If my 15-year-old daughter was questioned by police at school about a serious crime committed by one of her friends, I’d want to know. Wouldn’t you? And I’d expect officers to phone me or visit my house. If they stuck a letter in her book bag, not even bothering with an envelope, and if she intercepted that note, realised she was in trouble and consequently ran away, I’d be angry.
This is why families of the three east London girls who have joined Isis are upset with the Metropolitan police. Whether through carelessness or cock-up, the chance to confront their children about a friend who’d already fled to Syria, to uncover their escape plan and confiscate passports, was lost.
Although you wouldn’t know it from some headlines or the prime minister’s statement, the families were not trying to swerve responsibility; they weren’t blaming security services or police for their daughters’ actions. They are simply from a long line of devastated parents whose children have lied, stolen from them and fled, probably for ever, as depicted in a 50-year-old Beatles song: “She (We gave her most of our lives)/ Is leaving (Sacrificed most of our lives)/ Home.”
And yet their anguish and loss, their very humanity, is dismissed. Instead they are bundled into a stereotype that grows and grows as the election looms and the tough talk amplifies: they are Britain-hating, violence-sanctioning, sly, treacherous extremists who must have known what their girls were planning and endorsed it and therefore can burn in hell.
Since the Charlie Hebdo massacre, the tenor of debate about Muslims in Britain has changed. A harshness, a suspicion, a reductiveness has entered public discourse. The abiding British view, which carried us through the Lee Rigby murder without communal riots, that the vast majority of Muslims are peaceable citizens, revolted by terrorism that many have witnessed in their birthplaces at first hand, is disintegrating.
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To hear some people, you would think that 15-year-old white girls lured out of care home windows by gifts and compliments from Pakistani taxi drivers are “groomed” victims, but 15-year-old brown girls lured out of the country by flirtatious, manipulative online jihadists are irredeemably evil. I hear Nigel Farage talk of a Muslim fifth column; I read, even from liberal quarters, talk of “us” (the British people) and “them” (Muslims. All Muslims).
We are starting to do the extremists’ work for them. Jihadism is a crude binary world divided between Dar al-Islam (“lands of Islam”) and Dar al-Kufr (“lands of disbelief”). You are for or against us; Muslim or infidel. When a survey on Muslim attitudes was released recently, the BBC interviewed Asian businesswomen: secular, unveiled, integrated, they nonetheless felt they were lumped in with extremists, part of the Muslim “problem”. As the Liverpool barrister Zia Chaudhry writes in his forthcoming memoir Just Your Average Muslim, we are painting “a picture of two camps forsworn to be enemies for ever, seemingly oblivious to the damage being caused”.
I was struck by a scene in the French cop show Spiral where a street gang from the Parisian banlieues is trying to arrange a honey trap. The leader, a second generation immigrant, says: “We need a French girl.” She meant they needed a white girl. But her formulation was telling: to be black or Arab precludes you from being French. To be a Muslim — even a non-practising one, like most North Africans — means you are an outsider. I doubt an equivalent mixed-race gang here would have said: “We need a British girl.”
Until now . . . An increasingly shrill rhetoric, a long-repressed tribal glee at having an excuse to unleash our hatred of those unlike us, has lately found full vent. Last week on these pages when the thoughtful, moderate Alyas Karmani tried to explain how a narrative of US and UK foreign policy, together with an “us and them” mentality, is driving ordinary mixed-up Muslim teens towards extremism, he was damned by some Times online commenters for crying victimhood. No doubt they will damn me too as a liberal hand-wringer.
But I have written often and critically of Islamism; its push to allow the veil to be worn in court, make girls cover up in schools, to segregate university meetings by gender, and to limit female education. Defending our secular public sphere is key to all our freedoms, not least those of moderate Muslims, being shoved by a Wahhabi extremism that purports to be the only true Islam towards isolation from mainstream society.
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Now, if you speak to liberal Muslims, you hear optimism: the centre ground is starting to shift back. Voices are speaking up who until recently were cowed by fundamentalist preachers, fear of family disgrace, even violence. Cultural practices such as honour-killing, forced marriages, domestic abuse and sexual grooming are at last being discussed openly.
It is young Muslim feminists who are leading the war against FGM. An organisation for apostates is thriving, with young non-believers bravely “coming out”. In Tower Hamlets a Bangladeshi women’s group Nari Diganta campaigns against Sharia courts. The idea that British Muslims constitute a monolith has never been less true.
I spoke this week to a former member of Hizb ut-Tahrir who now deradicalises jihadists. His first step, he said, was to appeal to their Britishness: “I ask if they queue in shops.” I laughed. “Yes, when I lived in Saudi I got furious when everyone pushed in. It made me realise how British I was.” In our poisonous, polarising age it is time to stop seeking difference and ask how we are the same.