KARACHI: ‘7/7 death knell for British Muslim leaders’
By Qasim A. Moini
KARACHI, Oct 25: The July 7, 2005, London bombings, also referred to as 7/7, effectively spelt the death of the old Muslim leadership and encouraged younger British Muslims to step up politically and socially.
This was one of the major points made by Dr Tahir Abbas of the University of Birmingham in his lecture on ‘British Islam: Ethnicity, culture, multiculturalism and radicalism.’
He was speaking at a conference titled ‘Religions and cultures in various regions of the world: Integration, a compromise between assimilation and self-assertion?’ held at a local hotel here on Thursday, organised jointly by the Karachi University’s Area Study Centre for Europe (ASCE) and the Goethe-Institut.
Though the mouthful of a title might suggest otherwise, the conference ultimately turned into a discussion of the much-debated topic of Islam and the West, in which along with Dr Abbas, scholars and speakers from India, Germany and France, as well as local academics, waxed philosophical about integration, assimilation and radicalism. The participants from Bosnia-Herzegovina and Sri Lanka were unable to attend.
Following the keynote address by German Consul General Hans-Joachim Kiderlen, Dr Tahir Abbas gave his succinct, highly informative lecture on the background and current status of the UK’s Muslims.
He said that of the UK’s estimated two million Muslims, about half were of Pakistani origin, and that too mostly Kashmiri. These people, he said, came to do the “dirty, low-paid jobs” the indigenous population did not want, such as in the mill towns of northern England, in the mid 20th century.
Soon, many of these people found themselves unemployed and the adverse effects of this have trickled down to the second and third generations of those who immigrated. They stayed in the poorer, run-down parts of town and this “historical baggage” has been carried into the present day. And the “residential clustering,” a term he used for ghettoised living, resulted in poor British Muslims often living next to equally poor indigenous whites, which created potentially explosive situations such as the 2001 Bradford riot.
Dr Abbas said British Muslims suffered from high unemployment, overcrowded housing and health issues.
Regarding the pitfalls and highlights of multiculturalism, he said “a perfect multicultural society existed nowhere” and that it was “an evolving concept.”
Giving an interesting example, he said the day before the 7/7 bombings, when London’s bid for the 2012 Olympics was accepted, British multiculturalism was hailed, while the day after, it was roundly lambasted.
No absolutes
Dr Abbas warned that terms such as radicalism should not be treated as absolutes as they are open to debate and said that radicalisation is an economic, political, cultural and criminal phenomenon rather than theological.
He said that the first generation of Muslim leaders had acted as props of the British establishment and thus alienated the younger generation.
Dr Jaffar Ahmed, Director of the Pakistan Study Centre, in his presentation titled ‘Globalisation, nation states and the Muslim diaspora: Contradictions and challenges,’ said that the international media, aided by certain political groups, had reinforced the concept of Islam vs. the West. This concept, he said, assumed that the West was civilised and egalitarian while suggesting that Islam was the opposite.
As for globalisation, Dr Jaffar said that while it ushered in the communications revolution, it had also widened the gap between the rich and the poor and resulted in the cultural domination of the West, which had led to “Disneyisation, McDonaldisation and Colaisation.”
Muslim malaise
Dr Jaffar also came down hard on the Muslim world, saying that despite being resource-rich, it was mired in poverty and least industrialised. He also criticised the lack of education, saying that in the 55-plus countries of the Muslim world, there were only about 500 universities, whereas Japan alone boasted 1,000.
Fundamentalism, he said, was a reaction to globalisation. The solution lay in checking the hegemonic designs of the superpower (the US), while engaging the fundamentalists rather than confronting them.
Indian activist Javed Anand, General-Secretary of Muslims for Secular Democracy, during his talk entitled ‘Theory and practice of secularism in India: A case study of the Muslim minority,’ said that post-1984, the period of communal riots had given way to full-blown pogroms and genocide.
However, he said that many Indians, including Hindus, had questioned why there were two different yardsticks for justice when it came to Muslims and Hindus, citing the specific example of the Bombay riots of 1992-93, which were followed by the bomb blasts of March 1993.
Mr Anand said that whereas the Bombay police proudly claimed to have convicted up to 85 per cent of the blast accused, all but one of those behind the riots remained scot-free.
He also said that an independent citizens’ commission had found that incumbent Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi was the architect of the 2002 anti-Muslim genocide, yet remained in power.
Security, he said, was paramount in the minds of Indian Muslims adding that Muslim politicians and religious leaders had “miserably failed.”
Earlier, Dr Naveed Ahmad Tahir, Director of the ASCE, delivered the welcome address.
