There is a lot of this happening. Figures on the left, anti-establishment figures, Muslims repeating these mantras: it is shocking that the state has ‘suddenly’ become authoritarian; that anti-terrorism laws are manifestly unjust; that political space has been forcibly shrunk. Arzu discusses how this outrage is undermining proper critical reflection and invisibalizing and marginalising Muslims and those racialised as such even further.
As Fahad Ansari has stated below, this authoritarian drive (authoritarian drift as Caterina Aiena has aptly coined) is not sudden.
We have been talking about this for nigh on 30 years.
I will be adding some resources bit by bit on these pages (they are being reflected differently across my social media).
To start, my own recent contribution on this ‘Wide-eyed and Unwary: Civil Society, Media and Political Failures in the Time of Genocide‘ for The Long View for Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC).
Whilst looking for material I remembered that IHRC has been sorting its archives out. There is more to add but their Civil Rights section is a good place to start. ihrc.org.uk/civil-rights/
There you will find material on: Anti-terrorism laws; Schedule 7, Stop & Search, Immigration & Asylum, PREVENT, Policing, Shrinking Spaces (Civil & Political), Minority Rights, Institutional Racism, Extradition & Deportation and more.
Here is a sample from 2011 on Schedule 7, as this is where we started.
“…continued discrimination in the application… against ethnic minority groups. The figures for 2010/11 show that the targeting… under Schedule 7 has in fact increased.”
This idea that suddenly anti-terrorism laws are being applied with discrimination masks decades of anti-Muslim policing, all of which happen because the laws have always been unjust and unnecessary from the get go.
Here is my own (and my children’s experience) of Schedule 7 from 2012.
To be clear one child was a tween, the other under 10. It still rankles. From that piece:
“I didn’t catch your name,” I ask my interlocutor, trying to see a name badge. I see his colleague’s ID tag is reversed (or maybe just blank) but it is at this point I notice the ribbon on her lanyard says SO15. If you didn’t know what that was, you would never know. My interlocutor says, “I don’t have to give you my real name, but you can call me ‘William’ if you like.” Like it or not, that is what I have to call him. We are allowed to go, two adults angry and upset, and two children unhappy and confused, as they repeatedly ask us, “Why were we stopped by the police?”
This has been happening to ‘anyone’ for the longest time and the time for caring was back then.
Fahad Ansari’s report, originally published in 2005 – yes, twenty years ago – gives you detailed anaylsis and examples of the state of play then, already nearly a decade into an anti-terrorism regime that targeted Muslims and demonised Muslim causes. Read it here, British Anti-Terrorism: A Modern Day Witch-hunt (Revised July 2006).
Part 2 of this series to follow.
Arzu is a writer and researcher based in London, UK.
