Civitas Blog

In recent times, and especially since the July tube bombings, many have begun openly to question the wisdom of the received policy of multiculturalism which recent critics have begun to claim does not do enough to integrate minorities, especially British Muslims.

Not so, argues Bristol University’s Professor Tariq Modood, in a recent article posted on Open Democracy in which he defends the beleaguered policy. Instead, so Professor Modood contends, the source of ‘the lack of a sense of belonging to Britain able to withstand the ideological call of jihad against fellow Britons… can be found in arguments on both the right and left [of the majority society]’.

In Professor Modood’s reckoning, therefore, the four British-born Muslims who blew up their fellow passengers had been unable to acquire a British identity as a result of right-wing ‘notions of Britishness that hold non-white people are not really British and that Muslims are an alien wedge’ and left-wing notions that hold there is ‘something deeply wrong about rallying round the idea of Britain, … and that the goal of seeking to be British … is silly and dangerous, and indeed demeaning to the newly settled groups among the population’.

To counter what he considers these causes of British Muslim alienation, Professor Modood argues that ‘what is urgently needed is not a panicky retreat from multiculturalism, but … to recognis[e] Muslims as a legitimate social partner and include them in the institutional compromises … that characterise the evolving, moderate secularism of mainstream western Europe’ .

‘Moreover’, Professor Modood concludes by observing, ‘ this is not just a matter of state action, for the burden of multicultural representation has to be borne by the multitudinous institutions of civil society that constitute our public space, our public interactions, and our plural, public identities.’

About this analysis of the causes of Muslims alienation, several doubts may be raised.

Jews were able successfully to integrate within British society, as Professor Modood himself acknowledges in the article, at a time when racially exclusivist notions of Britishness were far more prevalent than they are now.

Moreover, Jews integrated without need of either state or civil society having to change much to enable them to do so. Indeed, early on in the history of their re-settlement in Britain after their centuries-long explusion from it in medieval times, the Anglo-Jewish community went out of its way to expedite its integration. It set up and financed schools for its chiildren, not to impede their assimilation as do those who call for separate faith schools today, but to facilitate it by making Englishmen and Englishwomen of British-born Jewish children.

Moreover, the Anglo-Jewish community went out of its way to avoid becoming in any way a burden on the public purse by developing an elaborate and entirely self-financed set of welfare services for its members.

Why, on earth, should church and state in Britain, let alone civil society, be expected to make any further institutional compromises, beyond those already long since made well before the post-war wave of largely Asian Muslim immigration, so as to offer to minorities ‘a plural, changing inclusive British identity which can be as emotionally and politically meaningful to British Muslims as the appeal of jihadi sentiments’?

Early on in his article, Professor Modood observes that American Jews, often cited as a paradigm of a successfully assimilated minority, ‘have also changed the American society and culture they have become part of’.

Too true, but this was because their fellow Americans came to adopt Jewish idioms, humour, and culinary tastes voluntarily, not to prevent American Jews becoming alienated and turning to terrorism..

Just like the popularity in the USA of bagels and Bilko, the current popularity in Britain of the Notting Hill Carnival and of chicken tikka marsala bears ample testimony to the capacity of its predominantrly liberal Anglo-Protestant culture to absorb spontaenously such elements of minority cultures as its populace find to their liking. Minorities who, better to facilitate their own accommodation, expect more modification of mainstream cultures than their bearers are spontaneously willing to make, risk demanding more movement from national mountains than is compatible with their stability and hence with the well-being of those who dwell upon their slopes.

Instead of always asking of the mainstream culture and society ever more in the way of change to prevent the alienation of their young, how about minorities who have chosen to settle here teaching their children the value of gratitude to their hosts and of their need to make appropriate adjustments, rather than forever calling upon their host communities to change more swiftly and radically than they would be happy to do of their own accord?