minority community.

But to achieve this delicate equilibrium, moderate Muslims have to put their own house in order. Whether their community will be prepared to accept a status as a respected and valued minority, however, is very much an open question.

Posted by tom at December 10, 2001