Tip-toeing round extremists will not make Britain a safer place

There’s something happening inside Britain’s Muslim communities. There’s good and bad news. Last week’s terrorist attacks in India - with the possibility of British Muslim involvement - make the need to contain extremism in England ever more urgent. But how? Below the radar, fanatics continue to sow the seeds for more terror, while signs of hope are emerging from new, more engaged voices. But everything is up for grabs. The steps wider society takes today can help shape Islam in Britain tomorrow.

Last week also marked the beginning of a series of events where young, home-grown pluralist Muslims engage in unbridled discussions with senior officials from government and from across civil society. Hosted by the Quilliam Foundation, Britain’s first Muslim-led counter-extremism think tank, these roundtables will expose key opinion formers to intra-Muslim discourse. Why? Because Muslim insularity must cease and, as one country, we ought to realise that Muslims’ problems cannot be resolved in isolation by Muslims alone.

Britain’s Muslims are at a critical juncture. A fortnight ago, a terrorism-supporting group gathered with 300 supporters in council property in Britain’s most densely Muslim-populated area, Tower Hamlets, and called for rejection of British law and support for convicted terrorists in prison. They beamed in from Lebanon the banned cleric Omar Bakri, who called on young Muslims to disobey the law.

Afterwards, a blame game broke out between the police, the Home Office and the local authority as to how this banned group gathered without being noticed. If we are unable to stop such events, or even disrupt the phone line from Beirut to London, then not much faith can be placed in our law enforcement agencies’ surveillance of extremists.

In Britain’s most prominent mosque, in Regent’s Park, there are meetings every weekend of a group dedicated to creating an Islamist dictatorship, destroying Israel and which advocates Muslim supremacist views. These lines will be read: nothing will be done. Muslim leaders will remain as ostriches, and wider society will not “interfere”, lest we cause “offence”.

And yet “outside” pressure is starting to produce results. Under pressure from the media and civil society, the Muslim Council of Britain this year attended Holocaust Memorial Day for the first time. But where is that pressure in other areas where Muslims remain insular? Why, for example, is wider society keen to turn a blind eye to the mushrooming of so-called faith schools, where British teenage girls are subjected to Saudi-style clothing of black gloves, face covers and sack-like overalls?

Matters are made worse by unsustainable levels of immigration flooding our mosques; men with no experience of British society and a poor grasp of English becoming imams and spreading their ideas throughout Muslim communities. Just as we adjust to our surroundings in Britain, a new wave of immigrants are reintroducing village dialects, customs and attire, and adding to the confusion of young British Pakistanis or Bengalis. The British people deserve a serious debate on immigration, free from yells of racism.

I am a child of immigrants - I want my daughter to go to her local school and learn English, not teach it to new arrivals whose parents insist on creating little Polands and Pakistans in their homes. Trevor Phillips, the Chief Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks, and Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali have expressed similar concerns - what do our politicians fear?

I am a member of Labour and I am ashamed that the party, after 11 years in power, shies away from addressing the failures of multiculturalism. Pandering to so-called cultural differences has led to more than 70 per cent of Pakistani and Bangladeshi women in Britain today being unemployed. What happened to racial and gender equality?

These trends do not bode well. But there are developments that give us hope. For the first time, powerful young Muslim scholars have taken a stance against radicals and given shape to ideas that counter fanaticism and rigidity. The jury is out as to whether these voices will win the battle raging among Muslims or if short-sighted politicians will repeat the mistake of the 1990s by co-opting those who have ties to foreign radicals.

The Quilliam Foundation has successfully opened a public space in which it is possible to be fully Western and fully Muslim, free from the political burdens of the Arab world and the cultural baggage of the sub-continent. We have put extremists on the defensive, compelled to either jettison their ideology or face pressure to change. But we cannot win alone.

Wider society has a moral and civic duty to ensure that parts of our country do not become Balkanised. This means having the courage to explain that secularism does not mean being anti-religious, but a neutral public space. It also means having the courage to stand up for the ideas that make Britain the country that it is today. When Muslim seminaries in Dewsbury teach Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration, then we can rest assured that British Muslim clerics have truly understood Britain. At present, we are light years away.

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