Counter-Narrative to Islamophobia 1 (UK), focuses on Decentering Conversations on Islam and Muslims from Current Institutionalised Narratives. 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.
Upon being elected President of the University of Salford’s Student Union and a National Executive Councillor of the NUS, Zamzam Ibrahim found her tweets made five years previously when she had just turned sixteen being published in the mainstream media with claims made as a result that she was an anti-white racist and an extremist (Ibrahim, 2017). Finding herself forced to explain herself (repeatedly) Ibrahim was also subjected to 48 hours of threats, including rape threats and abuse via social media. She wrote after the event of the right-wing media that:
“They often paint us as caricatures undeserving of empathy or understanding. They want to deny our humanity because they want you to be afraid of us.
“We cannot allow this situation and allow this cycle to continue in Britain today. Because the first step of solving any problem is admitting there is one.”
This cycle of repetition is picked up by other interviewees. Samayya Afzal (2017), a former National Union of Students NEC officer, and formerly Diversity Development Officer at the Peace Museum of Bradford concurs with Ibrahim: ‘it’s very frustrating from my perspective or from people within the community that are constantly having to say the same things over and over again… to get people to understand that we don’t deserve to be discriminated against.’
Poole (2017) laments the lack of interest shown by media and government in the plethora of research discussed in this project, which proves in great detail the existence and nature of the problems and narratives of Islamophobia. Ibrahim’s demand that the problem of constant dehumanization must be acknowledged is still, sadly, the natural starting point.
The humanisation of the Muslim subject was repeatedly raised by interviewees not simply as an intuitive response to the idea of demonisation, dehumanisation and subalternisation (Johnson, 2017) in political and media discourses regarding Islam and Muslims, but as a basis for policy and even law. The dehumanisation of the Muslim subject is not necessarily an overtly racist act. In their submission to the Scottish Government (EHRiC) for its Inquiry into Bullying and Harassment of Children and Young People in Schools, Scotland Against Criminalising Communities (SACC) explain how this operates within an institutional setting where teachers are with all good intentions trying to help victims of racist and or Islamophobic bullying:
“In conversations with members of the majority community we often encounter the view that highlighting a racist/Islamophobic incident as such could risk further stigmatising the individual affected and could “make matters worse.” We virtually never encounter that view from the people supposedly at risk of being stigmatised.
“Recognising a racist/Islamophobic comment or incident for what it is as an essential step towards tackling the problem. We believe that systematic failure to recognise racist/Islamophobic incidents, whatever the reason for it, is a form of institutional racism/Islamophobia.”
Thus even putatively benign interventions can reproduce racism, in this case, by obviating the very outcomes that victims of racism feel are needed. Crucially, in this instance but possibly more generally the erasure of Muslim voices in countering Islamophobia (or more generally the voices of those who experience racism(s) from addressing racism) is causal. The well-intention actions implemented in order to suppress further problems in fact simply suppresses those who are the victims.
The need for this process of humanization was also indicated by interviewees to be crucial in academic and policy framing of Muslims, which even when sympathetic, had the effect of making invisible or marginalising Muslims in a way that again removed their agency (Johnson, 2017, Rajina, 2017). In so doing this:
“changes the very foundation of how you do this research because it means you’re not going to be just taking, “oh, look at the poor Muslims there, look at the violated Muslim…” It’s actually about these systems of oppression are killing many Muslims across the globe, but also, we deserve to be defined by more than these systems of oppression.” (Johnson, 2017)
By having this ‘basic understanding of the Muslim ummah’s humanity’ (Johnson, 2017) and an ‘understanding of the way race is invoked’ (Kapoor, 2017) in institutional discourses per se, made invisible ontic assumptions about Muslims as subjects (of law, the state or discourse) can begin to be challenged effectively.
Examples of how this has already been carried out include research undertaken by interviewees in the course of their doctorate or post-doctorate work as well as discrete research projects funded by the ESRC and UK universities on e.g. the framing of and the outcomes of the framing of securitisation discourse like the Deport, Deprive, Extradite project. The project aims to ask key questions about the praxis of government by investigating:
“the shifting dynamics of racism and the security state, exploring the interconnections between counterterrorism policing and border control as they play out in the context of the War on Terror.” (Deport, Deprive, Extradite, 2017)
In addition to garnering statistics and analyses of events and their impact on the securitisation discourse, they have produced films with renowned director Ken Fero highlighting individual cases of injustice where the narrator and subject of the films’ lives have been devastated by unproven allegations and or refusing to co-operate with the intelligence agencies (Fero, 2017). At the level of the individual, some academics referred to their own doctoral work and how they challenged the norms of framing the Muslim or otherwise racialized subject. Rajina (2017) found that she:
“…decided to focus on the British Bangladeshi community in East London because… a lot of the research… was all very much about the socio-economic status of being the poor migrants, the poor people… It was never about the people themselves… it was very much about just framing it within the good migrant-bad migrant discussion. And I was keen to just look at the people, and look at the landscape and see how East London has changed over the years. East London has a very, very long relationship with Bengal – not just modern-day Bangladesh but the whole of Bengal, with the East India Company being set up in the Bengal in 1600 and the British leaving India in 1947. So, we’re talking about a 300-year relationship there. That intrigued me …
“…I feel, any research around Muslims always revolves around something as nebulous as just identity or just their economic contributions, it’s very rarely about the people, the development of the community, internally, how the shifts are happening between generations – this is why I compare two generations and their perceptions of dress and language. How, what is it? What are the factors that are influencing and changing those things?”
Rajina (2017) signals that the arrival within the academy of people of colour who ‘disrupt’ established anthropological narratives is one positive counter to existing narratives that have failed hitherto to deal with positionality, the need for reflexivity and the white male colonial gaze (2017).
However, the natural evolution of change whether in academia or other institutions or society per se without institutional intervention is challenged by interviewees from various backgrounds who noted that diversity in and of itself was not enough to effect change with institutions often socializing those who entered those institutions to its norms and prejudices. Ahmed (2017) notes that in the lower ranks of the legal profession there are many Muslims represented but that this did not necessarily entail a critical approach to the profession or the law. Whilst Ahmed (2017) and others concede that better representation at the top of the profession is needed and welcome in ensuring that the optics of equalities (see counter-narrative 7 below) are fulfilled, the same caveat applies.
An understanding of the way race is invoked (Kapoor, 2017) is helpful across all fields discussed. Kapoor’s comments apply regarding the need to understand the shifting boundaries of what is understood as race/racism apply equally to the framing of research in academia (Rajina, 2017, Johnson, 2017), the positionality of lawyers (Ahmed, 2017, Choudhury, 2017), the ontology of the law and the epistemology evoked by lawmakers (Qureshi, 2017) (whether in parliament or on the bench) or common-sense understandings of marginalised groups within society and projected by parts of the commentariat (particularly but not solely characterised within a securitisation discourse) (Ameli et.al., 2004b) Kapoor, 2017 states:
“I think specifically the big challenge is convincing people, in certain sections of mainstream population that [Islamophobia] constitutes racism in the sense that there’s an argument by the similar liberal sections, political commentators but also the general public because the signifiers are centred around religion. [They say] it’s not race, it’s different, the Polly Toynbees[i] and so on, of the world… it transgresses, although it might be that it’s deeply linked to seeing physical differences; colour is used in conjunction, as part of the ways in which Muslims are portrayed I think the stark racial signifiers are there but it’s not necessarily the case and so one of the challenges is the way in which race is invoked … the other thing is… the way the narrative around the problem is conceptualised in terms of national security, global security, it’s moved the criminalised threat, which is one way in which race is always invoked, beyond national boundaries, so it presents a greater or a more difficult challenge, one that more starkly connects racism with imperialism. It’s not just a criminal figure that within the bounds of a nation state can be dealt with within the confines of a criminal justice system, it’s something that links domestic racism with imperial and colonial interventions and I think the separation between racism and imperialism is part of the consequence of the separation of thinking about the two together, has enabled this distinction or separation so that the terrorist suspect is not necessarily a figure that we think about as being a racialized trope in the same way that the mugger has been in the past, the kind of criminalised black and brown figures.”
Part of the Deport, Deprive and Extradite project led by Kapoor is the production of short films that convey in the words of people who have been harassed by the security services, the traumas that they have faced and the injustices laid bare e.g. the removal of their children by social services despite there being no criminal finding against them (Fero, 2017).
The challenge variously identified of the normalization of Islamophobia and the desensitisation of society at large and institutions to its operation, effects and its inherent injustices are interconnected issues that such projects have tried to challenge. Kapoor identifies a mix of anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, securitised discourses that pervade the university setting, where institutions have gone above and beyond what is required by the law rather than interrogate the ideas underpinning such laws and policies. Getting the institution to understand it’s complicity in injustice is part of the challenge of unpacking the various performances and theatres of Islamophobia (Sayyid, 2014). Kapoor’s (2017) example highlights that in:
“…some senses there’s an indifference, there’s some sense when you try and raise the injustice, for example, of having to treat Tier 4 students differently from other students, police being on campus during freshers’ week to ensure that they know they have to register if they change address or if they fail to attend supervisory meetings then they potentially face deportation.”
Williams (2017) highlights the dangers, but also an example of push back against the loose use of terms, in particular ‘radicalisation’:
“One of the basic mistakes that government sometimes makes (I have spoken to successive ministers about this over the years) is that there is something called ‘radical Islam’ and something called ‘moderate Islam’… that is a painfully inept grid to interpret Muslim identity… I am always wary of the way the word radicalisation is thrown around…
“We continue to have arguments (at the university) about how radicalisation is understood and our own university [Cambridge] made a nuanced response to the government on that, noting that the word radicalisation must be used with care… unfortunately in a very short term and reactive political culture where you have to be seen to be doing something yesterday this is hard work, so I think the sheer normalisation of Muslim presence is needed.”
Kasia Narkowicz (2017) who also works on the Deport, Deprive and Extradite project with Kapoor describes the dilemma to humanising Muslims and the impact of celebrity ‘Muslimness’ thus:
“the problem is what is effective is not effective… celebrities like Nadiya Hussain, I can see that probably does something for people, just like visual representation, when they see people who they normally dehumanise, they see them humanised… bringing Muslims to the mainstream probably does something. I personally think it is a really sad benchmark to have.”
Kassam (2017) describes his project’s work in this regard:
“… a [counter]narrative for Islamophobia is being able to highlight studies of Muslims that contribute to society… For example, we have recently got a hijabi Muslim referee who was qualified, and we have a video on that. It just offers a different perspective obviously the way in which Muslim women are portrayed. When I say mainstream I do not mean the entire mainstream elements of the mainstream, but The Daily Mail, or The Sun[ii]. The way in which Muslim women are portrayed is often… they do not have a voice etc. and when you see this, when you see a Muslim woman in a hijab giving yellow cards to a bunch of guys playing football it’s quite liberating, empowering. In a sense it offers a different perspective and we try to focus on those stories, whenever there is a positive story, positive contribution.”
However, the cycle of humanisation and dehumanisation, is critiqued by poet Suhaiymah Manzoor Khan in her piece, ‘This is not a humanising poem’ (2017). She decodes the conditionality placed on Muslim presence and acceptance:
Love us when we aren’t athletes, when we don’t bake cakes
when we don’t offer our homes, or free taxi rides after the event,
In other words the national conversation and the national story needs to include Muslims regardless and without conditions. She concludes her piece with a brutal but precise critique:
Because if you need me to prove my humanity
I’m not the one that’s not human.
Hooper (2017) highlights both civil society and media trends that emphasise ‘positive’ Muslim responses to incidents of political violence as serving to ultimately undermine the supposed aim of doing so:
“there’s been a counter-narrative to the narrative that, there’s some sort of incident or attack, the Islamic state is blamed, and there’s an outpouring of public emotion and among those reactions are: Muslim communities raise funds or they do something which then the media seizes on as an example of “Oh look, Muslims are doing something in recognizing the horror of the Manchester bombing” or something like this. And I actually feel that the framing of these media stories is quite damaging because although it is well-meaning it actually frames Muslims… [and] it makes the point that they have a normal reaction to something horrific, something that’s newsworthy and noteworthy. We have to be really careful now about how we present these stories about Muslim communities as if we somehow should be congratulating people that they have a normal human reaction to horrific events happening in the society where they live. That’s a trend that I’ve noticed, the ‘good Muslim’, as it were, promoted as opposed to the ‘bad Muslim’… I think that we shouldn’t go [this way] because it entrenches the idea of Muslims as the ‘other’. In terms of the media, this also feeds into the idea of stuff that goes viral, even the sort of emotional framing of headlines. The Independent does very cheap stories about how these Muslims reacted to the Manchester bombing… it’s quite manipulative and unhelpful.”
Simply reproducing cultural forms in order to provide counter-narratives to the problems caused by that form perpetuate the problem. Looking for different cultural practice, to analogise Kappeler (1986) arises from a ‘changed consciousness of what culture and its practices are… It would be a practice in the interest of communication, not representation’.
Manzoor-Khan’s performance of “This is not a humanising poem” has been seen on various social media platforms several million times, clearly speaking to the experience and feelings of many. The use of art by Muslims to express their story/ies was recommended by many interviewees albeit with an understanding that the space within which those stories could be created was under severe pressure (see El-Khairy and Latif, 2016 below), and that freedom of expression for Muslims was severely curtailed by the state, that mainstream artistic spaces are not easily accessible to Muslims or conducive to this type of work. At the time of writing Manzoor-Khan’s poem and work have been profiled on mainstream arts media channels. Manzoor-Khan’s work is one of the more vociferous and critical in a developing canon of ‘resistance’ and decolonial performance art which broadly includes young Muslim artists like Mark Gonzales and Warsan Shire whose poem ‘Home’ on the experience of being a refugee, was adopted by INGO Save the Children during the so-called Refugee Crisis[iii].
This type of cross-over into the mainstream is an important step by the culture and arts sector that narratives of Islamophobia that deny the place of Muslims within the cultural fabric of the nation can be confronted despite societal and institutional discursive practices that work counter to that. The type of pressures on Muslims in arts spaces are compounded by the operation of security praxes include Prevent as highlighted by El-Khairy and Latif (2016). Their play Homegrown was pulled by The National Youth Theatre halfway through rehearsals. The pair highlight not just the hypocrisy of this denial of free speech, but elaborate in detail how this incident highlights the exclusion or worse, expulsion of Muslim voices from telling their own or indeed any stories by the mutually reinforcing actions of the law, media and government (Ameli & Merali, 2015).
El-Khairy and Latif report and argue the impact of the following as:
(i) Before being cancelled, the production had already been subject to local government intervention. That intervention led to them being thrown out of their original venue; after which police had suggested security measures that included reading drafts, attending rehearsals, planting plainclothes officers in the audience, and carrying out daily sweeps of the venue by a bomb squad. This all garnered much media attention, but little dialogue. Subsequent to the cancellation there was no consistent or elucidatory explanation from any of the agencies of why any of the foregoing or the cancellation took place.
(ii) The playwrights argue that had they, and the majority of the 113 young people involved not been Muslim this situation would not have arisen and indeed their work may have been lauded in much the same manner that Gillian Slovo and Nicholas’ Kent’s work ‘Losing our Children to Islamic State’ which was not only allowed to go ahead by the same National Theatre (NT) but framed by the artistic director as ‘provocative’ and ‘urgent’ speaking of: ‘the “flak” the theatre anticipates, but [he] said it was right to take part in a “national debate”.’
As El-Khairy and Latif note: ‘This framing… in relation to Islam not only boosts ticket sales, but also sets up a battle between brave artists and feared Muslims.’
(iii) They summarise the duplicity of the ‘national conversation’ in reference to a previous attempt by the NT ‘to promote a show tackling “the Muslim question” as both timely and fearless”’, including in 2012 when a work that ‘addressed freedom of speech, censorship and Islam – from the Salman Rushdie fatwa to the Dutch cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.” The playwrights note that: “Despite contemporary British Muslim life rarely puncturing the walls of the National, they presented Islam not only as a topic for dramatic exploration, but as an urgent problem: one that society has been too scared to confront.”’ This leads them to raise the core issue to this section: “Why can’t Muslims tell their own stories?”, but also, why did the NT not open its space to young Muslims to speak of the experiences of over-policing and Prevent, the key issues facing them and the story of their nation as told through their experience?
(iv) They also refer to the double bind of the interpretation of Muslim absence from these ‘conversations’, using the example of DW8 again: ‘they tend to be left out of the conversation, yet their position is always presumed to be one of irrational rage. Their absence is never interpreted as an act of ambivalence. Instead it is cultural ignorance or crude protest.’
Understanding that ambivalence and opening up conversations that interrogate the hidden operation of Islamophobic narratives – even as in the case of NT’s production ‘Another World’ they seek to humanise the dehumanised – is desperately needed to have a ‘national conversation’ that decentres current institutionalised narratives on Islam and Muslims, whether overtly or covertly Islamophobic, or indeed whether they operate in existing attempts to ‘humanize’ the Muslim subject whilst denying that ‘subject’ their own voice.
The importance of Muslim agency in this process crosscut with counter-narratives 9 and 10 below, and fall under the broad meta-narratives of the normalisation of Islamophobia (1) and the need for Muslim space (4). This idea of changing the narrative has impact on the utility of legal challenges. Choudhury (2017) highlights the role his department (advocacy at IHRC) has in trying to challenge the government narrative through strategic litigation but, as will be expounded on below, has severe limitations:
“we are constantly challenging government policies, whether it is when they put out a consultation for legislation, … pushing back and constantly challenging these narrative and providing that alternative narrative or that alternative face on that story.”
However, this has been fraught with difficulties in regard to the anti-terror legislation in particular, leading IHRC to absent itself from consultations on this issue because they felt that the government simply used such consultations as rubber-stamping exercises rather than engaging with the concerns raised (Islamic Human Rights Commission, 2015). This theme of whether to engage or not was recurring through the interviews for this research, with several advocating either strategic boycotts of institutions (Salih on the media, 2017, see counter-narrative 8 below) or no direct engagement with government.
Even where humanising narratives exist, e.g. the memorial work for Srebrenica that has taken hold over the last few years, Ahsan (2017) expressed concerns about what could be the agenda of the government which has funded such a project organisation with over £1million pounds. This frustration with established institutions and the state can be summed up by Choudhury’s (2017) expectation of the political and media discourse produced around immigration:
“[it] smacks of racism, and it is a case of ‘these immigrants are problem’, they don’t necessarily want to discuss how social problems are solved, so it just becomes all about ‘immigration’ … and it is what they end up doing is demonising minority communities as a result, and they need to stop doing that and that it is.”
Williams (2017) feels that Muslims being seen to interact with other issues not just Muslim ones is a way that the media and political realms can send messages to wider society about the place of Muslims in the UK, where:
“… Muslim commentators in the media are seen to be addressing other intelligent and resourceful issues not just religious ones … that is surely one of the things that would make a difference. This [Muslims] is a set of resources, identities, convictions that can contribute to a general civil discourse, not just one about religion, but about justice, poverty, the environment etc.”
This visualising of Muslims as part of the story of society carries forward to the next counternarrative of diversifying the understanding of who and what constitutes the nation.
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].
[i] Polly Toynbee wrote for The Independent after the launch of the Runnymede Trust Report Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All, “I am an Islamophobe, and proud of it.” cited in Toynbee, P. (1997). “In Defence of Islamophobia”. The Independent (23 October 1997), quoted in Naser Meer, Citizenship, Identity and the Politics of Multiculturalism: The Rise of Muslim Consciousness (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 182.
[ii]The Sun and The Daily Mail are politically and socially right leaning tabloid newspapers that have earned reputations as purveyors of scurrilous stories (particularly in the case of the former) and anti-migrant (particularly in the case latter). The anti-migrant sentiment broadly covers any number of anti-Muslim tropes discussed in this and the Workstream 1 report.
[iii] It has been noted that the term Refugee Crisis is in itself problematic insofar as those suffering the crisis are largely imagined to the European societies faced with an influx of refugees rather than the refugees themselves who are often fleeing war and / or extreme poverty / social deprivation. It arguably another example of dehumanising discourse.
