Who doesn't feel British? Divisions over Muslims

This article is available open access through the publisher’s website at the link below. Copyright @ 2009 The Authors.Politicians increasingly promote Britishness. We thus ask who do they think has difficulty feeling British and why do they think this? Scholars have not yet tried to address these questions and in this article we attempt to do so. Using interviews with former home secretaries, junior ministers and their shadow cabinet counterparts, we examine whether leading politicians think that Muslims have difficulty feeling British. We show that senior members of the main political parties are not only internally divided on this issue, but that a cross-party divide exists and that many of the members of these divisions are unaware of the relevant sociological data.Leverhulme Trus

Nationhood and muslims in Britain

These are difficult times to be British,” Andrew Gamble and Tony Wright maintain. Their assessment centers on how “the state which underpinned British identity is no longer the confident structure of earlier times.” They are not alone in coming to this view, and at least two implications follow from their observation. One is that the political unity of the administrative and bureaucratic components of the state is related to cultural features of British nationhood, including the ways in which people express feeling and being British. This is perhaps a familiar assessment of the configuration of all nation-states, though it could also imply that the state has been one—though not necessarily the most important—touchstone in the historical cultivation of British as a national identity

Supporting Fathers in Multi-Ethnic Societies: Insights from British Asian Fathers

AbstractThere is concern that current UK policy and intervention aimed at supporting fathers remains primarily informed by dominant White middle-class values and experiences, and therefore fails to respond adequately to the needs of Britain's diverse fathers. This paper contributes to understanding of ethnic diversity in fathering contexts, practices and experiences, by reporting findings from a qualitative study of British Asian fathers, involving in-depth interviews with fifty-nine fathers and thirty-three mothers from Bangladeshi Muslim, Pakistani Muslim, Gujarati Hindu and Punjabi Sikh background, and over eight additional respondents engaged through Key Informant interviews, ethnographic interviews and group discussions. The paper highlights four areas that require greater recognition by policy-makers and practitioners to appropriately meet the needs of fathers from diverse ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds. These are: recognising that fathers and mothers do not necessarily constitute an autonomous unit; appreciating diversity in fathers’ understandings of desirable child outcomes; addressing additional obstacles to achieving similar outcomes for children; and understanding that the boundaries and content of fathering are not universally recognised. Policies that are less normative and more responsive to diversity are essential to ensure that all fathers can be effectively supported.</jats:p

Interview: Tariq Modood – on being a public intellectual, a Muslim and a multiculturalist

In an interview for Renewal with Simon Thompson, Tariq Modood, one of Britain’s foremost Muslim public intellectuals, discusses the role of the public intellectual, Islam and British public life, and a critically evolving multiculturalism. You can read the full interview for free, online here. In this extract Modood discusses the impact of the Salman Rushdie affair of 1989 on his politics

Post-immigration cultural diversity and integration

Ethno-religious diversity is a fact of Western European cities and will grow and spread. Living in these locations today requires a respect for ‘difference’ as well as a sense of commonalities; these are required at the level of the local and the city but also at the level of the national. A framework of anti-discrimination and processes of uncoercive cultural encounters are also necessary but are not sufficient. We also need to have the possibility of sharing a macro-symbolic sense of belonging. With this in mind I consider a number of modes of integration. I argue that multiculturalism is a mode of integration, which can be contrasted with other modes such as assimilation, individualist-integration and cosmopolitanism, and like the others it is based on the core democratic values of liberty, equality and fraternity/unity. My contention is that even though multiculturalism is unpopular with some European publics today, integration is not possible without including it within an integration strategy. I go on to consider what kinds of ‘difference’ mark the real divisions today and into the future. I conclude that one of the most profound questions Europeans are being forced to consider is about the place of religion in the public space

In remembering the Charlie Hebdo attack we must not forget the responsibility that goes with free speech

On 11 January, unity marches were held across France following terrorist attacks which killed 17 people in Paris, including an attack on the headquarters of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. One of the key debates to have taken place since the attacks has focused on the issue of free speech, given the controversial nature of some of the material published by the magazine. Tariq Modood argues that while there is clearly no possible justification for the violence that took place, there is nevertheless an important responsibility which accompanies free speech and we should stop short of celebrating images that reinforce social divisions

Multiculturalism can foster a new kind of post-Brexit Englishness

One of the questions raised by the UK’s decision to leave the EU is the extent to which national identity is becoming a stronger factor in British politics. Tariq Modood writes that the rise of Scottish and English nationalism poses a potential threat to British identity, but that a new conception of multiculturalism could revive feelings of Britishness among UK citizens

Intercultural Public Intellectual Engagement

The article firstly examines the different conceptions of dialogue and reason within political theory, especially in the work of Rawls. Secondly we explore multicultural political theorists who have been motivated less by abstract reasoning by a sole reasoner or identical identity-less individuals and more by dialogue. For such multiculturalists, the principles of social justice are not known in advance or simply by reason, but are arrived at by conflict and learning, by dialogue and negotiation in circumstances of inequality and minority-claims making. In response to the multiculturalists, interculturalists allege that multiculturalism is too focused on the macro and the conflictual, and dialogue should be redirected to the micro and the cooperative. Although I welcome the interculturalists’ focus on micro-relations, this does not require abandoning the idea of dialogue at the level of political controversies and public discourses. It is not an either–or choice because groups and intergroup problems exist in society and cannot be simply handled at a micro level of contact, interaction and sociability. The kind of macro-level dialogue that I am speaking of can also be understood as a form of public intellectual engagement that can contribute to societal dialogues.1 1This article is a reprint of Tariq Modood (2017) ‘Intercultural public intellectual engagement’ in Fethi Mansouri (ed) Interculturalism at the Crossroads: Comparative perspectives on concepts, policies and practice, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, France, 83-102

Political mobilisation by minorities in Britain: negative feedback of ‘race relations'?

This article uses a political opportunity approach to study the relationship of minority groups to the political community in Britain. The main argument is that the British race relations approach established in the 1960s had an important effect that still shapes the patterns of political contention by different minority groups today. Original data on political claims-making by minorities demonstrate that British 'racialised' cultural pluralism has structured an inequality of opportunities for the two main groups, African-Caribbeans and Indian subcontinent minorities. African-Caribbeans mobilise along racial lines, use a strongly assimilative 'black' identity, conventional action forms, and target state institutions with demands for justice that are framed within the recognised framework of race relations. Conversely, a high proportion of the Indian subcontinent minority mobilisation is by Muslim groups, a non-assimilative religious identity. These are autonomously organised, but largely make public demands for extending the principle of racial equality to their non-racial group. Within the Indian subcontinent minorities, the relative absence of mobilisation by Indian, Sikh and Hindu minorities, who have achieved much better levels of socio-economic success than Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslims, suggests that there is also a strong socioeconomic basis for shared experiences and grievances as Muslims in Britain. This relativises the notion that Muslim mobilisation is Britain is purely an expression of the right for cultural difference per se, and sees it as a product of the paradoxes of British race relations