Counter-Narrative to Islamophobia 10 (UK) looks at Recapturing and creating further space for Muslim narratives of being. 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.
The need for movement building (Kundnani, 2017 and Bouattia, 2017) has already been averred to. The role that such movements have includes creating spaces for those marginalized to be able to not only speak freely but to take control of their own narrative and participate in movement building on the terms set by those narratives. In lieu of a sympathetic state that encourages / protects the spaces needed, this role must fall onto nascent movements. This is not something that can be adequately fulfilled by the workings of individual or small groups of civil society organisations. The spaces needed within such movements suggested byrespondents cross-cut sectors, but include arts spaces (Rajina 2017, Ahsan, 2017), alternative media (Winstanley, 2017, Salih, 2017 and Hooper, 2017), spaces for self-care which include the ability to create alternative narratives to the ‘constant cognitive abuse’ that Johnson (2017) identifies as the state of the post-9-11 generation which does not know of any other type of narrative except the types outlined in the introduction above. Kassam (2017) describes this need based on his own experience as a raison d’etre for the creation of The Muslim Vibe (a media hub that straddles news and cultural stories for Muslims):
“I have discovered my identity but for us growing up at least my generation it was a very difficult time and space that we were in and now there are so many conflicts… So, it’s important to create spaces where people can actually champion this identity… growing and developing themselves.”
Examples of how this could work include the aforementioned example Homegrown. How could a movement (a) step in in cases where a play like Homegrown was effectively censored / pulled? Is there or can there be made space where such a work could be performed with the support, financial and otherwise, outside of the mainstream. This support would need to include the ability to withstand political and (ps
eudo)legal pressure e.g. through Prevent mechanisms or the anti-terror laws, as well as the support required of any artistic production. The erasure, not only of ‘Islamic’, or ‘Muslim’ voices, but histories is not simply a local or regional one.
Hoskote (2007 in ed. Merali, 2008) describes the portrayal of the ‘House of Islam’ post-9-11 in the global media as a ‘politics of image which presents the House of Islam as a repository of horror, showing it chiefly through images of violence, terror, desolation, the unreason of the mob, the intolerance of pulpiteers – the model of reportage from zones of crisis and conflict.’ Hoskote continues:
“The tendency to reduce Islam’s richly variegated tradition to… bigotry … and violence…, the reflex of picturing it as a breeding-ground for fire-breathing ayatollah and kamikaze martyrs, obscures the fact that Islam was – for nearly a millennium – a vibrant cultural framework that linked South and West Asia with North Africa and West Europe, synthesising Arab, Greek, Persian, Indian, Turkish, Mongol and Chinese influences. During this millennium, civilization was embodied by the House of Islam (with its emphasis on the illumination of learning, urbane sophistication, social and geographical mobility, and a mercantile economy)…”
As Ameli and Merali (2015) note:
“That tendency to reduce can only be tackled through serious reassessment of how representation is produced. It is not enough (though much needed) to simply refrain from negative stereotyping. There has to be the enrichment of representation that humanises all subjects, and in the cases of out-groups like Muslims, this can only come from the presentation of the idea of a ‘House of Islam’ that has historical context and civilizational meaning.”
This contextualization can only come in the present circumstances within wider political movements that understands the wider global as well as the local context of this erasure and this history. There exist many arts projects that require further support from movements including, the Khidr collective, Oomk, Variant Space and the Khayaal Theatre Company. An arts fund to support such initiatives Amal has been recently set up and provides support that is less tied to established funds which have or are perceived to have political conditions attached. The Saqi gallery and publishing house is an older example of this praxis with similar initiatives in Muslim civil society e.g. Kube publishing, IHRC Gallery and Bookshop, Algorithm, Amrit publishers, Turath, Islamic Texts Society and other publishing houses and galleries. Existing projects already work in hybrid political spaces sometimes working within the mainstream and at others within discrete sections of or wider sections of movements. Better understanding of the nuance and thus the power of this diversity can form the basis of kinder and more egalitarian movements (Salih, 2017), Kassam, 2017 and Ameli and Merali, 2015).
Likewise the proliferation of alternative and semi-alternative media provides a basis for creating narratives and spaces for existing or marginalized narratives of being (Bodi, 2017). Whilst these do have and should have more impact on the mainstream media, it does not have to be the prime aim of such initiatives (Salih, 2017). Having a space of recognition (Kassam, 2017) has a palliative effect on those whose voices have been suppressed. Attacks on any part of these spaces need to be understood as an attack on all (Salih, 2017). In particular the independence of those initiatives, whether from state interference and engineering (Salih, 2017) or attack or usurpation by other states, (notably Saudi Arabia, Salih, 2017b and Williams, 2017). Salih (2017b) describes the quandary of a ‘Muslim’ media currently, with some becoming: ‘irresponsible sectarian mouthpiece which is only good for advancing western/Saudi/Qatari foreign policy and destroying other countries’. Having a media that report on politics, rather than becoming involved in propagandizing for any state or project is the pre-eminent challenge for movements. Whilst the above again rely on civil society to take the burden for what should be the normative and transformative project of the state, the meta-narrative of accountability remains. As Bouattia notes:
“…it’s an incredibly incredibly worrying time to be Muslim and the more that I travel and meet with other groups, the greater the problem [I see]. And whilst I’m under no illusion that, in relation to the state or, big institutions and their roles and intentions – I think there needs to be pressure and accountability around questions of what the hell is happening around Islamophobia around the world. And there needs to be an international recognition of some of those things, and at least processes and spaces where you can challenge and start to have real pushbacks on the kind of international policies that we are seeing and the treatment of Muslims in every space.”
A strong peace movement (Kundnani, 2017) cannot challenge injustice without being attacked itself. The type of attacks that even ‘mainstream’ figures in the political establishment have faced e.g. former cabinet member Baroness Warsi and London Mayor Sadiq Khan are indicative of the need for counter-narratives of normalization of Muslim presence (Williams, 2017). Both Warsi and Khan were attack
ed for links to or sharing platforms or facilitating entryism of ‘extremists’ and by dint of, somehow evidencing extremism themselves. Extremism and radicalization as terms are easily bandied about in the current culture of securitization and their instrumentalization in Islamophobic narratives has been discussed in Workstream 1 (Merali, 2017b). According to Williams (2017), these types of attacks are a:
“…major distraction because it draws us back to the particularist question i.e. if you are a Muslim then you must have this agenda and if you don’t have this agenda it’s only because you are concealing it very successfully… it’s a bit like the way historically in Europe people have talked about Jews in public life… I think there’s quite a bit to be learned from the history of anti-Semitism… I have just been reading Simon Schama’s ‘History of the Jews: Volume 2’ and page after page have sparked in my mind regarding Islamophobia…
“We need to make those connections more publicly because those who have learned something from the history of anti-Semitism need to be prodded to do something about Islamophobia.”
This dovetails with the liberal self-perception of the state (Johnson, 2017), which at the moment stands exposed as a myth to many of those interviewed. To those that share this self-perception, the liberalism of the state has been undermined by its commitment to the Prevent programme and its failure to tackle Islamophobia and other forms of racism, and its undermining of the institutions and culture that hitherto provided some protection from and sent a normative signal about racism at the individual and structural level. The wider question of whether the abuses of minority rights, as well as the structural and individual violations of civil and political rights enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights by the praxis and increasingly the overt ideology of the state (under successive governments) cannot be solved within civil society. Whilst this is the locus of a vociferous debate, itself 
targeted and often silenced by state forces, it is ultimately the institutions that make up the state and the wider institutions that legitimize the power of nation states as arbiters of social mores to address both violations of these norms but also how accountability and recompenses can be affected in the short and the long term. Until then, the despondency of many of those interviewed, that there will be and cannot be anything of use offered from state institutions will remain.
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].
