Channel 4 Dispatches used to be a haven of serious documentary, but has degenerated into a stream of Islamophobia. It touched rock bottom today with a truly pathetic effort by Andrew Gilligan which found – shock horror – Muslims in the East London mosque!
These Muslims actually wanted society to be ordered in an Islamic way on Islamic principles. To try to achieve this they were – shock horror – undertaking political activity and joining political parties!
Gilligan’s piece turned on the Daily Express trick of attempting to inculcate fear that suddenly you and I will wake up under sharia law. The fact is of course that no matter how much devout Muslims may want to campaign to ban alcohol and push-up bras in the UK, they have not a hope in hell of succeeding.
But surely they have a right to their beliefs and ideology and a right to espouse it? Surely we should be delighted that these Muslims are seeking to advance their views through participation in the democratic process and not through violence? In fact, is this not the sort of activity we should be encouraging?
Apparently not. Apparently you only should be allowed to participate in politics if the ideology you are offering to the electorate is broadly the same as Andrew Gilligan’s. We were apparently supposed especially to be shocked by Gilligan’s revelation that Muslim activists campaigned for George Galloway because of his opposition to the Iraq war and support for the Palestinians. Wow! Whatever next?
Gilligan went on to introduce a number of neo-conservative nutters from wild eyed groups such as the Centre for Social Cohesion, to condemn all this “extremist” activity, without giving any context to explain where his “Independent” commentators were dredged up from.
Gilligan’s only useful point was about the waste of taxpayers’ money being pumped in to various Muslim groupings. Sadly he confined his criticism on this point only to financial support for those Muslim groups who did not wholeheartedly support the Bush/Blair foreign policy, when in fact twenty times more public money has been wasted on tiny but grasping Muslim groups who proselytise Blairism.
All in all, the most risible piece of half-baked Islamophobia I can recall. Gilligan – a man for whom I have had respect – should be ashamed of himself.
I bumped into this a few weeks ago :-
http://faultline.org/index.php/site/item/incendiary/
On the gentle art of predictable argument. Too long, possibly, but terribly familiar.
Thanks Chris and Technicolour,
Let’s take an example.
A man takes a job in a supermarket. He is muslim. He refuses to handle pork products at the checkout. Should he be required to do so?
The example is not just hypothetical: http://muslimmedianetwork.com/mmn/?p=824
Any answer you give, so long as it is sufficiently general as to apply equally to all, legislates for tolerance.
Best Wishes,
Stephen
Jesus!
What did you make of the “Spot the Fag!” quiz game at the beginning of that programme?
Stephen,
Your question appears to have arisen regarding alcohol in Sainsbury’s already, in 2007:
http://tinyurl.com/2gmtee
Richard,
“On the gentle art of predictable argument”, was good craic, thanks.
Yes, thanks Richard. Oh, a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down..
Dreoilin, hello, are you well? Meant to say, for RSI try (a good person who knows how to do) acupressure, really worked for me. It comes from the shoulder blades, you know.
Stephen: why are you so against the BNP? And thanks for that link: those poor people, handling slimy pork with no gloves, eurgh. And the health implications! Thank heavens they took a stand, and now wear gloves.
Stephen, sorry, ignore the bit about the BNP: it was meant flippantly.
I’m grand, Tech, thanks. I must look up what you say about acupressure. Never thought of the shoulder blades. 🙂
A young Sikh guy who wanted to join the Irish Garda Siochana (police force) was told he couldn’t wear his turban. There was a bit of a fuss about it but the force held firm. A uniform is supposed to be uniform, but more to the point is the necessity to keep religion and State separate. You’d have some Ban Garda sticking a crucifix on her uniform before you’d know it. Echoes of BA.
As I understood it, the turban was originally used to keep the long hair tidy, anyway, and wasn’t a matter of faith. They didn’t allow the turban, and the fuss went away. I think these issues have to be sorted one at a time, case by case. You can’t legislate for them.
This comment is a sunny, cheerful one designed to repost Richard Robinson’s:
http://faultline.org/index.php/site/item/incendiary/
and thereby share in some reflected glory. Since it gets funnier the more you read it.
“Since it gets funnier the more you read it.”
It is quite fiendishly to the point, isn’t it ? I’m glad it seems to have gone down well, actually, it struck me afterwards that it may have looked more pointed than I quite meant it.
What I’d really like would be to see it as a numbered list. A vast amount of bulk (again, not pointed, not even just on this blog) could then be dealt with simply as “this is #67”, etc, like the “prisoners’ jokes” joke, for a vast saving in all our time.
I find it a very frustrating and depressing thing, about this whole bloggycomment format. See if there are any new comments, refresh the page and look down, trying to remember where you left off. Have I seen this one before, that one before ? Oh FFS yes, 175 times, over N years on 93 different thread on 43 different sites. All, supposedly, on different topics, but all the same going-nowhere moves.
This comment is guiltily aware of the term ‘displacement activity’. This next sentence would like to come up with something cheerful and encouraging but in fact is going to mutter something about firefighting sometimes being necessary, especially if one likes the blog owner, and then slink off and have a cup of tea. This concluding sentence nevertheless reminds itself that without all these comments, it would never have heard of Chris Clarke, obviously a top chap, or ‘shillshits’. A PS will explain it could have lived without the latter,
Hi Craig,
I really appreciate the article you wrote. We in Tower Hamlets usually get the brunt of all the rubbish after gutter journalism of programs like Dispatches are produced! My colleagues in various work places including the council have had all sorts of comments (tantament to Islamophobia) being thrown at them.
One of the negative impacts of this Islamophobic and politically biased Dispatches program was that it has caused a large number of parents to pull out from an event happening today in which the London Muslim Centre is trying to (along with many other organisations out there) help achieve the World Reading Day Record (Guiness Book of Records) in London for the most number of children reading books at the same time.
The current record holder is Dubai. Sadly, rubbish like this has no doubt made a great negative and disturbing impact on people’s mind.
Ahmed, I’m sorry. Have you written to Dispatches? They are human, last time I looked, though publicity driven, and they should know this.
Ahmed, can I ask which parents pulled out of the World Reading Day? And why?
” Apparently you only should be allowed to participate in politics if the ideology you are offering to the electorate is broadly the same as Andrew Gilligan’s.”
No, you only should be allowed to participate in politics as a member of the Labour Party if the ideology you are offering to the electorate is broadly the same as the rest of the Labour Party’s.
That isn’t true of I.F.E. and East London Mosque. No, they aren’t out to impose sharia on all of us; they are out for what they can get, which is probably a rather worse reason for being in politics.
“they are out for what they can get, which is probably a rather worse reason for being in politics.”
Depends what sort of thing you want, maybe ? Once upon a time, they wanted, & got, things like a National Health Service.
Accumulated backlog, I can’t keep up :-
“We are talking about a fully automatic 9mm pen….”
9mm seems a bit thick, but automatic would be good, my handwriting’s illegible these days. Penis jokes ? There’s a whole thread for them.
Suhayl – Old England, etc. Dodgy business, there’s a lot of mythologising around ‘folk music’. Collect the Authentic Music Of The English People, reject the corrupting foreign influences … nice picture on the chocolate boxes, gets uglier on the streets. (As a player, I’m a bit dubious about ‘collectors’. People were busy doing it, and then other people came from a different class background and noticed that they were doing it and told other people of their class, and that’s what’s important. For them). But the last couple of generations have done a better job of keeping it out of the hands of the nasty people than they might have done. As witness, yes, Richard Thompson. I knew he was Muslim at one point, is he still ? I haven’t been so impressed with his more recent work, but he was very glorious for a hell of a long time.
Yes, Richard Thompson is Muslim, as far as I am aware.
I agree about collectors – there was that Smithsonian guy, what’s his name? I suppose the irony is though that without the colonial-era ‘collectors’, there would probably be no record at all. A bit like some of the Colonial Residents in the Raj – they wrote about ‘local customs’ from a truly psychotic point-of-view, but it makes very interesting reading – as long as one doesn’t confuse it with truth.
An interesting interview with Richard Thompson, from 2007:
http://nightlight.typepad.com/nightlight/2007/09/publish-and-be-.html
Thanks for the interview, I hadn’t known of it. And, yes, I see he does talk of his Islam in the present tense (2007) – I notice I’ve only heard it mentioned before in the context of that photo-with-a-turban LP, a sense of “we all experimented superficially with exotic ideas in those days, of course we’ve all stopped now” kind of thing. Hmm.
This veers wildly away from the purposes of Craig’s blog, and probably from most peoples’ interests. But it’s a thing I’ve been concerned with for a long time, so I’m going to indulge myself, I hope no-one minds. (Or maybe the threads have moved on and no-one’s looking any more ?)
The Smithsonian are strong on recordings, aren’t they ? Back to the wax cylinders. And that, I have nothing to say against. Listen to the way people did it / do it, lovely. That’s what matters. (Apart from, it all comes out of a particular bunch of people, there are attitudes, stories, functions. You can’t just buy that stuff off a global-supermarket shelf).
“I suppose the irony is though that without the colonial-era ‘collectors’, there would probably be no record at all”
That’s a bit I have trouble with. Yes, on the assumption that it’s going to die. What if they’d joined in ? Learn to sing/dance/play something ? Help keep it alive. The whole attitude of ‘look at the quaint customs of the peasant class, which of course we are not involved with’.
Aural culture in an age of literacy, I think. We learn to speak of the sheets of notation (“the tadpoles”) as The Music, and in the “classical” tradition, this is indeed the case, one person’s ideas working as a set of instructions to the performers (though even there, there are oral traditions). In a word-of-mouth situation, the paper is not that, it’s a second-hand report, a description of what actually happened. Not a very good one, in many respects.
Pause for breath, scratch head, what am I wittering on about ? Cecil Sharp hears Untutored Rustic singing song, writes it up and draws it to peoples’ attention, and it might become part of a different culture. But the next generation of Rustic, don’t they just learn it from the person who sings it ?
Do they need the ‘educated’ intermediaries ? Or, of course, rustics find they can no longer go on quietly starving in their rustic abodes and shift to the city slums to die of TB instead, and it all shifts into something else, and what was abstracted out and written up is indeed safely dead. But the people who were doing that music will be doing some other music. There’s continuity, of a sort. Not of the forms of the music, maybe, but of the process.
Illustration: you might have guessed I have something personal here, to be banging on like this … As I said before, I’m a “tunes” player. I had, for a long time, a web site, hosted in Leeds Uni. music dept., holding a monster collection of transcriptions (originally, all my own. Then other people started contacting me with theirs, since I was in a positin to put it up somewhere …). I was copied an internal memo. once, during one of their intermittent fits of “who is this person, and what’s he doing on our website ?” (it disappeared a couple of years back; final takeover of the suits, after an annoyingly-few months short of 15 years). The memo was justifying the collection’s existence, on the grounds that one day it would be a “valuable source of ethnomusicological data for some future researcher”. That’s the ‘collector’ attitude I’m talking about. From the ground, what I knew was that the overwhelming bulk of the feedback I got in connection with it was from people looking for/finding tunes for people to play – people finding it useful in carrying forward the things it was reporting. But all that, the main point and purpose so far as I (whose work it was) was concerned, seemed completely invisible to those who had the thumbs up/down on it.
(“static” is a tricky point in itself, though, when publishing for free. Copyright is a minefield, in an aural-transmission setup. The bulk of the content was necessarily originally made by those who are 70+ years dead; or those of whom I have to claim ignorance … *ahem*).
[ For the sake of completeness – I had seen Leeds’ takedown coming and tried to prepare a replacement. It’s been vastly more work than I expected, the current version is ugly, confusingly presented, and the code is a nightmare way beyond fixing (I’m terrified of bug reports). But for what it’s worth, the current state of play is at http://livetunebook.qualmograph.org.uk/
I ought to be working on the next, long-term-maintainable version, instead of woffling on here. ]
3% would be 1.8m Muslims. Some sources give believable estimates of 2.0 to 2.5m and, of course, it is growing faster than the rest of the population.
As many Muslims don’t integrate preferring to live amongst fellow Muslims, some areas and some towns are becoming Muslim areas and Muslim towns. You won’t need many to bring about some kind of Balkanisation
Also note, the Gallup Coexist study found only 10% of British Muslims were integrated. http://libertyphile2.blogspot.com/2010/01/gallup-coexist-study-2009-headlines-you.html
A handful of extremists can have an effect out of all proportion to their numbers (I won’t trouble you with examples.)
We are already feeling the consequences of this disproportionate effect with the establishment of Muslim Arbitration Tribunals (you are wrong to say Sharia has “no standing” in English law, it is having a most decided impact ?” for example, child custody, inheritance, and Muslim men in domestic violence cases being sent on anger management courses), new limitations on free speech (take the ridiculous business at John Lennon airport ?” another cartoons outrage) and recognition of polygamy by the social services, to name a few examples.
The critical interest in the IFE and what it really stands for is fully justified.
BTW, personally I would be in favour of a lot less alcohol and slightly higher bras.
Hi Craig thanks a lot for such a locely read, thank you very much indeed.
I think the main reason we respect and admire you is certainly because of your utmost honest interst and active effort on pro-human right activites. Keeping it in mind I woould like to draw your attention into another side of IFE.
IFE is infact is the European outpost for the Jamayat E Islami Bangladesh. Jamayat activists and their killer student wing Islami Chhatra Shibir memebrs openly admits this fact here in the UK and in Bangladesh.
I can name quite a few IFE executives who are directly representing Jamayat E Islami Bangladesh, the extremist group behind Bangladeshi genocide during 1971 and raping of CHILDREN and women. Jamayat also believes killing an anti Jmayat activist is not going to have a long lasting effect so Jamayat activists cut opposition activists vein to cripple them for rest of their lives and they do it in the name of Islam, what a disgrace! Your IFE comrades may have an innocent face in the UK but when they repeatedly invited and organised meeting and public engagements for Jamayat leaders who publically called for the mass murder of the British and American troops in Afghanistan and in Iraq (Please don?t get me wrong I am a life long anti war protester, I hate war and weapon as much as you do)
Jamayat and some of IFEs executive/founding members still believe killing of 3 million people in months and raping of 200000 women and CHILDREN are justified (as it was done by pious Pakistani soldiers and Jamayat leaders)
IFE can be a well run organisation in the UK but we should never forget their roots, their motif.
Finally, now a days I honestly believe Andrew Gilligan is nothiong but a good pro neo-Nazi blogger who preys on innocent people’s fear and ignorance
Richard, that’s absolutely fascinating! Important – and joyous – work.
Yes, you’re right, anthropology, with its various associated fields, has been a contentious discipline for a long time. Issues of the colonial eye, social class, subject-object, centre-periphery and various assorted ‘isms cannot be avoided in this discourse – and so really it is not that far from many of the concerns raised on Craig’s blog’s threads.
Btw, I read in Leeds once, a few years ago, at a super place on the edge of the suburbs called ‘The Old Police Station’, which had been converted into a restaurant/ bar and downstairs (? originally the cells), an events space. A good evening it was, too!
Libertyphile, while I agree with your points about Sharia Law, which I do not think should have any place in UK law/ practice and I share your valid concerns about monocultural ghetto-isation, I do feel I must take issue with your statement that “many Muslims don’t integrate preferring to live among fellow Muslims” presented as a bald statement in that way.
Inner-city (we are usually talking inner-city here) ghetto-isation is a very complex socio-economic phenomenon to do with many factors, including the nature of certain forms of migration, socio-economic status in the ‘source’ country and many other factors, all of which simply cannot be distilled down to the sentence as you’ve presented it.
It does not affect only ‘poor Pakistanis/ Bangladeshis’ but lots of other ‘poor’ sections of society. However, we are talking here primarily about ‘poor’ people, aren’t we. The rich Arabs of Knightsbridge and the highly-engaged Arabs of Edgeware Road, not to mention the Turks of North London, do not fit the paradigm, do they?
So the manner in which the religion has developed – or shall we say been developed among certain subsets – in the cultural and socio-economic contexts of post-industrial Britain (Metropolitan England, to be accurate) is an hypothesis worth exploration – but not in the sloganeered way you’ve presented it.
Also, LibertyPhile, we are not talking about wealthy and middle-class Pakistani/ Bangladeshi/ Indian-Muslim families living in the suburbs of UK cities and towns, are we? Many of them are very well-‘integrated’ (whatever that strange word means; like the word, ‘cool’, it used to be ‘good’, then it was ‘bad’, now it’s ‘good’ again!) in their own social class (this is Britain; to ignore class is not merely to pass by a confounder, it is to ignore everything). And if they’re not well-integrated, often it’s not for want of trying! Silent racism is still a big problem among the upper classes.
Around 1900, The Daily Mail and other media organs used to iterate that ‘The Jews’ (recently-arrived from Russia and Eastern Europe) were ‘dirty, breed more than us, don’t eat our food and speak funny languages’. The spectre of ‘being swamped’ (Ah, Maggie T, you were far from original, and were simply one more in a very long line of racists!) was raised constantly. In some circles, the word, ‘Jew’ provoked the same response then as the word, ‘Muslim’ does now. I alluded to this earlier in this thread: it brings out the worst – or perhaps, the core – in some people.
I am the last person to be in denial about the very real problems that beset some parts of our communities today – I think we need to tackle these problems with courage, cleverness and proportion, not with fear-mongering slogans deriving from highly questionable agendas – from a position of ‘bad faith’, one might say.
Suhayl Saadi
I was trying to be brief but you are right. There are many reasons why people stick together, nearly all of them reasonable.
However, for the sake of social cohesion and to avoid Balkan enclaves over time people need to mix, and inter-marry. Education and economic progress help but in the case of Muslims, especially, religion is a great hindrance.
Regarding “integration” have a look at how the Gallup Coexist survey defines it.
http://libertyphile2.blogspot.com/2010/01/gallup-coexist-study-2009-headlines-you.html#integration
And BTW, Gallup Coexist is run by Dalia Mogahed, Senior Analyst and Executive Director of the Gallup Centre for Muslim Studies, and an advisor to the US President.
Interesting comments Suhayl; thanks, Libertyphile, for generating them.
“3% would be 1.8m Muslims. Some sources give believable estimates of 2.0 to 2.5m”
Dear Libertyphile, you do know that there are 61 million people in this country, don’t you?
“and, of course, it is growing faster than the rest of the population.”
Ah, this old scare story, last used about the Catholics in the Six Counties, since though heavily outnumbered, Catholics tended to have more children than Protestants. Just to reassure you, if there are two blue people and they have 6 blue babies, and 60 red people, who have 30 red babies, the blue population is not ‘growing faster’ than the red population. But logic aside, it wouldn’t matter if it was, would it?
Are there ‘Muslim towns’ in the UK? How interesting. Where?
“Around 1900, The Daily Mail and other media organs used to iterate that ‘The Jews’ (recently-arrived from Russia and Eastern Europe) were ‘dirty, breed more than us, don’t eat our food and speak funny languages’. The spectre of ‘being swamped'”
Several years back, I played a gig in a pub in Bradford. They had a whole load of old newspapers & other ‘victorian nostalgia’ stuff by way of decoration. Most of it was ugly rantings about The Foreign Outsiders who weren’t like us. They come here and do the jobs we don’t want to, with their foreign religion, foreign language, foreign habits, filthy foreign-muck food, all those tatties, cabbage and bacon … Wave after wave after wave of ‘incomers’, all starting out in the same places and functions. (Not always quite the same places, I doubt the London docks work quite sthe same way these days).
Think of pub gigs, re: integration, ghettos, etc. I keep hearing all these ‘we know best’ people pontificating about how Muslims Must Integrate Into Mainstream Society, but I’ve never heard any of them put it together with just how much of ‘mainstream’ social life happens in pubs. And I wonder how that works for people who start from just not expecting alcohol ?
@technicolour
“Just to reassure you, if there are two blue people and they have 6 blue babies, and 60 red people, who have 30 red babies, the blue population is not ‘growing faster’ than the red population. But logic aside, it wouldn’t matter if it was, would it?”
Just to correct you,
“if there are two blue people and they have 6 blue babies, and 60 red people, who have 30 red babies, the blue population is not ‘growing faster’ than the red population.”
– the reproductive population of the blues has tripled
– the reproductive population of the reds has halved
yet you say that the blue population is not “growing faster”
In 6 generations the blue reproductive population will be having 0 babies and the red reproductive population will be having 2,916 babies.
“But logic aside,” what logic?
I can only assume you are looking at the first generation plus the parents giving a population of 8 for the blues and 90 for the reds completely missing the point that even within just that one generation the blues have increased by a factor of four while the reds have only increased by a factor of 1.5
Worse yet, I emphasise again, the blues reproductive population has increased by a factor of three while the reds has halved
Assuming no parental deaths on either side after six generations the blues will outnumber the reds by (roughly) 18 to 1
At this stage the blues are no longer reproducing whatsoever and the reds continue to have 3 babies each which in turn go on to have 3 babies each so that 18 to 1 becomes 54:1 then 162:1 (ish)
Does the term “exponential growth” mean anything to you?
“it wouldn’t matter if it was, would it?”
Well, it is. So my answer to your question would be that it depends to what extent the blues and the reds value secular principles as opposed to supernatural principles from strange old books interpreted by even stranger old men.
Yeah, golf-clubs, etc. too. In fact this affects many white people don;t drink or who don;t enjoy a drink culture; women too to some extent.
It’s also a point of interest that in general, if you look at immigration into North America from Muslim countries, those incomers achieve a far greater degree of integration into mainstream society than is the case in the UK. This applies also to Hindus and Sikhs and other groups, btw. There are several reasons for this. One, North America is an immigrant society (a cliche, but basically true). Two, the social class demographic of migration to N. America was entirely different from that into the UK. Three, there is a residual colonial relationship in the UK which does not exist for S. Asians in, say, France, the USA, etc. but which is likely to exist for North Africans in France, for obvious reasons.
Extremism knows no class, of course, and many of the ‘actors’ have been from middle and upper class backgrounds, which is where it began. But social ills do provide a ripe substrate for the fertilisation of extremism. The provincial towns of England, in some cases, have been that substrate. Of course, there is the catalytic element of extremist religious views, distortions of Islam (though we must accept that it is our problem, not some great plot foisted on us).
Richard, what do you play?
Oh, come on, basicmath, let’s not get into the silly paranoia about black people outnumbering white people in Britain. Because that’s what it’s about.
Irish people in the UK no longer have the big families they used to up to the 1960s, for many reasons. One of these reasons is capitalism and the nuclear (as opposed to the exteded) family. The other is the reduction in infant mortality. They third is advancing socio-economic status. The last is probably the availablility of contraception (unlike in Roman Catholics, this is not really an issue in Muslim families).
@Suhayl Saadi
First, read the post i was responding to
Second, I am non-white, mixed race, call it what you will my post has nothing to do with skin colour