Losing the hearts and minds of young Muslims

HERE'S a mystery. Last week, a poll for Eastern Eye, Britain's biggest-selling Asian newspaper, indicated that 87 per cent of British Muslims of all ages feel loyalty towards this country. Yet other recent polls, for The Sunday Times and BBC Radio 4 among others, indicate the opposite - that a majority of British Muslims feel a deep sense of disaffection and unease about living in a country which, as they see it, is at war with Islam. Where does the truth lie? Certainly no place where opinion polls are likely to uncover it. It will have to be drawn from witnesses within the Muslim community, which is why the testimony of a Channel 4 News producer, Sarfraz Manzoor, in the current issue of Prospect magazine is so enlightening.

Manzoor grew up in the Seventies in a working-class area of Luton. His father, who worked in the Vauxhall car plant, and his mother, who stayed at home and made dresses, had emigrated from Pakistan, which for both of them always remained home. Like other first-generation immigrant Muslims, they were determined that their son should maintain their Islamic faith, partaking in the good things Britain had to offer - work prospects, education, the NHS - while rejecting the individualism of the British which corroded religious belief.

But Sarfraz Manzoor, perhaps because he was not sent to the mosque or to Islamic classes after primary school, was seduced, like so many secondgeneration Muslims, by western culture, its movies and music.

The songs of Bruce Springsteen drowned out the austere melodies of Islam. At university, he became a " multicultural tourist", taking the things he liked from his heritage, especially the strength of the family unit, and rejecting the rest - "arranged marriages, overwhelming deference, bad haircuts".

Then came 11 September. Manzoor decided to give a talk to students in his old school, Luton Sixth Form College.

These were the next generation of British Muslims, and their attitudes shocked him.

Manzoor was an example of what his father had prophesied, that with assimilation would come dilution. But these third-generation Muslims had put the clock back.

His classmates had worn western clothes; most of the Asian students today (78 per cent of the class) were in traditional dress: the boys in flowing kurtas and the girls wearing shalwar kameez under their denim jackets.

They were confident, articulate and virtually unanimous in condemning the West's response to the bombing of the World Trade Center.

They put more credence in emails from their friends than in what they heard on TV or read in the British press, doubting Osama bin Laden's responsibility and suspecting the terrorist attack might have been an anti-Islam plot.

They queried Manzoor's Muslim credentials: if he was a Muslim, why didn't he fast? "Are you a Muslim because you're a Muslim or because your parents are?"

Most of the girls believed in the absolutism of Shari'a law, with very British caveats: death for adultery was "impractical", and the Taliban, though three-quarters right about Islam, neglected important Koranic principles such as the education of women.

All the students took the view that religion came before nationality. They planned to go to university and become lawyers, bankers, journalists - but as one of them declared: "I'm British because that is my nationality, but Islam is who I am".

Sarfraz Manzoor writes that he envies these Luton students their certainty, and I can understand why. They have forged an identity for themselves within their religion, while absorbing what western culture can provide them in the way of self-esteem and self- advancement.

Growing up in a place, and at a time, which cannot have offered them much inspiration, let alone pride in their citizenship, they cleave to a creed which helps explain their place in the world.

They don't choose to integrate, for fear of losing that certainty round which their lives revolve.

What does this mean for the rest of us? How should we strive to stop these young Muslims fencing themselves off from what they call "white culture" inside a bulwark of Islamism?

Multiculturalism - the policy espoused by New Labour that minorities be integrated by giving their cultures equal standing with our national culture - is plainly irrelevant to these students.

If they had gone to single-faith Muslim schools of the kind Education Secretary Estelle Morris wants to encourage, instead of honing their ideals against the whetstone of an ordinary state school education, they would have had less understanding of the society outside, less articulacy and less confidence about their ability to reconcile their religion with a professional career.

It seems to me that the only way we can hope to achieve the aims of multiculturalism is to do the opposite: to give these Muslim students and others like them enough understanding of their host culture, its tolerance and flexibility, to make them realise that Islam and western civilisation, far from being incompatible, share enough common ground to let them feel at home here.

If their schools have failed in this, university should not. They will meet there, perhaps for the first time, westerners who are not ashamed of their own culture and see no reason to make excuses for it.

Within 15 years, there will be two million Muslims in Britain. Let's hope that by then it will need no pollsters to tell us that, as a matter of course, we respect their religion and they respect our way of life.

Copyright 2001
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