As with so many books on Western Muslim identity, too much of British Muslims and Their Discourses, a compendium work edited by Laurens de Rooij, once again proffers the saturated opinion of the social sciences, in which Western Muslims are perpetual victims, and the matter of Islamism barely exists.
The growing pushback against “identity politics,” Jan Dobbernack, Nasar Meer, and Tariq Modood write in an entirely expected opening chapter, has “marginalized and silenced” British Muslims.
Perhaps aware of the need for at least something fresh, the authors do offer a framework upon which victimhood can be measured and understood, coming up with defined “types” of purported identity suppression, or “misrecognition.”
But the cited examples appear deceptively chosen. To prove the polity’s “reluctance to acknowledge” the “diversity and dynamism of political agency” among British Muslims, the efforts of three groups are mentioned: Engage, the Muslim Council of Britain, and the Muslim Public Affairs Committee.
Unmentioned by the authors is that all three groups, frequently criticized in the media for their overt extremism, are well-recognized as proxies for specific Islamist movements that have long failed to wield British Muslim popular support.
Far from illustrating “diversity,” the authors offer up a small cabal of homogeneous radicals whose very aim is to stamp out Muslim diversity, in the name of all-consuming Islamist ideal.
And it turns out that “misrecognition” types are not a new sheen at all. The opening chapter is markedly out-of-date. One of the groups mentioned in fact changed its name to something entirely different over eight years ago. Indeed, the authors acknowledge that the paper is a copy of one almost a decade old, which they or the editor seemingly declined to update for a book ostensibly on “current discourses.”
Such a consistent hypocrisy underpins several of the book’s early chapters. Frequent references to the “oversimplification” of Muslim identity or the “absence of diversity” accompany a persistent portrayal of British Islam as a single-minded collection of activist-victims.
A particularly preposterous collection of sentences by Laurens de Rooij, optimistically presented as serious study on media bias, revolves around Rooij’s steadfast inability to understand why news reporting of Islamist violence tends to reflect negatively on Islamists.
Eventually, a “socio-psychological” reading of “Islamophobia” as a responsible response to the West’s fight against terrorism advances the book slightly, although perhaps just replacing one junk science with another. The authors here still rely on immeasurable or self-evidently questionable premises centered around the persistently ill-defined problem of “Islamophobia.” They conclude with some abrupt and concerning ideas, such as an unexplained insistence on a need to “de-legitimise” the media.
The observable, measurable, relevant problem of Islamism, remains relentlessly ignored.
Gradually, the book does improve. The study of a Shia community in northwest London is largely informative, honest, and interesting, explains the complicated diversity of British Shia institutions, and is not too badly sullied by the obligatory references to “Islamophobia” and other modish terms.
By the beginning of the book’s Part II, nuanced discussions on the permissibility of music and art, all caught amid intra-Islamic divisions, and further complicated by the influence of both Salafism and Sufism, are largely well-presented and filled with genuinely interesting examples. Both chapters are somewhat free of the pretensions and dogmas of the book’s opening chapters.
A chapter by Angela Quartermaine on British deradicalization efforts in schools offers some reasonable criticisms of government programs to regulate young minds. The specific question of Islamism is discussed openly, although some of the cited sources are problematic, such as a paper from disgraced “academic” and Iranian regime propagandist David Miller.
While one may personally find little common ground with the author, a real discussion is, at least, presented. The chapter is let down in its conclusion, however, in which Quartermaine argues a tangible discussion of ideology should be replaced by more abstract discussions of the “concept” of terrorism, without adequately investigating the reasoning or corollaries.
The final two chapters, based around interviews with British Muslims, offer some additional interesting anecdotal insight. The information presented may well be of interest to professional observers of British Islam, although little of use is gleaned from much of the authors’ analyses.
Unless you are a social scientist unable to escape your situation, most readers can safely ignore this book. If you are unduly fascinated by the academic narratives around Western Islam, and can tolerate the sermons of the social sciences, then do procure a copy; although I encourage you to skip the opening chapters.
Sam Westrop
Middle East Forum
