"We Should Look to Solve Our Problems at Home", The Independent (London), 15 August 2006. 

It is August again, and this year at least, thankfully the terrorism plots have been foiled.  But for those of us members of the Muslim community called in yesterday to see the Deputy Prime Minster et al there was a familiar ring to events. Ruth Kelly, the Government Minster leading on faith and cohesion issues wanted answers to the same questions that we grappled with a year ago:  Why has extremism taken hold so virulently among some young Muslims? What can be done in practical terms to counter it?  The answers, mainly in the form of worthy grass roots initiatives seemed familiar from last year. There was some stocktaking of what had seemed useful, and the usual pleas for resources. But the only passion generated by those present was in placing the blame firmly on British foreign policy. 

And there is blame a plenty: in the words of Muslim Labour parliamentarians, who published an open letter to the Prime Minister in Saturday’s newspapers the ‘debacle of Iraq’ and Mr Blair’s vow of silence over events in Lebanon in the first two weeks of that crisis last month are examples of where Britain has gone wrong.  Some of us have longer memories of the Labour government’s failures in this regard: inaction over the Talibanisation of Afghanistan in the late 1990s; the folly of not following through after intervention in 2001, but abandoning the Karzai government whose writ did not run beyond Kabul, to the venal war-lords who had presided over the undoing of Afghanistan over decades, so that we are still at war there.  Moreover, there has been complicity with the US in circumventing international law in the ‘global war on terror’ not least in silence over Guantanamo Bay; one-sided extradition treaties and the use of extraordinary rendition by the CIA, to mention just a few examples of where I would disagree with what constitutes Britain’s national interest.   

The Muslim leaders letter to the Prime Minister states the obvious that ‘attacking civilians is never justified’; it is interesting in that it goes on to ‘urge the Prime Minister to redouble his efforts to tackle terror and extremism and change our foreign policy to show the world that we value the lives of civilians’.  One could argue that a change of foreign policy would be ethical of itself, rather than to show the world how moral our stance is.  But the real problem with the letter along with its drawing a link between ‘terror and extremism and … our foreign policy’ is its timing.  Coming as it does in the immediate aftermath of an attempted terrorist attack, it is somewhat morally dubious, and at best ill judged. 

Not only Muslims, but a significant number of Britons have views on the merits of the government’s foreign policy, and so they should. It is entirely legitimate in a democracy that the varied opinions on where the national interest lies should indeed be fed into parliament and the government, and be revised when public opinion so suggests.   But to seek to instrumentalise terrorism to gain leverage for your cause smacks more of cynicism than a serious attempt at affecting change.

No one doubts the Muslim communities’ frustration at the inability of Mr Blair to influence events for the better nor indeed for detracting from the search for peace and stability in the Islamic world.  Having experienced the Pakistan-India dispute, and then the Lebanese civil war and subsequent invasion, I feel that frustration palpably.  But I also know that making peace is more difficult when public opinion is gorged on a diet of injustice, perceived or real. Hence President Musharraf’s current difficulty in ‘selling’ a putative peace with India to his reluctant population.

We British Muslims fool ourselves if we expect a change in British foreign policy to resolve the crises which engulf the wider Islamic world.  Indeed foreign policy has been used by governments across the board to distract from domestic failure. Muslim governments are shielded by it from their manifest domestic failures, which leave so many of their citizens existing on the poverty line, in societies riven by sectarianism and ruled in complete absence of the most basic human rights. 

And despite many reassurances from the Muslim Council of Britain that we have never had it so good, there is much to be done by and for the community here in the UK . The raw statistics, revealed in several reports are shocking: a quarter of Muslim graduates are unemployed; 77 per cent of Muslim women are economically inactive; one third of working age Muslims have no qualifications at all, and over one third of children are growing up in households where there is no adult in employment. Furthermore, spacial segregation, poor educational attainment and a higher incidence of risk factors associated with poverty make grim reading for those seeking causes of disaffection.   

This is where the real challenge to Muslim leaders lies. Why are the lives of third generation Muslims still scarred by socio-economic disadvantage and racial and religious discrimination?  Why does this particular community in Britain reflect Muslim ‘exceptionalism’ in failing to avail of the opportunities in the fourth richest country in the world?  And why as last week’s NOP/Channel 4 poll showed, is loyalty to Britain so uniquely weak as compared to similar countries where greater discrimination and fewer opportunities exist?

The Muslim community needs to move away from building its identity on a notion that it bears responsibility for injustices abroad.  If it continues to be seduced by the vain hope that Britain on its own can resolve injustice to the Muslim umma, it may find that it has let down yet another generation of its children.  These issues call for more nuanced arguments than are currently being articulated. Let’s take the debate to where we can and will make a difference. 

Kishwer Falkner

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