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Philip Lewis: The Muslim children raised in a cacophony of different voices
I WAS at a recent conference in London where a security minister pointed out that hardly a month would go by in the next two years without a high-profile trial involving Muslims accused of terrorist-related activities. This raises the spectre that Muslims will be increasingly seen through a narrow security lens.
Such worries prompted me to write Young, British and Muslim which seeks to offer a more nuanced perspective on the challenges and predicaments of young, British Muslims; a map on which to locate violent extremism.
More importantly, I wanted to enable non-Muslims to overhear the passionate intra-Muslim debates now exercising these communities. To this end, I have sought to allow Muslim academics, novelists, film makers, young religious leaders, as well as community activists to speak for themselves.
As with Christianity, so with Islam, no one is religious-in-general. Different cities reflect a diversity of Muslim nationalities and sectarian traditions. Muslims in Brent in London are drawn from more than 25 countries – the only common language is English and this diversity has generated huge creativity: a Muslim Human Rights organisation, an active Muslim women's group, the first Muslim monthly magazine in English serving the YUMMIES – the young, upwardly mobile Muslims!
Further north in Leicester, the Muslim communities are "twice migrants", east African Muslims with roots in Indo-Pakistan expelled with Africanisation in the 1970s – the focus of the recent film The Last King of Scotland. Such Muslims were grateful to find sanctuary in Britain, were English speakers, had already learned to live as a minority and were part of commercial and professional networks. Unsurprisingly, they have done well and contributed to its economic well-being.
In Bradford, as in other northern cities, the majority of Muslims have roots in one of the least developed rural areas of Kashmir in Pakistan. They have had to make a series of major adjustments: moving from rural to urban, eastern to a western society where, for the first time, they have to develop skills to live as a minority in a context either indifferent or, at times, hostile to them.
Many of the issues exercising these communities have more to do with the dislocation of migration than Islam. This is clear in the mosques. I was speaking to a young British-educated imam who was telling me that most mosque committees are made up of elders who continue to import imams from their villages – understandable but unhelpful since few of these imams can connect with their English-educated children. The latter can be left exhausted, even embittered, by the long hours they spend rote learning Qur'anic Arabic in the after-school madrasa.
Migration often creates inter-generational conflicts, especially where children are the first generation to enjoy formal education but in a language and culture quite different from their parents. A Muslim academic has researched young British Pakistanis in northern cities and refers to a growing minority as "rude boys" – the product of three cultures: working-class street culture, the chauvinism of which is reinforced by rural Pakistani culture and exacerbated by American hip hop and gangsta rap. No wonder many parents have lost control of their sons who are street wise.
However, their chauvinism is being challenged by their sisters who are often more successful educationally than their brothers and are more easily employable.
I think of one of my brightest students, a young Muslim woman whose parents from rural Pakistan had little or no formal education. In one generation, some in the community are availing themselves of the educational opportunities afforded in Britain and generating a new leadership. Here was someone who had developed the skills and confidence to be one of the leaders of "Stop the War" movement in the city.
Amid a cacophony of Muslim voices, I wanted to render such constructive interventions audible. Such voices are fashioning new expressions of Muslim identity, at ease in British society. Such quiet engagement is a vital antidote to the high-profile media cases of cells of violent extremists accused of various horrendous crimes.
Let me mention another friend, a local teacher whose father saved to send him to a local public school from where he went on to Oxford and is now head of department in a local Bradford secondary school with a majority of young Muslim pupils.
Since 9/11 and 7/7, he has worried about the attitudes of some of the youngsters: Osama bin Laden often lionised as a latter day Robin Hood standing up to the bully. You might like to guess who is cast as the bully!
But they had no idea of the hideous distortion of Islam he embodies or their perception that the Israel Palestine dispute is simply between Jew and Muslim – with no understanding of the complexity of rival nationalisms – which can generate a casual anti-Semitism. He was so concerned that he got his father – then President of Bradford Council for Mosques – to support a new course on "Islam and citizenship" to address directly such issues.
My young friend devised the scenarios and he got Muslim religious scholars to provide the answers drawing on their textual sources.
I mention these two people to indicate that a new generation of young British Muslim professionals is beginning to emerge to challenge the hold the elders, embedded in large, hierarchically-ordered, patriarchal clans, continue to have over local politics, mosques and community centres. It is worth remembering that 85 per cent of Muslim organisations are controlled by elders born somewhere else, while 50 per cent of Muslims are under 25 and born and educated in Britain.
Let me conclude by mentioning an unusual instance of cross-community, co-operation. In Bradford, a small group of clergy and British-educated imams are beginning to meet, to develop trust and mutual understanding. The high point was last summer, when a joint cricket team went off to Leicester to play an equally mixed team.
My abiding memory is of a priest, who has just bowled out the leading imam in the Leicester team, being embraced by a fellow team member – a Bradford imam!
To order Young, British and Muslim from the Yorkshire Post Bookshop, call free on 0800 0153232 or go online at www.yorkshirepost
bookshop.co.uk. Postage and packing is 2.75.
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Saturday 26 May 2012
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