Looking Back from the Future - Q-News July 2006, Issue 367

From anti-terrorism laws and foreign policy to extremism and radicalisation - Britain’s Muslims have been reacting to crisis, dealing with real and perceived conundrums, rolling up their sleeves and trying to make the best of what at times has seemed like an awfully bad situation. It’s been a year of fire fighting. That’s all right for now, says H.A.Hellyer, but it’s no way to develop a long-term vision of Muslim communities that are truly integral to Britain’s future.

In the aftermath of the 7th July attacks, many within and without the Muslim community tried to engage in ‘fire-fighting’ the issues. Many sincere intentions have turned into some successes, but such a reactionary approach cannot be the only perspective. At best, it is a framework that lacks vision and foresight. At worst, it involves poor ‘quick-fixes’ and hopeless mantras - uncourageous, and uninspiring. There are challenges facing us all - as Muslims and non-Muslims, as Britons and as Europeans - and they are going to require a bit more valour and imagination. Instead of looking at ourselves a year on in retrospect, we need to look a decade forwards and work backwards.

Will there be a vision for British Muslims of audacity and splendour? Or will the very idea of any vision at all be cast aside and dismissed as a luxury that cannot be afforded in this terror/anti-terror age?

The challenges we face are universal: closing the gap between the rich and the poor; ensuring excellent health care delivery for an ageing population; delivering safe, clean and sustainable energy; resolving the crisis of ‘identity’ and ‘values’; reversing environmental collapse; increasing genuine participatory democracy, and improving people-to-people trust. The future of Britain rests on more than dealing only with the issues, however important, that came out of the July 2005 bombings.

As for the Muslim community, committed to Islam as a faith and to Britain as their home, what are the possible contributions to Europe that arise out of their being Muslim? What makes that contribution unique from a non-Muslim European, if at all? What contribution to Islamic intellectual history in the long term will be made by European and British Muslims?

For all the scare mongering about a coming ‘Eurabia’ and the tabloid exposes of ‘Londonistan’, the majority of Britons are not about to support throwing the British Muslim population into internment camps. There is an acknowledgement that Muslims are here to stay.

That cannot be taken as an inevitable, inexorable reality. A careful look at the debate in the UK show that there is a significant segment of the non-Muslim community that are still undecided as to how they will relate to the Muslims in their midst, and how Muslims relate to them.

For its faults, multiculturalism, at least, brought recognition to and the respect of difference. So, what now? Should we adopt the laissez-faire - live and let live - approach, where we have a minimum of common values shared between communities and individuals of different backgrounds? Or are we going to build a new social contract where we agree on certain fundamental common values?

This is possibly the political issue of our time - which moves people across the political spectrum. It speaks to concerns of the ‘withering of the nation’ that so obsesses tabloids and Middle England. So far, the far-right - except for a handful of elected councillors -has proven relatively incompetent, and incapable of exploiting the issue. But this may not be the case for forever.

Muslims will either prove to be an essential, integral element with a key role in the discussion, or be a marginal contributor - a subject of analysis rather than a participatory force. This is not a choice that should be taken lightly. If the concerns above are combined with the growing feeling that Islam is a foreign, alien religion, rather than an integral British one, the possible outcomes to Muslim communities could be remarkably damaging.

Muslims, in order to fulfil their duties to their communities and to remain faithful to their principles, can be involved in an ‘integralisation’ process from within. A process that does not ‘assimilate’ them, but that encourages them to engage in society in a full and constructive manner.

This is not entirely a populist demand of the Muslim community, but if wholly orthodox and traditional Muslim communities in non-Arab environments built integrally Islamic and indigenous cultures there, Western Muslim communities can do so as well. Not the creation of a parallel culture, but a manner to navigate the existing one whilst simultaneously contributing to it, positively and for the long term.

The alternative, which many minority communities in the West have already taken, is to try to rebuild non-indigenous, imported cultures in their new circumstances. Like a tree grown and nurtured in one place, then uprooted and re-planted in another environment, fungus and weeds along with it. It seems likely the local soil will reject it.

On the other hand, the original seed that was planted elsewhere, and which has been planted in many places, can be planted here in the West, and cultivated here. It can, will and should look different. The 12th century philosopher Abu Hamid al-Ghazali in his O Beloved Son wrote that the peak of good etiquette (adab) is that “you do not burden people according to your own pleasure, but burden yourselves according to their pleasures so long as they do not violate the Shari’ah.”

Such is a principle of tolerance and self-sacrifice widespread in the Islamic intellectual heritage that is often forgotten in an era of identity politics. It is a principle that would likely go a long way in building a community of Muslims that are respectful of their own differences, as well as their differences with non-Muslims.

In this, faithfulness to the religion need not be used as an excuse. The Malays of Southeast Asia remained true to the orthopraxic heritage brought by Hadhrami traders and immigrants from Yemen, but even their upholding of their inherited Shafi’i madhhab (school of jurisprudence) was slightly different from Yemen. The heartlands of that school of law are now actually in Southeast Asia, yet the niqab (face-veil) [ordinarily encouraged according to Shafi’i teachings] is not generally worn. This was not historically decried as a deviant attitude. Such a stance avoided an unnecessary confrontation with a culture that did not generally have the face-veil as a part of its makeup.

That is not only a cultural exercise, but an ideational one as well. The scholars of Islam in the past not only partook of superficial habits and social norms, but also of philosophical paradigms; examining them, engaging them, and ultimately filtering them through their own Islamic frameworks. They were fundamentally faithful but not dourly dogmatic.

It is important to point out how wrong some authors are in their ‘Eurabia’ discourses, but pointing it out is not enough. It must be accompanied by Muslims being actively involved in building Britain, not remaining content with a ‘leave us alone, and we’ll all get along’ attitude.

The fear that Muslims would not relate to the dominant culture, and in fact, repel themselves from it as much as possible, is shared not only by figures such as Britain’s Phillips, Italy’s Oriana Fallaci or France’s Bardot. It is also a fear that has been expressed by Pope Benedict XVI, and growing numbers of European intellectuals, who may not be averse to respecting difference, but who wish to do so on less relativistic terms.

The racism, xenophobia and Islamophobia of the BNP will not change the fact that many of their stances have resonance with the white majority. The far-right did not create the concern that many have for these issues; the far-right only exploited those issues, and gave their own answers. Consider that in France, around 20% of the population voted for the far-right Front Nationale; but when the issues were actually polled, around 70% were sympathetic to their stances. Their political advance was halted, but Muslim communities should take heed. Issues surrounding identity and national belonging should not be ignored by these communities; rather, Muslim communities should take the discussion on board, head-on. Reasonable and well-thought out answers need to be provided.

The debate about integralisation is not a new one; Ibn Taymiyya made this clear when he advised that Muslims acculturate themselves to their non-Muslim environments provided they do not commit forbidden actions. As far as Ibn Taymiyya was concerned, failing to do so would not only endanger their survival, but also stand as an obstacle to their bearing witness to Islam to others.

Modern Muslims are often dissatisfied with traditional Islam because of its seeming unwillingness to ‘come into the 21st century’. Tariq Ramadan has sought to explore this issue by asking, “Is Islam in need of a Reformation?” The reality is that a “reformation” exercise is not required or desired. ‘Upgrading’ or ‘contemporising’, conversely, is not only permitted, but demanded by orthodoxy.

This is not to say that the Muslim should simply accept the hegemonic terms in this discussion that are placed in front of him or her as a fait accompli, but that the discussion has to be entered into, forcefully and imaginatively. Otherwise, the discussion will go on without the Muslim contribution.

Leadership is what is needed. It is not easy. Emotions run high within, making long-term visionary steps difficult, even to articulate - a year on, that is at least obvious. Expectations from government and wider British society make leadership even more difficult. On the one hand, Muslim leaders must forge a path ahead for their communities to follow. On the other, they must remain faithful to their own principles, rather than simply heeding the beckoning call of the non-Muslim majority - hardly a soft rock, or a tender hard place. It is not an easy job. Muslim representative organisations can be criticised all day and all night, but they are trying to hold onto the support of their communities, which are instinctively (after years of bigotry) averse to criticism, particularly with regards to national belonging, while at the same time as managing a diverse ethnic community with a plurality of religious outlooks. The risk could be that those who say the right things may not be very popular. But visionaries are usually those people saying things that people don’t want to hear.

History teaches us that there are different paths that a vision for Muslims might take. With tiny numbers, Chinese Muslims virtually dominated the import-export business by the time of the Sung Dynasty (960-1279 CE), and the office of Director General of Shipping (not an insignificant post) was consistently held by Muslims during this period. The ‘Golden Age’ of Islam in China came about a hundred years later. Uzbek lands with their Muslim minority bequeathed Muslims the Sahih of Imam Bukhari, one of the most significant collections of authenticated Prophetic narrations. It was someone born on European soil, Abu Madyan Shu’ayb ibn al-Hasani al-Ansari of Cantillana (near Seville), that spawned many of the great mystical traditions of the East. It was in Cordoba, that the lasting contributions to Islam by Ibn Hazm, al-Qurtubi, al-Zarqali, al-Ghafiqi, Ibn Tufayl, Ibn Rushd and Ibn al-’Arabi took place. Many of these contributions had a remarkable impact on not just Muslim civilisation, but the rest of the world. Is this kind of output even conceivable today in Muslim European communities?

The potential is certainly there to contribute in remarkable and creative ways to a revitalisation of our country, our continent and indeed, our world. In the current debate, such potential is less seen, and less obvious. Truly visionary leadership will inspire ordinary Muslims to become agents of this kind of change.