Immediately after the London bombings last July, the Government promised Muslim leaders urgent help in fighting extremism. Tony Blair announced a dozen new measures, including a ban on imams who could not speak English, the deportation of extremists and the closing of mosques and bookshops promoting radicalism. The Home Office invited Muslim leaders to join working groups (Preventing Extremism Together), which recommended 64 measures to tackle the disaffection and alienation of young Muslims and blunt the influence of jihadists and poisonous preachers.
A year later, precious little has come of these initiatives. Beyond a few attempts to take a “roadshow” of moderate Islam to a few city centres and calls for better training of imams, Muslim leaders have failed to agree what needs to be done, where the danger lies or how to reach those most likely to turn to violence. Instead, many blame the Government for failing to back the agreed recommendations, for clumsy police raids and terrorism scares, and for doing nothing to assuage Muslim grievances.
Muslim leaders have now accused the Government of pursuing a foreign policy that has angered even moderate Muslims and of wilfully ignoring their protests that Britain’s stance on Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon was stoking Muslim militancy — an ahistorical accusation that ministers have rejected as tantamount to blackmail. Against this background, the Government’s promise after the latest alleged plot to step up its engagement with Muslim leaders and the launch next month of a new Commission on Integration and Cohesion look distinctly unpromising.
There are, indeed, flaws in the government strategy. The first is to imagine there is a single Muslim “community”. There is not. Britain’s 1.6 million Muslims are split by ethnic origin, tradition, language, sect and generation. Iraqis and Algerians differ greatly in culture and outlook from those of Pakistani and Bangladeshi backgrounds. Sufis, who were recently welcomed at Downing Street, have a far more tolerant tradition than the narrow-minded, puritanical Wahhabis.
The second mistake is to think that Muslim “leaders” can deliver. Islam has no ecclesiastical hierarchy; leaders are recognised by their piety and scholarship, and many are in jealous competition with each other. Fearful of losing credibility, no leader, therefore, can espouse the call for “moderation” without appearing to compromise with secularism and Western values or being seen as a government stooge. Extremists always claim that they are more fundamentalist, more pious and therefore “better Muslims”. And those leaders embraced by the British Establishment have little idea of the frustrations, in part, motivating hopelessly underachieving young Muslim men in the suburbs of northern cities.
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Islam needs a reformation, but many of its opinion leaders recognise that they will not benefit from a more tolerant, less ideological religion. They see Islam and their role in Islam as immutable, and denounce as apostates men, and women such as the Canad-ian Irshad Manji especially, who call for a renaissance of critical thinking. But unless there is more respect for such calls, more tolerance of women’s rights and views and less fear in denouncing extremism, the government dialogue with Muslim leaders will yield little. Only when moderation commands the respect, credibility and allegiance of more Muslims will the nexus with terrorism be challenged.