Written submission from Baroness Kishwer Falkner of Margravine (HCL0022)
In providing this submission to the Home Affairs Select Committee, I write as an ethnic minority woman who is a secular Muslim with a largely liberal outlook. I arrived in the UK in 1976 as what would broadly be described as an ‘economic migrant’ – i.e. I was posted here by an employer, and subsequently natrualised as a British citizen. I should also note that I was the only opposition parliamentarian to be included in the Labour Government’s Taskforce on Muslim Extremism in 2007, and have been engaged with some of the issues discussed for over almost two decades. Most recently, I was nominated by the Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister in 2016, as the UK candidate to be OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities – the post was to be a champion of minorities across 53 countries. The nomination eventually attracted a Russian veto.
I read the APPG on Islamophobia’s report in preparation for a House of Lords debate on the matter on 20th December 2018. I would not be writing if I did not believe that the APPG’s analysis was so flawed, prone to ‘groupthink’ and unhelpful that it may well contribute to a practically unworkable result. Moreover, it risks giving an impression to other religious groups that Muslims in Britain are in a privileged position vis a vis them. It also risks perpetuating a view among more secular Muslims that our identity had been ‘captured’ so as to diminish our personal freedoms, and impinge on the freedoms of non-Muslims too.
I will attempt to set out below my initial thoughts, but would welcome the opportunity to speak to the Committee were it to wish to proceed beyond written evidence.
The APPG report provides almost no evidence for its claim that the term ‘Islamophobia’ should be adopted by Government as a working definition (presumably to have legal standing) other than to say that efforts to tackle Islamophobia cannot succeed unless there is a universally agreed legal definition of it. This assertion appears to be based on a view that Islamophobia is the mirror image of anti-Semitism, and thus requires similar treatment to the IHRA definition adopted by Government. This view does not take into account the historical context of anti-semitism in Europe, its gravity (the report’s promoters in the House of Lords confuse xenophobia with fascism), or of the scale and impact of anti-Semitism over the 19th and 20th centuries. The two cannot be considered equivalent.
The report has been drawn up under the leadership of respected Parliamentarians—including Dominic Grieve, Anna Soubry and Wes Streeting — yet begs the question of their involvement as it is populated with extraordinary claims, without an empirical base – oversights that you would not expect of a former Attorney General or other holders of Ministerial Office. It expresses the belief that the existing rough and ready definition of Islamophobia is so inadequate that is has actually led to an increase in attacks on Muslims, without providing any evidence. It claims
“The APPG has recognised that the lack of a widely adopted working definition of Islamophobia had lowered the threshold and led to an increase in Islamophobia in society to devastating effect.”
This statement of itself serves to confuse correlation with causality.
The evidence that is provided is either anecdotal or drawn from non-objective surveys of opinion or from the rising reports of hate crime. It is true that recorded hate crime has more than doubled over a five year period and religious hate crime has risen five-fold, from a low base, over the same period. But we know that this welcome increase in reporting is largely a function of greater encouragement to do so and we also know from other data sources—notably the Crime Survey of England and Wales—that actual hate incidents (as opposed to reported) are at worst flat and probably declining.
I do not dispute that there is greater wariness towards Muslims than towards any other significant ethno-religious minority. The British Social Attitudes data showing that 44 per cent of the population would mind if a close relative married a Muslim is far higher than for other groups and goes some way to justifying the belief of 63 per cent of Muslims that there is more prejudice against Muslims than other religious groups. This may have to do with the relative recentness of the numerical rise of Muslims in the UK. Moreover, it is hardly surprising that there is more wariness about Muslims than other groups. Our association with violent religious extremism, terrorism and more recently sex grooming gangs, combined with the much greater religiosity of Muslims and the somewhat more separate lives many of us lead compared, say, Hindu Indians, makes that greater wariness understandable if not inevitable.
I could not find evidence that the wariness of including Muslims in one’s family (itself highly subjective) will be sustained over time. Having lived in three other EU countries, I can testify to the interaction effect: that hostility reduces as people get to know one through living and working alongside one. The report’s own data shows that the proportion of people who think there is a fundamental clash between Islam and the values of British society has been in sharp decline in recent years, including the years since the Brexit referendum. In June 2015 it was 59 per cent and in June 2018 it had fallen to 46 per cent.
I myself, along with most Muslims, will know someone who has had a bad experience and I therefore understand that there is a heightened sense of anxiety – a member of my immediate family has had a recent attack that was either racist or Islamophobic, or both. What is not provided for through evidence is the extent to which the hate crimes experienced by Muslims, are necessarily because they are Muslim per se, or because they are visibly different – not least because most are non-white. We run a danger of conflating racism with anti-Muslim hatred, and in evidential terms run the risk of setting up to fail genuine victims of anti-Muslim hate crime, where they are white.
Turning to education and employment, the report is strong on rhetoric but weak on evidence. While it is true that Muslims do tender to cluster at the lower end of the spectrum in terms of income and status, that may largely be a reflection of our historic origins, coming from poor and economically disadvantaged agrarian parts of poor countries, with a legacy of low skill levels. But increasingly evidence shows signs of a growing Muslim middle class (particularly in the south of this country) and many more Muslims are going to good universities. The proportion of young Bangladeshis going to Russell Group universities is almost exactly the same as for the white British.
Writing as a liberal and secular Muslim, I should also raise the issue of individual choice and the role of human agency within my community. Muslims in Britain are a heterogeneous group both in terms of national origins and belief, but we tend to share more regressive attitudes than the British mainstream to gender and equality – the reason for my own migration to the UK, as the first generation from my own family. The fact that Muslim women are held back from the language and world of work (compared with a 70 per cent rate of female employment across the rest of the population), results in enforced separation from the wider community. Muslims are also less likely to have a residential university experience or be prepared to move for a job, due to a stronger reliance and attachment to ‘one’s own community’.
The Role of Politics
The select committee has asked for views of the role of politics in supposedly perpetuating Islamophobia, and I wish to address that point in my concluding thoughts.
Some of my generation’s decision to leave our countries of origin was not economic, it was political. I see that repeated from middle classes fleeing Syria, other parts of South Asia and the Middle East. While we may be small in number, we do not give up previously comfortable lives to work much harder in globally competitive advanced economies lightly. We do it for the same reason that generations of others across the world have done so before us – for political freedoms, for equality, for rights, for a genuine ability to exercise our choices be they religious, racial, sexual or merely for us to be allowed to ‘live and let live’ – for individual autonomy. The attraction for us of the liberal West is that it gives us personal freedoms denied at home.
While I accept that the majority of Muslim arrivals in the UK in the past few decades have come for economic reasons, I am also aware that their children, educated in the freedom of the UK, even in less-integrated settings, are growing up with western values. This younger generation is divided between those who grasp the opportunities available to them, and those who for whatever reason, don’t. Their heterogeneity should of itself serve as a reminder that a ‘catch-all definition’ cannot work.
The attempt on the part of the report’s supporters to suggest that somehow politicians and thinktanks ‘legitimise’ Islamophobia is presumably prompted by one or two high-profile incidents relating to articles written by a senior politician. They may have been offensive, but were not necessarily worthy of censorship, which seems to be the agenda here.
The philosophers Ronald Dworkin, John Rawls, Stephen Lukes and others have pointed to the most basic condition for a democracy to be viable: the space for minority opinions to be given expression and protection, and for the expression of peaceful dissent. Politics provides the valve where dissent and disagreement can be vented, even where it takes an offensive form. As long as this is within the law, it is entirely legitimate. Society is itself riven in its values and it is right that politics and politicians should reflect those divisions, even when they are distasteful, misjudged or just simply cringe-inducing.
It is profoundly important that politics represents the diversity of opinion held by our fellow citizens, which is one reason I have always been reluctant to ‘ban’ the BNP and other right-wing or seemingly racist groups. It is right that their views, however odious, are exposed to those voting. We would be considered Orwellian if we sought to restrict political opinion to those we deem to be attitudinally like us.
We have recently imposed a duty on Universities to uphold Freedom of Expression. This is not because we have a politically correct desire to wrap students in cotton-wool, but rather because we know that human resilience is a product of experience. If nothing ever goes wrong, if one never experiences offence, one won’t have the resilience when it hits us in the face. Resilience is a trait to be promoted, rather than ‘feelings’ to be protected.
For many of us, something has gone wrong with the institutions of the state when we hear that victims of blasphemy like Asya Bibi (Pakistan) or Raif Badawi (Saudi Arabia) are not offered protection in the UK but rather Canada. We are told the UK does not want them here because there is an institutional view that offering a ‘religious dissenter’ asylum here ‘might upset conservative Muslims’ or ‘there might be public disorder’. We wonder what has happened to Britain if it is unprepared to stand up against injustice on a tiny scale merely because my co-religionists might make trouble. It is testament to the failure of integration that officialdom prefers to elevate public order and ‘fear of the mob’, over the rule of law or the reputation of Britain a beacon of human rights.
A further problem with the report, is the lack of academic input from those who analyse the impact of ‘Political Islam’. The evidential base of the report comes mainly from sociologists and anthropologists. There seems to have been no attempt to understand anti-Muslim perspectives through discourses on the impact of political Islam. So contemporary political scientists such as Gilles Keppel, Bassam Tibi, A al-Naim, Olivier Roy, Tariq Ramadan et al, who from different perspectives explain the incompatibility or otherwise of political Islam with western values, are ignored, thus creating an incomplete picture.
Anti-Muslim prejudice undoubtedly exists in British society. The APPG report conflates it with criminal behaviour. We should continue to improve and implement action to address hate crimes where we find there has been criminal behaviour. If we move to stamp out opinion and action that is too widely defined, or where existing law covers those actions, we will be at risk of appearing to use a sledgehammer to crack a nut.
In conclusion, the convoluted definition of Islamophobia that the APPG has come up with—confusing a religion (a question of belief) with a race (an immutable characteristic) —will make little difference to these trends. The report’s biases and hyperbolic stances will simply contribute to increased fear and distrust on the part of Britain’s largely thriving Muslim population, while pushing those of us who promote greater integration to be left on the side-lines.