Muslims are under siege. Police treat them as terrorists. Racists attack
them and firebomb their mosques. Politicians and journalists revile their
religion. Especially since the events of 9/11, it's become a community assailed
from all sides.
That, at least, is the received wisdom - and not just from Muslim leaders.
Everyone from anti-racist activists to government ministers wants us to believe
that Britain is in the grip of Islamophobia - a morbid fear and hatred of
Islam and of Muslims. Former Home Office Minister John Denham has warned of
the 'cancer of Islamophobia' infecting the nation. The veteran anti-racist
Richard Stone, who was a consultant to the Stephen Lawrence inquiry, suggests
that Islamophobia is 'a challenge to us all'. The Director of Public Prosecutions
has worried that the war on terror is 'alienating whole communities' in this
country.
I'm the kind of person whom you might expect to join this chorus. I've been
an anti-racist all my life. I opposed the war on Iraq. I think that Britain's
anti-terror laws are an affront to democracy. But I also think that Islamophobia
is a myth - at least in the way that most people conceive of it. There is
clearly ignorance and fear of Islam in this country. Muslims do get harassed
and attacked because of their faith. Yet I believe that the hatred and abuse
of Muslims is being exaggerated to suit politicians' needs and silence the
critics of Islam.
In making a film on this issue for Channel
4 what became clear is the gap between perception and reality. The debate
about Islamophobia is driven by what people want to believe is true, rather
than what really is true. Take, for instance, the question of physical attacks
on Muslims. According to Iqbal Sacranie of the Muslim Council of Britain,
Muslims have never faced greater physical danger than they do now. The editor
of Muslim News Ahmed Versi similarly believes that 'after September
11th we had the largest number of attacks ever on Muslims'.
But is this really true? The European Union was so concerned about Islamophobic
attacks that it commissioned a special report in the immediate aftermath of
9/11. In the four months following the attack on the World Trade Centre, the
EU discovered around a dozen serious physical attacks on British Muslims.
That is certainly a dozen too many attacks, but it does not speak of a climate
of vicious Islamophobia. 'There were very few serious attacks', acknowledges
the report's author Chris Allen. Islamophobia 'manifested itself in quite
basic and low level ways'.
Even Muslim organisations that campaign against Islamophobia find it difficult
to make the case for there being widespread attacks on Muslims. The Islamic
Human Rights Commission monitored 344 attacks on Muslims in the year after
September 11, most of which were relatively minor incident such as shoving
or spitting. For the victim, each attack is nasty and distressing. But taken
together they do not suggest a climate of uncontrolled hostility towards Muslims.
It is certainly nothing like the racism we used to face 20 years ago. When
I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, racism was vicious, visceral and often
fatal. Stabbings were common, firebombings almost weekly events. In May 1978,
7,000 Bengalis marched in protest from Whitechapel to Whitehall in protest
at the murder of garment worker Altab Ali near Brick Lane - one of 8 racist
murders that year. In the decade that followed there were another 49 such
killings. I remember organising patrols on East London estates to protect
Asian families from racist thugs. It is ironic that in the 70s and 80s when
racism was ferocious, the issue rarely hit the headlines. Today, when anti-Muslim
prejudice is much weaker, there is constant hand-wringing about Islamophobia.
There is a similar gap between perception and reality when it comes to the
question of police harassment. Last summer the Home Office published figures
that revealed a 300 per cent increase in the number of Asians being stopped
and searched under Britain's anti-terror laws. Journalists, Muslim leaders
and even the Home Office all shouted 'Islamophobia'. 'The whole Muslim community
is being targeted by the police', claimed Khalid Sofi of the Muslim Council.
Certainly, the bald figure of a '300 per cent increase' suggests heavy handed
policing and continual harassment. But dig a little deeper and the figures
reveal something very different. They show that just 3000 Asians had been
stopped and searched in the previous year under the Terrorism Act. Of these
probably a half were Muslim. In other words around 1500 Muslims out of a population
of nearly 2 million had been stopped and searched under the terror laws -
hardly a case of the police targeting every Muslim.
There is certainly disproportion in the treatment of Asians. Asians make up
about six per cent of the population, but 15 per cent of those stopped under
the Terrorism Act. Could this be because of anti-Muslim prejudice? Perhaps.
It's more likely, however, to be the result of anti-terror sweeps taking place
in areas - near Heathrow Airport, for instance - where there happen to be
higher numbers of Asians. Stop and searches under the Terrorism Act form only
a tiny proportion of the 900,000 stop and searches that took place last year.
If there was widespread Islamophobia within the police force we should expect
to find Asians in disproportionate numbers in the overall figures. We don't.
Asians are stopped and searched roughly in proportion to their population.
There is evidence that stop and search is used in a racist way. But
the victims are not Asian. They're black. Blacks form less than three per
cent of the population - but 14 per cent of those stopped and searched. You're
at least four times times as likely to be stopped and searched if you're black
than if you're Asian - not that you'd know from all the hoo-hah about Islamophobia.
One of the consequences of the exaggeration of anti-Muslim prejudice is to
hide the real discrimination.
For Muslim leaders, inflating the threat to their communities helps consolidate
their power base. For government ministers, making a song and dance about
police harassment allows them to appear both tough on terrorism and sensitive
to Muslim needs. But it does the rest of us, whether Muslim or non-Muslim,
no favours at all. The more that the threat of Islamophobia is exaggerated,
the more that ordinary Muslims come to accept that theirs is a community under
constant attack. It helps create a siege mentality, stoking up anger and resentment,
and making Muslim community more inward looking and more open to religious
extremism.
Exaggerating the level of anti-Muslim hatred also creates a climate of censorship
in which any criticism of Islam can be dismissed as Islamophobic. Every year,
the Islamic Human Rights Commission organises a mock awards ceremony for its
'Islamophobe of the Year'. Last year there were two British winners. One was
the BNP's Nick Griffin. The other? Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee.
Toynbee's defence of secularism and women's rights, and criticism of Islam,
was, it declared, unacceptable. Isn't it absurd, I asked the IHRC's Massoud
Shadrajeh, to equate a liberal anti-racist like Polly Toynbee with the leader
of a neo-fascist party. Not at all, he suggested. 'There is a difference between
disagreeing and actually dismissing certain ideologies and certain principles.
We need to engage and discuss. But there's a limit to that.' It is difficult
to know what engagement and discussion could mean when leading Muslim figures
seem unable to distinguish between liberal criticism and neo-fascist attacks.
The people who suffer most from such censorship are not prominent journalists
like Toynbee but those struggling to defend basic rights within Muslim communities.
Marayam Namazie is an Iranian refugee who has long campaigned for both women's
rights and against Islamic repression. As a result she has been condemned
as an Islamophobe, even by anti-racist organisations. 'On the one hand', she
says, 'you are threatened by the political Islamic movement with assassination
or imprisonment or flogging. And on the other you have so-called progressive
people who tell you that what you say in defence of humanity, in defence of
equal rights for all, is racist. I think it's nothing short of an outrage.'