by JOHN FEFFER
The Muslims Are Coming!: Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror by Arun Kundnani, London: Verso IMAGE/Verso
Arun Kundnani is a British writer and human rights activist. He is the former editor of Race and Class, published by the Institute of Race Relations in London, and is currently an Open Society Institute fellow. In 2009, he wrote Spooked: How Not to Prevent Violent Extremism, which explored the effects of the Prevent program, the British counter-radicalism policy aimed at Muslim communities. Here he talks to John Feffer of Foreign Policy In Focus about the debate on multiculturalism in the United Kingdom, the dichotomy between “good” and “bad” Muslims, and the status of the Prevent program.
Arun Kundnani conducted hundreds of interviews to get a sense of Islamophobia in the United States and Britain PHOTO/Andrew Testa/Panos for the Open Society Institute/Gulf News
John Feffer: Let’s begin with the Rushdie affair, when members of the Muslim community mobilized against Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses. How and why did that become a pivotal moment, particularly as it relates to multiculturalism?
Arun Kundnani: The Rushdie affair was when the debate on multiculturalism in Britain shifted from being a left-right debate to being a debate within liberalism or within the left. Up until that point there was the Conservative government position, which was that Britain had reached the limits of ethnic minorities in terms of numbers and the job was now to ensure that these minorities adopt some kind of British values. The riots that happened in the 1980s were seen as a symptom of the failure of these people to adopt British “norms of civility.” For the left, discrimination against Muslims was bound up with racism. The left embraced the notion of cultural pluralism, believing that communities had the right to develop their own identities. There was a dissenting view on the Black left as well that said: “we don’t really want to accommodate ourselves to British society within a multicultural framework but transform British society to destroy its structures of racism.” In other words, cultural pluralism needed to be combined with political radicalism.
With the Rushdie affair, new positions emerge. There was a new liberal critique of multiculturalism. It opposed multiculturalism not from the conservative point of view — that people have to assimilate into some old-fashioned kind of society. It opposed multiculturalism because it ran counter to Enlightenment values. A lot of people that would ordinarily be on the left articulated an argument about immigration and minority cultures as a threat to post-1968 liberal values. At the same time, there was a burst of activity within the Muslim communities as members began to think about what it meant to be a British Muslim as opposed to a British Asian or Black. Groups that until then had been quiescent, but which had come out of Islamic politics in other parts of the world, were becoming much more vocal domestically in Britain.
It’s the first time that you get the contours of what becomes more intense after 9/11 in terms of how the discussions around Islam become framed. The space for people to talk about the experience of victimization that Muslims have suffered – but according to a progressive politics that’s not about restricting freedom of expression in a reactionary way – that space narrows very quickly. And the anti-racism movement after the Rushdie affair is completely fragmented, splitting along pro- and anti-Rushdie lines.
Before The Satanic Verses, Rushdie was by and large admired by British Asians. He made quite an important TV program in Britain about racism.
Foreign Policy in Focus for more