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14 December 2005: can Muslims be oppressed? In
the States, neo-con Daniel
Pipes has written a recent piece accepting that he opposes
Islam but denying that this makes him a racist, 'Islam being a
religion with followers of every race and pigmentation, where
might race enter the picture?' I
read a letter in Socialist
Worker a couple of weeks ago (and written by someone who I
know to be a longstanding and superb anti-racist activist),
which made a surprisingly similar point: arguing that religion was only an idea.
'No view', the writer argued, 'and that is all religion is, should
be placed on a legal pedestal as being above criticism.' There
were many problems with the formulation, it seemed to me. Not
least was the implied suggestion that a person contains in their
body some material essence (such as a race) which constitutes them, and
in their mind, only ephemera of passing significance. There
are at least three ways in which activists in other social movements
have tended to recognise oppression in practice: i)
Hostility from above, from the state, employers, or the press,
taking such forms as immigration controls to exclude black
workers, moral panics against lesbian and gay people, or against
single mothers, the refusal to employ disabled people,
stereotyping in the media, institutional racism. ii)
Hostility from below, taking such forms as domestic violence,
racist attacks, gay-bashing, the harassment of disabled people. iii)
The combination of difference (including identity and often
self-organisation) and powerlessness in society. Just
on the last point: there are plenty of differences that lack this
dimension of power and powerlessness, or which hold it only
intermittently. Thus it is too simple to speak of young people
experiencing age discrimination: a young person might be on a
trajectory which will take them to the top of an organisation. It
is also wrong to speak of 'all' 50 year-olds as facing age
discrimination. One of the ways in which such discrimination works
in employment is by managers discriminating against their direct
peers. It is therefore possible that when individuals begin to sue
employers for age discrimination, managers will be
over-represented among litigants. It
is also unhelpful to see ethnicity as something which is
inevitably a category of discrimination: recent English emigrants
in Australia may be 'ethnically' different from the majority (they
are a different nationality, they look different, they have
different accents) but they also have on average a higher income.
On the hand, ethnicity can become a category of discrimination if
it is attached to relationships of power, thus white migrant
workers from Eastern Europe can become the subject of economic
discrimination, if they travel to Britain, in the current context
of press hostility, and are employed on an ethnic basis in the low
wage economy. If
we were to imagine hypothetical groups of people who could face
discrimination on grounds of
religion, there are just three or four religious groups in
Britain today that could fit this pattern: Muslims included. Here
is the list of racist attacks reported and monitored by the
Institute of Race Relations for the three weeks following the
London bombings: we can note the recurrence of 'Asian', 'Islamic',
'Muslim' and also 'Sikh' targets.
I
was present at a meeting in July this year, when a spokesman for
the Mayor's office reported back on the latest Metropolitan Police
figures for racist attacks. Using the number of attacks on white
people as a sort of base, he suggested that Jewish people were two
times more likely to be attacked than the average, that black
African and Caribbean people were around eight times more likely
to be attacked, that people of Asian origin were around ten times
more likely to be attacked, and that people who were identified as
Arabs were around twelve times more likely to be attacked than the
average. The
1997 report of the Runnymede Trust's Commission on British Muslims
described how Islam is often seen
in Britain in a closed fashion, 'as a single monolithic bloc,
static and unresponsive to new realities … as separate and other
– (a) not having any aims or values in common with other
cultures (b) not affected by them (c) not influencing them … as
inferior to the West – barbaric, irrational, primitive, sexist
… as violent, aggressive, threatening, supportive of terrorism,
engaged in "a clash of civilizations" … as a political
ideology, used for political or military advantage.' Studies by
Elizabeth Poole and John Richardson have concluded that Islam and
Muslims are ill-served by the British press, with speakers
demonized and views misrepresented: many of their case studies
predate the crisis of the past four years. Of
course not all racism is so direct and obvious – one of the
reasons why racism, like other social oppressions, hurts is
because there is a connection between its violent forms and its
more subtle, covert or institutional forms. We know from many
sources that anti-Muslim racism combines overt (violent /
ideological) and concealed (economic) forms: On
most indicators, black Muslim communities suffer disadvantage, not
just in comparison to white people, but often in comparison to
other black British people. So while for most of the past ten
years, the average black unemployment rate has stood at twice the
level among whites, for people of Bangladeshi or Pakistani origin,
the ratio has normally been three times as high. Levels
of economic activity are lower among people of Pakistani and
Bangladeshi origin than among Black African or Black Caribbean
people. Wages for men of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin are on
average £150 lower than their white counterparts. Just 4 percent
of Bangladeshi women are in work. Racism
interacts with poverty. While
22 percent of White FE students were living in deprived areas in
2000, the
proportions of black students living in deprived areas were
higher: 76 percent of Bangladeshi, 68 percent of Pakistani, and 67
percent of Black Caribbean students. Like their African and
Caribbean counterparts, Pakistani and Bangladeshi students suffer
disproportionately from exclusions and a lack of support in
schools, colleges and universities. The
largest Muslims groups in Britain are of Pakistani and Bangladeshi
origin, but there are also Muslim communities in Britain of
African, Indian and Middle Eastern origin. Some research has
studied the economic opportunities open to Indian Muslims, Indian
Sikhs and Indian Hindus in Britain, and concludes that of each of
these three groups, the first are more directly subject to
occupational and housing segregation, are less likely to work and
are paid less. (Z. Bunglawala, Aspirations and Reality.
Open Society Institute, 2004, p. 8). Various
arguments are put that some economic discrimination may be
self-inflicted. For example, if just 4 percent of Bangladeshi
women are in work, does this mean that British society
discriminates against them, or that Bangladeshi migrant sexism
results in the exclusion of Bangladeshi women? The
first point to make is that there is no need for an either/ or
explanation of where exclusion comes from. It could be that
Bangladeshi women are the victims of double discrimination, like
LGBT victims of domestic violence, or the losers in the many
internal hierarchies of all oppressed communities (under
capitalism, there is no 'equal space'). The
second point to make is that the impacts of racism and sexism are
testable in different sectors. For example, the Learning and
Skills Council figures for Bangladeshi and Pakistani lecturers in
FE show that there are more women from these communities employed
in the sector than men (women make up 57 and 62 percent of the
totals). This gender split is roughly equivalent to the gender
split among white lecturers (where women make up 59 percent of the
total). The really striking phenomenon about further education is
the fact that that Pakistani and Bangladeshi students together
make up 3.2 percent of the current cohort, while the Pakistani and
Bangladeshi lecturers make up just 1.0 percent of the total. The
'ethnic barrier' blocking female Pakistani and Bangaldeshi
lecturers from employment in the sector is probably greater than
the 'gender penalty'. Other
arguments exists that particular religious minorities are unlikely
to co-exist happily in a context of genuine equality between
people because their religion teaches them values which are
hostile to equality. Similar points were made by Trevor Phillips
speaking at this year's LGBT TUC conference: how can a union guard
against the danger that by allowing new people into membership, we
also allow the importing of values hostile to equality? It
seems to me that the better we know a religious community, the
less likely we are to feel a threat. Personally, I know absolutely
nothing of the values of the Sikh religion in India, but I know
something of the politics of Sikh communities in Britain. I know
that in the 1970s, for example, Sikh communities tended to prize
trade unionism and women's equality. The results included the
Indian Workers' Associations and the Southall riots. To
the greater the extent that members of any religion experience
discrimination, organise against it, receive solidarity in their
struggle, and are allowed a space in the democratic organisations
of the majority, the more that their values are likely to be
equality values. A number of recent studies, including Tahir
Abbas' Muslims in Britain
(Zed, 2005) have shown some of that dynamic in Britain since 2001:
a greater militancy of Muslim women, the emergence for the first
time of a Muslim LGBT community. A
different question: how does religion connect to race? One
approach is to argue that Muslims are 'really' oppressed on
grounds of their colour rather than their religion, and that they
misunderstand their discrimination.
Whether or not this argument is true in fact, its logic is
surely one that we would resist. If anyone argued that LGBT people
were oppressed on grounds other than sexuality, we would be clear:
it is up to the LGBT community to generate its own self-knowledge.
And when after 9/11 and 7/7 politicians say that Muslims will have
to anticipate more police searches in future: no that the drivers
in this process are the religion of the suicide bombers, and the
consequent hostility of the state and the British public to other
Muslims on religious grounds. Religion may not be the only factor,
but it is a factor. The
best way to understand the present discrimination against Muslims
may be to reflect a little on some of the history of British
racism, which has included discrimination against white Jewish and
Irish people. In America, the main historical process driving
racism has been the experience of slavery and the continued Jim
Crow system that survived in the southern states until the 1960s.
In Britain, by contrast, the main driver has been migration. Each
new group has tended to encounter extreme racism on arrival, and
groups united on other grounds have frequently been divided by
generation. If
we think about the experience of Jewish people, it would be wrong
to say that racism was or is only about religion (although
religion was invoked), or about only ethnicity (although Jews were
believed to have heritable physical differences from the English
majority), racism was just as much about a combination of myths
(the blood libel, the idea of Jews as Christ killers, the claim
that all Jews practised usury, and so on). Most of all it was and
is about the idea in racists' head that a single, often poor
Jewish person represented some other quality on account of their
mythologised Jewishness. Present-day
discrimination against Muslims has some of the same character,
with the idea that Muslims belong to a community waging war
against the west, with the idea that Muslims religion holds to
some values which are morally wrong. Other religious groups are
then dragged into the same mythologizing, as in the attacks on
Sikh gurdwaras after 7/7. If
we understand then that racism is a slurry of ideas, which mixes
up race, colour, religion, nationality, migration status and
culture, never coherently but always arbitrarily, then we no
longer need to distinguish and say that anti-X racism is 'really'
about race or religion: we can understand that the two are joined
together in the response of racists and of the state. Can any religion be a marker of discrimination? Yes, if it is subject to institutional and individual hostility. But certain religious groups are more likely to be subject to oppression while others are more likely to be oppressive in their own rights: the religions of the majority, the religions of the rich, and the religions of the state. The group that deserve protection aren't religions as such, but the people who hold religious ideas, and especially those who are attacked for holding them. |