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Bunting: Why Muslims must guard against the satisfactions of complaint

Nov 22, 2005 7:18 am By Rebecca Bynum

Madeleine Bunting believes that if British Muslims would just listen to Tariq Ramadan all their problems could be solved. (Oh, and there’s that little matter about infidel attachment to alcohol. It should be given up for the good of the community. It’s so “exclusionary.”) From the Guardian, with thanks to Interested.

A year on from the Guardian’s first experiment in bringing together young Muslims for an evening of discussion, we did it again. The mood of the forum, held last week, had shifted in unexpected ways; there was less anger from the 60-odd participants from across the UK, but what had replaced it was, perhaps, even more worrying – a pervasive sense of frustration. Much of it is targeted at the government, but some is also directed at the Muslim community itself – why can’t it make itself heard? Why can’t it address its problems of poverty and educational underachievement? And the persistent questions about representation: who claims to speak for “the community” and why? The self-criticism among this group of largely university-educated Muslims is never far from the surface.

The problem is that the frustration – and its close relative, defensiveness – threaten to drown out all other discussions. It leaves little room these days for the outrage and horror one might have still expected in comments on the atrocities of 7/7. That’s troubling. In one exchange, participants pondered the respective responsibilities of Tony Blair and the bombers for the July attacks: 50/50, said one; 80/20 Blair, said another; while the last concluded that the attacks were Blair’s fault alone. The impulse to apportion blame very simply on Iraq and Blair has overwhelmed the soul searching widely apparent back in July; yes, Iraq was a major factor, but there were others. Some things, however repetitive, still need to be said; namely, that the July attacks were a terrible misuse of Islam. They were, as the Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan told the forum participants, not just “un-Islamic, they were anti-Islamic”…

And there are other causes of that defensiveness in the development of British Muslim identity, which we are still only beginning to grasp – some are well below the radar of headline news. As ever, eavesdropping on a community talking to itself, as we did last week, throws up new insights: for example, non-Muslim Britain hasn’t begun to grasp how big an obstacle alcohol is to Muslims’ participation. As alcohol consumption has soared in the past two decades, Muslims have been left to negotiate its centrality in British social life – at work, school or university, or as neighbours – with great difficulty. Alcohol is probably now one of the most effective and unquestioned forms of exclusion practised in the UK, affecting every kind of social network…

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