The erstwhile Foreign Minister, Robin Cook, proclaimed Britain’s favourite dish is Chicken Tikka Masala in response to claims that ‘Anglo-Saxon culture’ was being undermined. Norman Tebitt’s, ‘Britishness’ could be decided by test cricket, England versus Pakistan - supporting Pakistan is to be ‘something other’. Definitions of what is ‘British’ and what is ‘something other’ have long been the privilege of the ruling Protestant English. However, beyond the political and rhetorical jingoism lie important questions of identity and belonging for Britain’s Muslims. The presence of Muslims in Britain can be traced to early medieval times with an interesting chronology of influences, events and characters. However, the formation of a sizeable Muslim community in Britain is a relatively new phenomenon, which begins, in the early nineteenth century to the present. The decline of Britain’s global dominance and the settlement of large Muslim post-colonial migrant communities are subject areas well documented but the social and political inclusion of this large Muslim population as full, equal and participating British citizens is hindered by external perceptions and projections rather than internal conflicts that may occur as a result of shifting or new identities. In relation to the ‘Britishness’ of Britain’s Muslims, perceptions of Muslims as the paradigmatic other have been crystallised by the comments above by politicians from both ends of the political spectrum.

Racism is of course not particular to Britain, it is part of a global phenomenon structured within the framework of the capitalist world economy. But just as economies transform so too does racism along the same politico-economic structures and social formations. For example, compare the plight of pre-eighteenth century European Jews with the fully Europeanised communities in existence today. This process was, in part, the result of Wilhelm Christian Dohm’s efforts for Jewish emancipation, who declared in 1781 that Jews were capable of enlightenment and should therefore be fully assimilated into European society. Although Marxist studies on racism pinpoint the economic roots of the current crisis, the evolution of racism encompasses the combined effects of economic, political, ideological and cultural processes. Racism as it exists in Britain today cannot be treated merely as a sociological phenomenon: it has to be located in the historical development of the political and religious structures of British society. Whilst some scholars have meticulously traced the roots of British racism to nascent sixteenth century colonialism, others cite the Enlightenment as the major contributor in the construction of a systematic and institutionalised racism. The Enlightenment project worked in parallel with reasserted Protestant pietism and evangelism and the tensions between both surfaced as empirical rationalism versus religious emotion. Further, the Enlightenment’s reliance on Greek classicism imposed anthropological notions and value judgements based on physical beauty. Both phrenology (skull reading) and physiognomy (reading the face) are rooted in eighteenth century anthropology.

It would be wrong to absolve Protestant Christianity from the developed ideologies of racism that emanated via the Enlightenment. The origins of pietistic Protestant domination can be dated back to 1517 when Martin Luther nailed up his catalogue of contentions on the Cathedral doors at Wittenberg. The two major themes of Luther’s reformation movement were individualism - in rights and responsibilities and egalitarianism - the reforms saw the authority of the Church disempowered and Christianity demystified. Absolution by priests was no longer needed when salvation could be sought through ‘works’. Reformist thinking undermined the feudal society and in a sense laid the foundations for modern western democracy. The decentralisation of the institutionalised Church gave rise to the phenomenon of Christian ‘sects’. Religious plurality not only questioned traditional church dogmatics; it also instigated the birth of the secular nation state. Protestantism through an asserted religious piety began an intolerant and irreconcilable polarity between not only Papist Christians, but also Muslims and Jews. Luther wrote in 1529, ‘May our dear Lord Jesus Christ, help and come down from heaven with the last judgement, and smite both Turk and Pope to the earth’. This newly developed ‘choseness’ theorised eschatology with distinct imperialist and racial assertions. The Protestant obsession with Jewish ‘restorationism’, a peculiar form of non-Jewish Zionism preached that if the Jews could be restored to Palestine they would rise-up and annihilate the Muslims. Thereafter, Jews would convert to Christianity and the removal of Islam and Judaism would give Britain control of Jerusalem in preparation for the Messiah. This reductionist ideology served both British imperialist dreams and the Protestant millenarianist eschatology. This Pax Britannica vision was remarkably partially realised some three centuries later.

Colonialism, with its primary economic function, reinforced racist ideologies formulated via empirical sciences which were further condoned in the form of religious supremacy and Protestant revivalism. Religious zeal may have helped to provide a moral and spiritual validation for Britain’s empire building which began in the reign of Elizabeth 1. In many respects the unevangelised pagan faired better than his Muslim counterpart - the ‘Noble Savage’ was preferred over the ‘Saracen Infidel’. In the sixteenth century a man’s colour had become a defining characteristic and determining factor in his salvation. It was believed that the Africans’ blackness was ‘biblical’ and represented Ham’s original disobedience to Noah. Within Christian cosmology racism was transmogrifying ‘others’ into devils whose external blackness was an open manifestation of an even greater darkness within. By the nineteenth century Britain’s global politico-economic dominance was transformed into military might. After two world wars in the twentieth century, the Muslim world was dismantled and neatly carved-up between its European beneficiaries. The sub-conscious fear of Ottoman military supremacy and Muslim economic dominance experienced in medieval times had finally been exorcised.

Imperialism brought an influx of immigrant workers to Britain in two distinct waves. The first saw a small number of colonial subjects in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some came as traders and merchants whilst others found their way here as sailors. The second wave came after world war two when the British government, prompted by industrialists, encouraged large numbers of South Asians to the UK during the post-war economic boom. Although an institutionalised structured racism was set in place long before Britain received its first Black and Asian immigrants, the ‘alien’ cultures were seen as the cause and the symptom of the destruction of the ‘British way of life’. This perceived ‘threat’ led to race riots in the late 1950s after tensions mounted in the face of rising racial discrimination. Race riots are an integral feature of British racism dating to twelfth century Jewish pogroms. The ‘Lascars’ of Bristol, Cardiff, Liverpool and South Shields were the subjects of race violence in 1919 and the 1930s. Whilst the Labour Party condemned the 1958 riots and opposed racial discrimination and immigration controls, the Conservative government, in 1959, introduced a Bill to control commonwealth immigration to Britain. The political parties have ever since pandered to the fears of racists and ethnic minorities alike, both gaining much political capital in the process. Whilst the real issues relating to racism are never addressed, endemic institutionalised racism is nurtured and perpetuated.

A pedantic and etymological definition of the word British might be, ‘relating to, denoting, or characteristic of Britain or any of its natives, citizens or inhabitants of the United Kingdom.’ If one studies the historical development of the British nation we would find that this ubiquitous definition of ‘British’ reflects the true composition of its people. Clearly, being British is to be part of an eclectic multi-racial and cultural phenomenon and the earliest inhabitants of these Isles were the Indo-European Celtic peoples. The Anglo-Saxon arrival in the fifth century was not just another colonisation; it was the beginning of a new hybrid race – the English. Anglo-Saxon settlers marginalised British language, religion and culture through their dominance. The Britons or ‘Welsh’ as they became called, from the Saxon word weahlish meaning ‘foreigner’, were either exiled into the western and northern highlands or integrated into the evolving Anglo-Saxon sovereignties. The achievement of the Anglo-Saxons was the making of England, not the United Kingdom or even Great Britain, but more or less what we mean by England today. The English are now English in language only racially they are a conglomeration of Celtic, Roman, German, Nordic, Norman and Flemish peoples. The historian Charles Thomas has commentated on the English identity crisis stating, ‘the English, heaven knows, should find enough problems in defining their own identity without seeking to extend it to other peoples.’ The myth of Anglo-Saxon ‘Britishness’ continues a historical and cultural hegemony long since past.

Hybrid English Christianity via Protestantism provided a new cultural and religious framework in which all else was evaluated. As a consequence Catholicism, Judaism and Islam were demonised and mythologised through erroneous interpretations and preoccupations with all things other. Orientalism as a system of scholarship began in the early fourteenth century with the establishment by the Church Council in Vienna to promote an understanding of the orient. Importantly, Orientalism has helped Europeans define themselves in terms of what they are not as well as providing a monolithic construct by which the East is comprehended. The transformation of Orientalism from an academic discourse into a multifaceted hydra of interchangeable meanings has been eruditely deconstructed by scholars like the late, great, Edward Said.

In terms of mythology, Orientalism has contributed in locating the Muslim in the typography of Sodom. Eroticism and uninhibited sexuality was attributed to Orientals (i.e. Muslims) through imaginative travelogues, popular plays, novels and lowbrow art. All contributed, and still do, in ‘placing’ Orientals as the descendants of the Biblical city of Sodom. The sexual deviations of the Sodomites have become a western manifestation of the ‘forbidden fruit’ of Adam and Eve, thereby, creating a theologically demonised other. Using Orientalism as an ideological tool, western imperialism gave rise to the most arrogant and abhorrent form of racial superiority. For British colonial racists the ‘quaint foreigner’ remained the acceptable other only when contained within his colonised geographical boundaries. Once the other wished to domicile in the country that had been made the focus of his material aspirations, Akbar Ahmed notes that the alien becomes ‘no longer romantic and mysterious, he is contemptible and smelly. There is an inane triumphalism and, lurking not too far underneath it, bigotry and racism.’

The politics of perpetuating otherness in the national context relies upon Britain’s imperial past coupled with a developed racist ideology which exploits the themes of ‘the British nation, culture and people’. Translated to the specifics of racism in Britain today, we would witness it as stereotyping and perpetuating fallacies that Black and Asian cultures are ‘primitive’ and underdeveloped in comparison with the west. It would follow that most, if not all, ‘ethnics’ would carry these disadvantages regardless of their British national and cultural identities. The effect is a ‘common-sense’ justification of imperialism, colonialism and racism. Within the process of nation building formed around state government and state religion social entities outside this framework would naturally be seen as something ‘other’. Brian S. Turner, referring to the ‘Celtic fringe’, speaks of the continuing isolation within the emerging English nation-state of social minorities which he says are ‘characteristically religious minorities’. Into the terminology of defining social minorities as others came the usage of the term ‘ethnic’. The word originates from the Old Testament Hebrew and was translated to Greek from the word ethnos, a derivative of ethnikos, which originally meant heathen or pagan. It was used in this context in English from the fourteenth century until the mid-nineteenth when it gradually began to refer to racial characteristics. The connotations of the word ethnic are locked into the idea of the other created by the process of the English nation-state based on race and religious identity.

Social scientists are largely responsible for the perpetuation of religious, social and ethnic minorities being viewed as the other through their ethnic and cultural studies of Muslim sub-groups who are essentialised and presented as a normative. Yet, the cultural and religious practices of a South Asian community in Bradford no more reflect the normative for British Muslims than do the Hausa Nigerian migrants in Manchester. The resulting outsider perceptions are that Islam is idiosyncratic and reflective of a particular ethnic entity. Beyond the intra-Muslim politics and theological differences that this genre of research produce, these studies also explore the ‘challenges’ of shifting and multiple identities among British Muslims whose heightened sense of Britishness is often represented as a considerable contention with their traditional Muslim and cultural identities. The suggestion is that a synthesis between being British and Muslim is impossible.

The ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’ of internalised immigrant diaspora and exilic identities by British Muslims have been created and fuelled by a plethora of ethnic, cultural and anthropological studies aimed at projecting and reinforcing notions of otherness. David Mason, like Tariq Modood, has alluded to Muslims being isolated and disadvantaged by what he calls, ‘a growing stigmatization of Muslims as unique and self-chosen outsiders’. He explains the influence of this developing anti-Muslim sentiment in Britain via the controversies surrounding the Satanic Verses, the Gulf War and a rise in Islamic revivalism. These phenomena have, he claims, increased Muslim-Christian polemics providing ‘a focus for inter-ethnic hostilities in such countries as Britain’. But the idea that Muslims cannot integrate into mainstream British society is largely projected as being problematic of the ‘outsider’ minority rather than the result of identity negation or social exclusion. Measured by their responses to their religious convictions and national identities, particularly when there is a contention, British Muslims are located at the periphery of British culture. Whilst the reality of an emerging identity that is increasingly British is experienced, finding a voice to express it is increasingly difficult. This is perhaps because the Britishness which Muslims possess is hybrid and is actually located in the historical and cultural evolution of Britain.

In the wake of September 11th and as if to add substance to the discussions surrounding British Muslims’ national allegiances and loyalties, Muslim leaders moved quickly to distance themselves and Islam from religious extremism and terrorism - placing themselves ‘shoulder to shoulder’ with the Prime Minister. This public pronouncement of British Muslim identity was soon frustrated and compounded when the government later committed troops to Afghanistan and then Iraq. In its bid to be the voice for British Muslims, the Muslim Council of Britain publicly condemned the bombing of Afghanistan and rightly questioned the validity of the invasion of Iraq. Here Muslims generally were viewed through the prism of their universal identity, forced to adhere to their religious community - the Ummah, in preference to their national identity. This apparent shift in allegiance and identity once again forced the question - British Muslims or Muslims in Britain?

Source: (Q-News, No.354, March 2004/Muharram 1425, pp. 31-33.)