Divided Loyalties, Empowered Citizenship? Muslims in Britain

Abstract

Fear of Muslims, Islamophobia, is embedded in stereotypical assumptions and pronouncements regarding selected customs and, above all, the inherently fanatical, violent and irrational tendencies of Muslim leaders and their followers. The further point of such discourses is the claim that these alien qualities and attributes have come to be implanted in the Western body itself, no longer simply confined to its 'bloody boundaries', to cite Huntington, but extending within and across them. A substantial Muslim diasporic presence has emerged in Europe and the West, and even some Western liberals, who pride themselves on their enlightened tolerance, appear concerned about the capacity of this culturally alien presence, as they see it, to integrate'. Such doubts surfaced especially during the Rushdie affair and the Gulf war, both of which seemed to expose the chasm between so-called Western 'values' and Islamic ones. In denying the validity of this antagonistic vision according to which Muslim minorities are intrinsically antithetical to Western democractic practices, the aim of the present paper is twofold: first, to highlight the rise of an alternative contemporary debate about the rights and obligations of Muslims as minorities in the West which is currently animating Muslim and Western scholars, clerics and activists; and second, to argue that Muslim diasporic transnational mobilisation, including even the conflicts surrounding the Rushdie affair and the Gulf war, have been key moments in the development of a Muslim British civic consciousness and capacity for active citizenship. Far from revealing ambiguous loyalties or unbridgeable cultural chasms, British Muslim transnational loyalties have challenged the national polity, I argue, to explore new forms of multiculturalism and to work for new global human rights causes. At the same time such mobilisations have been part of the learning process of becoming a politically effective diaspora. In the long run, then, the Muslim diasporic presence in Britain is a potentially enriching one, and particularly so as the state moves to becoming a post-national, multicultural polity.