Dr Abdul Wahid’s Weblog

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you very much to the Transatlantic Institute for inviting me. I think this whole debate about citizenship that really has come to the forefront in the last few years is flawed. For me it starts hitting public life after 9/11, when people question why would citizens of Britain go and fight against their own troops in Afghanistan or after the 7th of July bombings, why would people try to harm their own citizens, the result of that focus has been that people have lost sight of the fact that, why is it that significant numbers of people in Britain have felt alienated. Why is it that they have felt anger to the state and this and there’s been a lot of focus on Islam and the Muslim community, I’m happy to address issues from the point of view of the Muslim community maybe when we get on to the Q&A part, but I wanted to address some of these other issues in my ten minutes.

I believe that if you try and unify people on a concept of Britishness based on a common history and a common heritage it’ll be pretty impossible to do that. It’ll be impossible to do that, to be fair to all the people, to be fair to major minorities in this society, to do it in a non-prejudicial way, and it’ll feel oppressive to some. I don’t think there is any unified view of Britishness, if there is a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant majority, their view of the common history of this country and the heritage will not necessarily be shared by the Celt or the Catholic or the Muslim or the Hindu, or the person who has come from one of the former colonies, the result of that kind of model of Britishness, will be something which makes a large number of people feel very united on one basis, and makes a significant number of people excluded from that, and never feel part of being British.

I think that’s a problem coming from identities that are based on the nation state, and are based on nationality, and I think that that can be very divisive in any society, when we try to talk about building a society based on shared values, I don’t see it as being particularly any easier, a lot of the time when we try and reduce things to common values that everyone can agree with, we either find that these are not unique to Britain, in which case trying to bind society together on that basis doesn’t seem like a very sensible way forward, or we are reducing the values to some kind of lowest common denominator, which doesn’t inspire anyone to feel loyal to anything in particular. Or that we’re trying to impose certain values as universal when in fact many people would dispute the universality of those, and if you try, through a variety of processes, whether it be though education, whether it be through media pressure, whether it be through legislation, to coerce people to follow those values, what you’re doing in effect is no more than what would be condemned in a religious society if you tried to coerce to pressurise people to convert to the majority religion.

I don’t believe that kind of approach will be well received by significant numbers of minorities in this country, I think at best it will be heavily questioned, it will be heavily questioned and debated if you’re throwing up a certain way or a best way of thinking or of being, and I think that at worst it will be rejected, and backfire spectacularly, and both of these two things have the propensity to increase alienation, rather than to bring a sort of social harmony which is I think the end point that we should all be looking for.

I have looked at the proposals for citizenship classes for immigrants, citizenship classes in schools, the examination that’s been proposed, I don’t see that as doing anything to bind society and bind people together, I see a lot of the pressures, within the media, that people should conform to some kind of liberalism that the media puts forward, as something which is highly discriminatory towards Muslims, it seems to demand from the Muslim community that they should display more loyalty towards these values than actually the rest of society is often asked to. We’re asked to display more loyalty towards the Crown than most people who are out on Oxford street or in London would actually ever be asked to, we’re asked to display more loyalty towards institutions like Parliament, when about 40% of the country doesn’t bother voting in a General Election, and these things from our viewpoint are looked on as very discriminatory, and very prejudicial.

I think the worst scenario we have coming is in the form of censorship and the anti-terror laws, because the effect of these laws, whether or not it’s the intention, the effect of these laws will be to censor political campaigns which support liberation movements, liberation struggles around the world, that would be defined by the Attorney General as being terrorism. Now that is something that many people would agree involves genuine terrorist activities, violence against civilians etc, etc, but in many of these cases it does not, and it means that people who dissent or oppose from a certain foreign policy position would actually be denied — criminalised from speaking, in particular if they spoke that view using Islamic language and rhetoric that Muslims do tend to use.

By the way, I don’t think that Muslim countries are particularly immune to this problem. Muslim countries have lived as nation states for the best part of the last century, as we’ve heard before, and they have a huge problem with racism and nationalism which exists within them. And that goes against the trend historically, when you would never hear, historically, terminology about there being a black Muslim or a white Muslim because actually in Muslim societies there was a successful melting pot; and even the way non-Muslim minorities actually existed in the society and were part of the society is an interesting thing to look at. Now there’s a long quote here, from Sir Thomas Arnold, which I’m not going to read, but it effectively helps to define something that existed in the Caliphate in the past, which I think are lessons that actually we could learn from. One is that citizens were only asked as a measure of their citizenship, whether Muslim or non-Muslim, black or white, to simply obey the law. Nothing more was demanded of them than that: to obey the law. It was not demanded of them that they believe in the source of that law, that they believe that that law that came from sharia, was the truth; nobody asked them to declare that, nobody asked them to change their beliefs and their religious book, nobody asked them to omit verses from their texts. And some of us feel that that’s what’s being asked of us: not simply to obey the law but actually to have a belief in the source of that law. And that’s not just asking for a contribution to society, and to be a citizen, that’s asking for, actually, a piece of my mind, and a piece of my heart.

The other thing that I think was quite successful in that time, was to give minorities space and to give them institutions even, that you trusted your own model of society enough to give them even autonomy in certain areas to actually practice their faith and to practice the differences that they had with maybe the majority society or maybe the majority thought or religion in society. And that gave people a feeling of gratitude and a feeling of belonging and a feeling that they were being respected. If you ask an older generation of Muslims in this country what they’ve liked about Britain, it is that historically they have felt that they have been given the space, and they have been given the respect, to do what they want. I think it’s very bad that that capital has actually gone out the window in the past two years, or two to three years; if you ask the same group of people now, they feel very pressurised and very forced into a certain way of doing things, and very criticised when they do things in a religious way, which seems to go against the general trend of society,

So I could go on and address things to do with the anti-terror laws, things the Muslim community needs to do, because there’s a lot that needs to be done on that side. But it’s these two things that I’d leave you with — the thought that if you try and build an identity based on nationalism, or on a set of values which the majority try to impose on the minority, it is actually going to appear to those minorities as being pretty oppressive and not going to go towards social harmony. Thank you.

Dr Abdul Wahid

Hizb ut-Tahrir Britain

The Transatlantic Institute

November 2005