Counter-Narrative to Islamophobia 3 (UK) looks at Contextualising the nature and level of ‘threat’ posed by political violence per se by reviewing the epistemology of current security policies. Find the full list of ten and their details here. This work was undertaken in 2017 – 18, and remains pertinent. The ten counter-narratives will be indexed on this site too here.
Brittain (2013) outlines the crisis caused by ongoing securitisation praxes: ‘what have been the costs in the UK and the US, to society and to the legal system which is supposed to represent the best values of society…?’ Securitisation haunts every discourse regarding Muslims. Denied acceptance and thus the rights and assumed dignity of citizenship, Muslims are not considered to be British (Merali, 2017a). This perverse logic followed through sees them projected as living or existing not in Britain but in ‘Islam’ or ‘Islamism whatever that may be’ (François, 2015) in a public discourse that allows them to be eschewed from equal citizenship in the wider public psyche. This situation is part of and indeed significantly undergirds the narratives and the experience of Islamophobia in the UK, and was highlighted by the majority of interviewees as the most significant issue that needed dealing with in order to build a counter-Islamophobia culture in the UK.
The differential impact of institutions on citizens marked by their ‘Muslimness’ or other forms of racialisation and wider society are not as clinically distinct as the operation of a security narrative and set of praxes targeting certain outgroups suggest. Kapoor argues that part of the issue at stake here is the need to understand that the authoritarian aspects of the nation state have always been there but have simply been exposed by the recent anti-terrorism cases (2017). Berger and Mohr (2010) argue that the difference between the experience of the racialised and non-racialised wo/man is that the former lives the content of European institutions in a shorter period of time, whereas the later has been socialised into them over generations. For the former the transformation is violent, for the later there is no transformation because they live within these institutions. This critique is necessary if conversations about the damage done to British society as a whole rather than simply as damage done to Muslims in particular. This sectioning off of the issue of Islamophobia furthers the idea that Muslims are something else that need to be dealt with separately – in this case by an exceptional legal regime that falls well below the guarantees and standards of the rest of the law in the country. This also normalises the law as neutral and decreases the space for critique and development of that law[vii].
The tropes of the narratives that undergird the securitization of Muslims, and the exceptional praxis of law and state against them are detailed extensively in Merali (2017a) and opposition to this has been framed largely by civil society calling for at the very least a review of the Prevent policy and its introduction into law since early 2016, to an all-out call for the repealing of ALL anti-terrorism laws (Jones et. al. 2015). Bouattia (2017) explains how the former of these has found echoes within the political establishment from all political parties to differing degrees, and that this is a testament to the persistence of civil society actors and NGOS, academics, dissenting politicians and lawyers and students’ groups to critique the operation of the Prevent policy. Examples of this include the Students Not Suspects campaign (NUS, 2015 onwards), the wider operation of anti-racist campaigns by the National Union of Students Black Students Campaign (NUS, 2017), which includes shared work on Prevent related matters (see e.g. the Preventing Prevent Handbook, NUS Black Students, 2017) particularly during the academic years 2015 – 2017, the operation of organisations like PreventWatch, IHRC, CAMPACC, SACC, Cage and MEND (Merali, 2016b, 2017a, b) who all adopted critical positions with varying nuances across varying durations of time, some starting as far as twenty years ago in response to the introduction of the first new anti-terrorism laws in 1997 (Ansari, 2006) since the repeal of laws targeting political violence in relation to Northern Ireland.
As Bouattia (2017) and others have highlighted this activism has come at extreme personal cost for many involved whether as individuals or organisations, facing demonisation in the press and by politicians, as well as facing the prospects of being marginalised in political spaces. This is widely seen as one of the reasons that many Muslim civil society organisations were slow to criticise the processes of securitiszation until they too found themselves demoniszed[viii].
The call for a review of Prevent being taken up in some political circles is an achievement however what is more significant is that the new independent reviewer of the anti-terrorism laws, Max Hill QC, has spoken of the ideal scenario where there would be no anti-terrorism laws, and crimes of political violence would be prosecuted using the existing gamut of criminal law (Hill, 2017a). Hill was considered by many observers to be a potentially authoritarian and illiberal choice for the post, given his work for the Crown Prosecution Service in prosecuting several high- profile ‘terrorism’ cases[ix]. In post he has called for higher sentencing tariffs for families of perpetrators of acts of political violence. The adoption of the critique by Hill that many of the laws enacted are simply a knee-jerk response to the idea that ‘something needs to be done’ (Merali, 2017b) and now marks a point where government must listen to the demands of even its hitherto strongly aligned supporters. It also re-emphasises the need for there to be space of critique for Muslims, free of fear and where their autonomy and their narratives are considered as part of the conversation. Hill’s views confirm that in this instance a counter-narrative to (Islamophobic) securitisation that was much maligned when expressed by Muslims and civil society alliances (Jones, et. al. 2015, United to Protect our Rights, 2005[x]) has found mainstream acceptance. Surely a twenty-year cycle to get to this position is one that the state needs to avoid as the basis of reviewing policy?
Qureshi (2017) claims that the conversations that are being had have no ‘epistemological basis’ and that securitisation and the framing of Muslims as a threat to the UK needs to be challenged epistemologically. In short:
“That’s why I respect the work of people like Marc Sageman quite a lot, who himself has come a long way in his own work. His book “Misunderstanding Terrorism”, which came out last year, was a phenomenal piece of work because what he does is that he uses Bayesian probability analysis to make an assessment about what the actual threat is that is posed to non-Muslims by Muslims in the Western world. He categorizes the West as being Australia, New Zealand, Europe and North America. According to him, it ultimately boils down to one Muslim per million per year. That is the threat that is posed to the Western World, that he actually says, that’s the way to talk about it. That’s what we should be saying. All of this exceptional policy, this securitisation, exists despite the fact that 999,999 Muslims out of one million pose no threat at all to the West. And so, this is how we really need to reconceive of what the actual data is, what statistics tell us. And then how policy should be informed by that.”
Hill QC’s meeting with advocacy group Cage (Hill, 2017b) to discuss their concerns regarding the current security regime, is another repudiation of Islamophobic narratives of Muslims as a security threat and a threat to internal democracy if engaged with. In response to his critics Hill (2017b) explains:
“I have come under some criticism for agreeing to meet with Cage, an organisation considered to be beyond the pale in many circles.” “Successive Governments have taken the view that there are some organisations with which any engagement is inappropriate, and Cage certainly falls within that category. That is of course a matter for government and it is neither my place nor would it be appropriate for me to pass judgment on their stance.”
“For my part, as the Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, it is my duty and within my remit to engage with anyone who is affected in any way by the legislation. This not only helps inform my annual review of the legislation but also informs my wider contextual understanding of how our laws apply generally to society.”
As Hill QC, says and does, reiterating the necessity of conversation between Muslim civil society, including those that have been demonised by established voices, is an imperative in breaking the cycle of literal, legal and conceptual expulsion of Muslims from the nation. Hill QC’s own disavowal of the need for anti-terrorism laws is another example of how relevant political voices, in this case an appointed reviewer of law, must look beyond current narratives of crime and security.
Arzu Merali worked on this project while head of research at Islamic Human Rights Commission. The project spanned 8 European countries and involved IHRC and five universities. IHRC was responsible for the UK, Germany and France sections of the project. Find out more about the project here[EXTERNAL LINK].
[vii] As Ahmed (2017) points out in section 7 below, whilst EU directives on equalities are often powerful on paper, case law developed and policies implemented in the UK often circumvent the demands made by such directives.
[viii] See e.g. the targeting of the MCB by Boris Johnson on the pages of The Spectator (Ameli and Merali, 2015).
[ix] The so-called Ricin case which has been highlighted as an extreme failure by the state, its agencies, law enforcement and prosecution in particular and the media, regarding the unchecked operation of anti-Muslim prejudice that resulted not only in injustice for those directly targeted but had long term (Ameli and Merali, 2015). It was also argued that the events were hijacked for purely political purposes both domestically and abroad as a justification for the invasion of Iraq (Archer and Bawden, 2010).
[x] The signatories to this statement came from a wide civil society spectrum.
