Counter-Narrative to Islamophobia 9 (UK) looks at A cultural shift in understanding who is part of the national, and how national histories have been intimately intertwined with Muslims and Muslim cultures and nations over centuries. 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.
In her critique of the academy Rajina (2017) highlights how at the outset of her PhD research she found that work on the Bengali community focused on their perceived problems e.g. socio-economic issues rather than their views. Tied to this was the failure to look at the relationship between that community and its existence in the UK physically and in the long durée imagination where the histories of the UK and Bengal are intimately intertwined. More academic but also cultural review of these histories is a way of resetting the collective imagination as to who is part of the nation. These attempts are not necessarily in and of themselves a panacea and those attempting to do this need to be mindful not to reproduce cycles of exclusion of Muslim and other racialized voices. Thus recent attempts to address the critique of the British penchant for costume dramas undermining black representation, by having a more diverse set of walk on parts as well as minor characters (see e.g. Howards End, 2017, Doctor Who (Orthia ed., 2017) and Gunpowder, 2017) has also come under fire from both critics of the exclusion and critics of the inclusion. Whilst the latter attempt to hold on to the fallacy that no such diversity existed (and have been refuted in de Lisle, 2017 and Turner and Diver, 2017), the former hold that the inclusion of visual diversity without then also factoring what the impact of racialization meant in those contexts is another way of sanitizing a history fraught with the inequalities created by empire. Making sure that there is better consultation in cultural production obviates some the above problems and indeed those created and discussed around the National Youth Theatre’s cancelling of Homegrown discussed above.
The idea of immigrants and migrants being outside the accepted understanding of what is the nation, also needs challenging by cultural and news media, not least the histories averred to by Sivanandan above regarding the creating of British nationals out of the peoples of the empire and their subsequent expulsion from that category. Efforts like those of Forgotten Heroes (Forgotten Heroes 14-19, 2017) that highlight the Muslim contribution in terms of manpower in the First World War are a civil society initiative with very little uptake by the mainstream imagination that is itself being moved into new and restricted narratives of that episode in history. This shift in narrative regarding the Great War is indicative of a wider trend to disassociate not just groups of people but groups of ideas from that of Britishness. Where once there was a thorough and almost commonplace critique in cultural production, education and newsmedia of the First World War as a largely imperial war that saw much unnecessary slaughter of young European men (itself a critical history from which Muslim and other racialized bodies are erased), there is now in its place an idea that this as a war fought for human rights and that any dissenting narrative of that war is somehow anti-British (Merali, 2014). That these narratives come from the same narrow political stables is again a cue to the question of accountability and control of the major institutions in the UK narrowing, with less opportunity for dissenting voices to be heard.
Afzal (2017) reflects on such initiatives as being conflicted and suggests that Muslims themselves need not take this track to prove their worth:
“If we want to talk about the Muslim contribution then it’s fine to talk about it in ways that highlight that this happened and the fact that it’s hidden or covered up and it’s not mentioned and it’s an erasure of history, that much I can understand. But what I don’t understand is this need to go so much further and act like we’ve got something to prove because we don’t.”
Rather than having an Indigenes[vii] moment in the UK, there is instead a pushback against that history with Christopher Nolan’s film Dunkirk coming under heaving criticism for its erasure of non-white faces from its retelling of that moment. The attempts to interrogate historical erasure, even in the most conformist manner (Forgotten Heroes does not challenge current narratives of the First World War) are left almost entirely to civil society and there must be uptake amongst wider cultural producers, rather than the rise of a culture of erasure.
This erasure reiterates the narrative of Muslims as invaders (Merali, 2017a), which finds realisation in policy and media discourse around immigration and the taking in of refugees. The need to delink the ideas of migration and invasion is imperative. The EIS’s three booklets for schools on ‘The Myths of Immigration’ are an example of how this can be practically achieved at a young age (2017). Ahmed (2017) outlines how the effects of immigration rules on racialized communities include: destitution, exclusion from services (medical, educational), and homelessness. This comes as the result of dehumanization and the work of campaigners and journalists like Anonymous 4 (2017) tackle this narrative but have no working partner at the level of the state. As Kapoor (2017) and Kundnani (2017) contend, there is a need for organization outside of advocacy with the state which tries to (re)connect the idea of the ‘other’ be it Muslim, immigrant, migrant or any other type or combination of types of racialized ‘other’ with members of wider society. This widening or equalizing of what it means to me part of the nation should have an inevitable knock on effect on legal interpretations of rules (Ahmed, 2017) just as the converse is currently seen to be true in equalities related law and policy.
Johnson argues that beyond this type of inclusivity there is a need for ways to deal with white supremacism within political and cultural discourse. This in and of itself need not be a specific project. The almost accidental impact of TV personality Nadiya Hussain has been highlighted by many interviewees as one which has had an almost entirely positive impact on the story of what it means to be part of the story of the UK (Hamid, 2017, Rajina, 2017, Johnson, 2017). Hussain won a reality baking show and has since gone on to present many programmes dressed in hijab. This process of normalization of Muslim symbols and faces in the cultural life of the nation, is not without problems (Johnson, 2017). This in itself is an indictment of what Johnson (2017) describes as the liberal self-perception of the state that requires further exploration in cultural circles. Liberalism has been reimagined by both proponents (Huntington, 1996, Ferguson cited in Skidelsky, 2011) as a strict adherence to a certain set of values rather than as a system of tolerating different views and values (Farron,2017 and Williams, 2017).
Without this cultural shift, the type of Islamophobic harassment from colleagues and even managers that Ahmed (2017) reports as the daily log of calls to his practice, are considered by the perpetrators to be entirely normal and indeed liberal acts. As Bouattia (2017) and various others have indicated, there has to be more sustained work on exposing this contradiction at the heart of the self-perception of the state as liberal, in order to tackle the normalization of right-wing ideas under a liberal garb. Aked (2017) referencing Kundnani’s (2017) call for a new peace movement, sees the recapturing of liberal arguments as a way of reimagining Muslim rights:
“when he [Kundnani] says radicalism [is] not necessary being a bad thing… at root it can mean political engagement and again it is a liberal narrative to say that political engagement is the right of Muslims as much as anyone else… [it is] a positive narrative to put forward that not many people would not deny… The fact that now if people are organizing against Prevent, that itself is now deemed as suspect of extremism, but it comes down to democratic values. I am speaking in broad terms, but I think those are the three key words, democratic values, equality, anti-racism,…”
The debating of fascism and fascists is reported by various as a particularly alarming development.
Poole (2017) describes the situation where far-right voices are finding a platform on mainstream media through the idea of ‘balance’:
“…this idea of a neutral mainstream that’s been normalized and these other groups with other voices were operating outside of that kind of mainstream so if you get one from one side and one from the other then you’ve got a balance. But that is deceiving because it covers over the fact that a lot of these views are being related in the mainstream but the way they’re being discussed is perhaps less sensationalist in terms of the way they’re framed so… that’s not an example of balance.” In November 2017, LBC contacted the chair of IHRC to discuss the Defence Secretary’s comments that British born Daesh fighters should be killed by drones. Shadjareh (2017) writes that he: “asked, ‘are you saying the discussion is ‘should we use drones to assassinate British citizens on nothing more than a level of suspicion rather than using due process?’… The LBC producer failed to understand that persisting with such a discussion perpetuates the idea that only certain people are thought of as human enough to be worthy of due process.”
Addressing this shift in the values of the reporting center or of balance between extremes that allows far-right narratives to be normalized needs to be urgently addressed by editors. Poole (2017):
“…it is problematic the media and the government don’t listen to, engage with certain parts of academia because there is the research there that could… be tapped into, the government said they want to deal with extremism and radicalisation and yet they don’t listen to all the studies that are out there, they only listen if it fits into their idea of what needs to be done and that communication between academic and state institutions like the media, that’s where a lot of progress can be made but they don’t want to see the problem. It’s not that there is no knowledge being produced. It just isn’t being listened to.”
Sheridan and Gillett (2005) make similar demands with regard to their work and Bar-Tal and Labin’s (2001) where they establish a link between a rise in racism and racist attacks post large scale events (Sheridan and Gillett’s study looked at 9-11), however there appears to be no obvious take-up of this as an issue worthy of policy.
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] The 2006 film Indigenes (Days of Glory in the English version) The deals with the contribution of North African soldiers to the Free French Forces during the Second World War and, controversially, with the discrimination against them. The film’s release contributed to a partial recognition of the pension rights of soldiers from former French possessions by the French government.
