Bradford, the Church of England and the Muslim Communities

Bradford assumed national and international notoriety in 1989 when, in front of the Town Hall, local Muslims burned a novel they deemed offensive, The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie. Before this most people were hardly aware of the dramatically changing local demographics. In 1961 there were some 3000 Muslims in the city, almost entirely men, most of whom worked in the textile mills, on the buses and in the foundries. This grew to some 50,000 in 1991, 75,000 in 2001, and 130,000 in 2011. The Muslim communities settled within eight inner city wards, where over time they became the majority. This, in turn, translated into these wards beginning to return Muslim councillors: 3 in 1961, 9 in 1991 and 24 in 2011 out of a total of 90 councillors across the Bradford metropolitan district council’s 30 wards.

The Church of England’s parish system covers the whole of the country, and the priest has a cure of souls for all within the parish. It responded to the new Muslim presence in the inner city in multiple ways: first, it established an inter-faith adviser – in Bradford as early as 1970 – and a small committee of people with practical experience of working in South Asia, from where most migrants had originated. This committee provided resource material for the inner-city congregations, about the religions and cultures of the newcomers, whether Muslim, Hindu or Sikh. Members of congregations were encouraged to become volunteers running language classes, mixed playgroups and youth groups, as well as occasionally making the church hall available for Muslim worship until the community had saved enough to build their own mosques. The emphasis tended to be the pastoral imperative of embodying hospitality and welcome to the stranger.

Secondly, the church supported the creation of institutions which provided an opportunity for members of different religious communities to meet and work together on issues of common concern, whether the Racial Equality Council, an Inter-faith Education Centre, or charities such as Common Purpose. Here future leaders developed the skills and confidence to work across religious and ethnic communities. It is no coincidence that the first Muslim Lord Mayor of Bradford appointed in 1985–86 was a member of the Racial Equality Centre where he honed such skills and competences.

Thirdly, Christians have used their presence in institutions to make space for the specific concerns of Muslims and others, notably as chaplains, especially in hospitals. Fourthly, the local bishops have frequently deployed their position in the city and, nationally in the House of Lords, to affect the temper and challenge the terms in which issues were discussed, whether the dismissal of Muslims as ‘fundamentalists’ or homogenizing them with Sikhs and Hindus within the category ‘Asian’.

Finally, church leaders have stood up for religious minorities when an issue of justice and equity was at stake: in Bradford this meant supporting the Muslim desire for school dinners which were halal in the teeth of opposition from animal rights activists, supported by the Far Right.Footnote ³

This essay will consider how such a pattern of activities has developed in the last 20 years, which in Bradford have included two riots involving young British Pakistani men in 1995 and 2001, as well as anxieties around Islamist terrorism after 9/11 and 7/7 which triggered a range of government initiatives. The church had realized in the late 1990s that there was a need to engage directly young people and women, both categories increasingly alienated from religious organizations dominated by older men usually born outside Britain. After 7/7 the government also gave this priority.

An Oblique Appreciation of the Church’s Role

An indirect acknowledgement of the importance of the Church of England in support of the public and civic incorporation of Muslim communities has been provided by a study entitled: ‘Taking Part: Muslim Participation in Contemporary Governance’. This makes clear that Muslims are active across three policy domains: ‘equalities and diversity, partnerships with faith and inter-faith bodies for the purpose of welfare and service delivery; and security and counter-terrorism…’.Footnote ⁴ The report, in seeking to shed light on Muslim participation, focuses both on governance at national level and in three cities: Birmingham, Leicester and Tower Hamlets, a London borough.

Time and again, ‘Taking Part’ mentions the importance of the Church of England and its personnel, sometimes in the background, sometimes in the foreground. Typical is the following comment:

It also notes the Christian turn in the Coalition government, exemplified by the £5 million awarded to fund the Near Neighbours (NN) programme launched in autumn 2011 to promote interactions across faith and non-faith groups in four urban areas, Birmingham, Bradford, Leicester and parts of East London. More than half the money goes to bilateral groups, the Christian Muslim Forum (CMF), the Council of Christians and Jews (CCJ) and the Hindu Christian Forum (HCF) – all of which were pioneered by the Church of England but include other Christian denominations. A further £2 million is devoted to small grants from £250 to £5000 given to enable local projects involving two different communities in the four designated areas. It is administered by the Church Urban Fund, and applicants require the signature of the vicar in whose parish the activities take place. The aim is to encourage mutual learning and social action across divided communities. So far some 39 per cent of participants have been Muslim and 36 per cent Christian. The report concludes that ‘NN does seem to be a success in terms of demonstrating the Church of England’s vitality, creativity and perhaps unique position for brokering solutions to common problems…’.Footnote ⁶

However, notwithstanding the increase in Muslim participation in public and civic life documented in the report, there is also a readiness to acknowledge that problems internal to the Muslim communities continue to compromise their abilities to capitalize appropriately on such opportunities. An exploration of these issues provides the counterpoint to church influence and explains the second part of the title of this essay: ‘Whose incorporation, which Islam?’ Four topics will be touched upon: first, Muslim communities are often characterized by a virulent sectarianism imported from their home countries – especially South Asia – and exacerbated by global movements.Footnote ⁷ This means the state, national and local, familiar with Christian hierarchies is frequently at a loss to know who its interlocutors are within Muslim communities.

The second issue is a need to move away from lazy generalizations about Islam and focus on different ethno-Muslim communities. In many parts of the country – especially but not exclusively in Bradford and Birmingham – the Pakistani Kashmiri community is the ethnic lens through which non-Muslims view Islam. In local politics this has meant the importation of an exclusionary, patron-client, clan politics, consolidated with the active collusion of local political elites.

In Tower Hamlets, by contrast, as ‘Taking Part’ makes clear, an Islamist pattern of politics can cause concern among Bengali heritage Muslims. These two quite different expressions of ‘Muslim politics’ indicate the weakness of Islamic political theology. The third difficult issue is the crisis in the intellectual formation of religious leaders – ‘ulama – in the UK. Entrenched traditionalism institutionalized in numerous ‘Islamic seminaries’ can translate into a commitment to ‘creationism’, which can render Muslim schooling suspect among educationalists. Such influence also constrains the ambitions of Muslim women to engage in public and civic life, the fourth theme.

From ‘Race’ to ‘Faith’ – The State Seeks to Engage ‘Faiths’

The British discourse on minorities has ‘mutated’ from a discourse on colour in the 1950s and 1960s, to race in the 1960s–1980s, ethnicity in the 1990s to religion in the present.Footnote ⁸ While these categories were never mutually exclusive, the shift has been driven both top-down by government policy and bottom-up by Muslims wishing to prioritize religion over ethnicity in self-representation.

Christian churches have long engaged bilateral relations with other religions; mention has already been made of the Council of Christians and Jews (CCJ) set up in the dark days of the Second World War in 1942 and the national Christian Muslim Forum (CMF) established in 2006, whose founder patron was the Archbishop of Canterbury. A conservative government for its part established the Inner City Religious Council (ICRC) in 1992, located within the Department of the Environment as part of a shared response to the Church of England’s critical 1984 Faith in the City report, which drew attention to the extent of the poverty in Britain’s urban areas. The ICRC began an ever-expanding circle of government ‘initiatives linking religion, community, urban neighbourhood and social cohesion’.Footnote ⁹ Religious communities were seen as having people, networks, organizations and building to engage the hard-to-reach in programmes of urban regeneration.

The Labour government’s return to power in 1997 saw a proliferation of such initiatives congenial to its communitarian turn, drawing inter alia on Robert Putnam’s research around the importance of social capital. ‘The Local Interfaith Guide’ was funded in 1999, advising local authorities how to go about establishing or strengthening such groups to meet the deficit in religious literacy of local policy makers. In 2003 the religious issues section of the Home Office Race Equality Unit was reconstituted to incorporate the new Faith Communities Unit, suggesting that a civic version of ‘faith’ was becoming as important as ‘race’ in the state’s management of minority ethnic affairs.Footnote ¹⁰

To enable religions, separately and together, to engage the socially excluded, to facilitate consultation between them and the state, and to promote ‘social cohesion’, money was made available by different government departments. A ‘Faith Communities Capacity Building Fund’ allocated £13.8 million between 2006 and 2008. Another £7.5 million was found for an initiative in 2008 – ‘Face to Face, Side by Side’ – to encourage inter-religious dialogue and social action across traditions. Mention has already been made of the £5 million given to the Church of England to fund the ‘Near Neighbours’ programme in 2011.

While ethno-Muslim communities had won many gains locally, it was not until 1997 with the creation of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) that something approximating an umbrella body linking local organizations emerged. Given the diversity, ethnic and sectarian, of British Muslim communities, such a national body, so necessary to lobby for legal changes, remains a ‘work in progress’.Footnote ¹¹ Its arrival was welcomed by the new Labour government as a Muslim interlocutor, analogous to the Board of Deputies for Anglo-Jewry. The MCB pressed for state funding of Muslim schools as an issue of equity and won the battle in 1998; in cooperation with the Church of England and other faiths, it persuaded the government to include a question in the 2001 decennial census on religion, the first time such a question had been included since 1851. The fact that the census showed 76.8 per cent of Britons claiming a religious affiliation legitimized the inclusion of ‘faith’ alongside ‘race’ in the state’s management of minority communities.

Sikhs and Jews have long been accepted as ethnic groups protected by racial discrimination legislation, but Muslim demands for religious protection advocated in the 1997 Runnymede Trust report – ‘Islamophobia a Challenge to us all’ – had to wait, first until December 2003 when religious discrimination was outlawed in employment, then the Race and Religious Hatred Act of 2006, which made incitement to religious hatred an offence, and finally the Single Equality Act (2010). This Act brought together and developed the various anti-discrimination laws that the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHCR) had been created to implement. With this Act the government enacted ‘religious legislation which goes beyond EU directives or indeed anything found in Europe’.Footnote ¹²

‘Taking Part’ also noted that most of the £60 million set aside for one stream of anti-terrorism work – PREVENT from 2007 to 2010 – went primarily to Muslim third sector organizations to counter violent extremism and was ‘easily the largest single investment ever made in British Muslim civil society’.Footnote ¹³ Of course the government had its own priorities, so monies went on funding the Young Muslim Advisory Group (YMAG) and the National Muslim Women’s Advisory Group (NMWAG) to enhance the capacity of young people and women in Muslim communities to ‘circumvent first-generation older male gatekeepers’.Footnote ¹⁴

The Church of England Makes Space for Muslim Women

The UK government belatedly followed the Church of England’s lead in making sure that, when engaging Muslim communities, they included all Muslim ‘schools of thought’ and identified female interlocutors. This has been true of the national CMF, as well as faith leaders’ groups convened by Anglican Bishops in cities such as Bradford and Birmingham. Near Neighbour small grants have gone to supporting many projects involving Muslim women. In two northern cathedrals – Blackburn and Bradford – Muslim women have been appointed to encourage relations across the two traditions. In Bradford, a Muslim Women’s Council has been created by professional women as a counterpoint to the male-dominated Bradford Council for Mosques. The churches include such women in their forums. Since 2001 the Church of England has pioneered the Building Bridges initiative, an annual scholarly workshop involving both religions, latterly in collaboration with Georgetown University in Washington. This network has always included women such as Professor Mona Siddiqui of Edinburgh University. This experience has borne fruit in her pioneering new study Christians, Muslims, and Jesus.Footnote ¹⁵

Britain’s Muslim Communities: No One Is a Muslim-in-General

Muslim communities carry into Britain radically different histories, distinct understandings of Islam, and diverse cultural baggage; all of this matters as they seek to situate themselves with regard to ‘the country of immigration, to the country of origin, and to global Islam’.Footnote ¹⁶ There are some 100,000 Muslims from Turkish backgrounds in London. They have little public profile, and seldom feature among the faces of angry young radicals protesting against this or that issue. As a people, the Turks were never colonized; indeed, for half a millennium they were the colonizers and carriers of a huge empire including much of the Arab world and Europe. Further, they have had more than 70 years of uncompromising, doctrinaire secularism borrowed from the French which has sought to exclude Islam from public life. Finally, many Turks define themselves as European. Turkey is part of NATO and wants to join the European Community.

This is in marked contrast to many Muslims from South Asia, who according to the 2011 census comprise some two-thirds of the 2.7 million Muslim population; more than 1.1 million of them have roots in Pakistan and another 450,000 in Bangladesh. South Asia was colonized by the British; the Pakistanis are often referred to as the ‘new Irish’, since like the Irish they were colonized and were carriers of a rival religion. As with the Irish, they carried into Britain negative stereotypes of the British and vice versa.

Most Arabs in London either fall into the category of international commuters – London has been dubbed ‘Beirut-on-Thames’ by journalists – or are well-educated students who have chosen to stay, or political exiles whose focus of engagement remains their home country. British Arabs insist ‘their identities not be submerged by an Asian-dominated British Muslim identity … [but they] must seek their own representation based on a specific Arab identity and Arab political interests, rather than religion’.Footnote ¹⁷

In cities such as Leicester in the East Midlands, Muslims arrived in the 1970s from East Africa, fleeing Africanization under Idi Amin. Such migrants had roots in South Asia, but in the half century in East Africa they had developed the art of living as a minority. They were grateful to be given refuge in Britain, arrived with a good knowledge of the English language and professional and commercial skills. They have flourished and contributed along with other East African Asian communities to the prosperity of that city.

Outside London, however, it is Pakistanis who tend to shape the public profile of Islam in Britain. Seventy per cent are thought to have origins in Azad Kashmir (AK) – usually referred to as ‘Mirpur’, a district of AK – one of the least developed areas in Pakistan. Their traditionalism is kept alive by substantial exchanges: religious leaders, politicians, investment in homes and businesses and, astonishingly, transcontinental marriages in the third and fourth generation running at 80 per cent. The BBC Pakistan correspondent, Aleem Maqbool, featured Mirpur in a news clip (‘How the city of Mirpur became “Little England”’, aired 5 March 2012) in which he estimated that some 200,000 people from the UK – mainly Bradford and Birmingham – visit it annually. He was told that the local radio station has listeners both in Mirpur and Britain. With over a half of the Muslim population under 25 years old, as against a third in wider society, and the average number of children in Pakistani families twice the national average, this community is expected to double within 20 years. For more and more Britons, this will be the ethnic lens through which ‘Islam’ is viewed.

In all, there is a diversity of ethno-Muslim communities, sometimes with convergent, sometimes divergent interests. If Muslims are to be equitably incorporated within British society, the focus of policy makers has to be town-specific, where Muslims are disproportionately concentrated; for example, in the mill towns in the North, where the textile industries – the magnet for migrant labour – have largely collapsed. Since most young Muslims are from ‘a working-class with the majority … living in neighbourhoods considered to be the most deprived wards in England … [this is] reflected in statistics as underachievers, anti-school rather than pro-school and generally displaying signs of disengagement with school authorities’.Footnote ¹⁸

Further, the educational gap between male and female success remains wide. The Cambridge Muslim College noted a couple of years ago that in 2006 some 50 per cent of Pakistani girls achieved ‘A’ levels as against 30 per cent of boys. Yet this does not translate into a similar proportion going on to university: ‘Participation of female Muslims at university level is 21%, considerably lower than the national female average of over 50%.’Footnote ¹⁹ Finally, 68 per cent of Muslim women are economically inactive, as compared to less than 30 per cent for Christian women and approximately 35 per cent for Hindu and Sikh women.Footnote ²⁰

Assets Britain Enjoys to Incorporate its Muslim Communities

Many of the issues which concern Muslims can be addressed at city level; for example, planning permission for mosques, licences for businesses, support for visa applications for visiting relatives, and schooling sensitive to their particular needs – whether via the provision of ‘halal’ school meals, adaptations to school uniforms to accommodate female norms of modesty, and religious education syllabi in schools which include Islam.

In contrast to Germany, the majority of British Muslims enjoy the vote along with dual nationality. ‘[I]n major cities they exercise a good deal of political power through the Labour Party.’Footnote ²¹ Bradford is a good illustration: there are 30 wards which return 90 councillors. Of the 24 Asian Muslim councillors in 2012 before the Galloway victory – about which see below – 20 were Labour councillors, 2 Conservative, 1 Liberal-Democrat and 1 Green Party. Nationally, there are 8 Muslim MPs, and some 20 Muslims in the House of Lords, one of whom is the redoubtable Baroness Warsi, the first Muslim woman in the cabinet.

An important dimension of the British establishment is how the public role of the Church of England has, in the name of equality, been pluralized to include other Christian denominations. As early as the Education Act of 1902, Roman Catholic schools were subsidized, since the Church of England’s schools required such subsidies. ‘The British state was in some way committed to Christianity and bound to be respectful of its representatives, as France was not, and this in practice provided a useful starting point for Catholic relations with government.’Footnote ²² That pluralization has now been stretched to make space for Islamic institutions: since Christians, then Jews, enjoyed their own state-funded schools, as well as private schools, so the Muslim communities won the right to enjoy a similar privilege. Today they have some 12 state-funded schools and more than 160 private schools.

Similarly, just as the Church of England has chaplains in a variety of institutions, including prisons and hospitals, so now it is common to find Muslim chaplains also. Indeed, one respected Islamic institution, the Markfield Centre in Leicester which offers training for Muslim chaplains, was set up with the active support and input from the local Anglican diocese and its Inter-Faith Adviser. Since the government funds students to study theology and religious studies at university, this institutional space has also been pluralized to include more and more courses on Islam.

The Bishop of Bradford’s Role in the Creation of an Integrated Civic Network

This development is indicative of the continuing public role of the Church of England, in enabling sensitive conversations and initiatives across different communities. Such an initiative was made possible by the fact that every diocese in England has someone designated, full-time or part-time, as an Inter-Faith Adviser whose role is to develop trust and robust inter-faith links. Dioceses such as Birmingham, Bradford and Leicester have invested in such appointments for well over 30 years. Their ‘local contextualised knowledge’ has been a pre-condition for improving inter-community relations.Footnote ²³ In Bradford such local knowledge was used to create an integrated civic network in June 2004, prompted by three influences:

1. 1. The Madrid bombing on 11 March 2004 and the subsequent insistence by the Metropolitan Police Commissioner that an attack in Britain was almost inevitable. In Madrid the Mayor immediately offered a public statement that the bombing was not the responsibility of any one religious or ethnic group. This message played a role in preventing a backlash against the Moroccan community. This posed the question: did Bradford have in place people who could intervene in a responsible way to dampen down tensions?

2. 2. A seminal study by Ashutosh Varshney asked why in India three cities imploded into Hindu-Muslim violence after the Ayodhya debacle, while three other cities with similar religious profiles did not. His broad conclusion was that while everyday interactions – children playing together, participation in each other’s religious festivals, eating together and so on – were important, the crucial variable was the presence or absence of a variety of crosscutting associational forms of civic engagement; for example, business, professional organizations, cultural groups and political parties involving both communities.Footnote ²⁴

3. 3. A Bradford time-line, which gave a chronology of conflicts in the city since 1964. This suggested that the District had long periods of relative calm interspersed with regular disruptions. These tended to become more violent and damaging. There were doubts that underlying causes were being addressed, for example, evidence of spatial segregation around class and ethnicity/religion and correlations between youth, ethnicity, unemployment, crime and turf wars – often drug related.

These triggers led to the co-convening by the Anglican Bishop of Bradford, a Professor of Peace Studies at the local university, and a leading local policeman, of sectoral groups across the district (Education and Youth, Business, Community and Voluntary Sector, Faith groups, and media, and politics/labour). The emphasis at each meeting was cross-communal participation, and each sector identified and incorporated young, ‘Asian’ Muslim professionals. The reasoning was to incorporate a new generation of young people, often excluded by their elders; also, it was vital that there was adequate Muslim involvement to signal that this initiative was rooted in a shared appreciation that any terrorist atrocity would be considered an assault on all people and communities, rather than being allowed to exacerbate Muslim and non-Muslim tensions.

The meetings were specifically to get each sector to reflect on what they would do to prevent an escalation of conflict following an atrocity. A plausible scenario was developed by the police to which the invitees had to respond. Five sector meetings in the course of 2004 were convened and then a meeting of representatives of all sectors at the Bishop’s home, where a respected academic talked about the international situation and reminded those present that most respected anti-terrorist specialists agreed with the Metropolitan Police Commissioner’s comments.

One of the aims of the sector meetings was to encourage and enable different institutional actors to talk to each other. It became clear that there was minimal interaction between schools and youth service, or schools, local college and university. Each sector also chose a couple of people to meet together across sectors to share experiences and initiatives.

The civic network proved its worth on 7/7, when it met and was able to enact a range of initiatives: the education authority sent schools guidelines on how to address the issue; the local Chamber of Commerce and a sister organization representing Asian, largely Muslim businesses – the Asian Trades Link – publicized a prepared joint statement. The police capitalized on the network – which had involved some 100 people – and held a series of meetings, especially with vulnerable communities, to reassure them that attacks on them or their places of worship would not be tolerated. There were high profile signings of a civic condolence book for victims by a cross-section of civic dignitaries and young people from all communities; further, mosque, synagogue, Cathedral and Hindu temple were opened for silent prayers for all the communities.

The Labour Party’s Faustian Pact with Dominant Kashmiri Clans

Bradford is one of a growing number of cities and towns which are better described as bi-cultural than hyper-diverse. Here, ‘there is not a range of groups but often just two, for example, Asian Muslims and whites’.Footnote ²⁵ This has led the sociologist Bryan Turner to worry that across cities in Europe the creation of an enclave society is emerging, where Muslim ‘rituals of intimacy’ – food and dress codes, marriage norms – intensify a web of exclusion. This means that easy talk of different religious and ethnic communities interacting and constructing an ‘overlapping consensus’ in public and civic life presupposes the overlapping of social groups. In its absence, we find ‘separate and sequestered communities’.Footnote ²⁶

While Turner exaggerates the degree of willed apartness, his concerns are not without substance. Events in Bradford on 29 March 2012 opened a Pandora’s box. On that day, the Muslim candidate for the parliamentary constituency of Bradford West lost one of the Labour Party’s safest seats in spectacular fashion to a maverick politician – George Galloway – who stood for the miniscule Respect Party. A 6,000 majority was turned into a 10,000 deficit. This was the result, largely, of an inter-generational civil war within the Kashmiri community with the young, both male and female, rallying around Galloway, who was seen as an eloquent champion of Muslim causes. One of Britain’s most perceptive political commentators noted subsequently that this defeat could electrify the Labour Party leadership nationally to address ‘one of the open secrets of Labour politics that in large parts of the Midlands and the North’ it has relied on the block votes of Kashmiri clan elders or biraderi.Footnote ²⁷

This pattern of imported politics freezes out able young British Pakistanis who do not belong to the two dominant land-owning clans, as amply demonstrated in an excellent study of the reasons for and implications of this dramatic by-election victory, The Bradford Earthquake.Footnote ²⁸ Lewis Baston, its author, states unequivocally that ‘without years of neglect, stemming from an accommodation with power brokers to exploit the clan voting solidarity of biraderi … there would not have been fertile ground for Galloway in Bradford’. The study carefully lays bare many of the ‘baneful consequences’ of such exclusionary politics as practised by the two dominant Mirpuri clans which between them accounted for 16 of the 20 ‘Asian’ councillors returned on a Labour ticket before the 2012 elections. Of the 24 ‘Asian’ councillors returned for all parties, all but one were Pakistanis. Further, ‘the traditional screening mechanism for councillors have been overridden so that councillors with a poor grasp of English or even with criminal records have sat on the council’.

With regard to the Bradford West constituency, the selection of the candidate, himself a member of one of the two dominant Mirpuri clans, owed more to ‘successful organization and manoeuvring rather than legitimately winning a political argument or having a candidate best suited to the task in hand’.

In all, Bradford is a sombre example of Turner’s enclave politics, more ethnic than religious, where clan politics can subvert democratic politics through flooding ward membership. A recent study of Birmingham politics with its large Kashmiri/Mirpuri community indicates that in some areas biraderi-politicking ‘still dominates electoral politics’.Footnote ²⁹

Islamist Politics in Tower Hamlets and the Lack of a Relevant Islamic Public Theology

In contrast to Bradford, the ‘Taking Part’ report considers the ongoing tension between two mosques associated with the Bangladeshi communities in Tower Hamlets, the Islamist East London Mosque (ELM) and the Brick Lane Mosque (BLM), which has its roots in the 1971 civil war with [West] Pakistan.Footnote ³⁰ This tension was reactivated in February 2013 when tens of thousands of Bangladeshis met in Shahbag Square, Dacca to demand justice against war crimes committed by the Islamist party – Jamaat-i-Islami (JI). There was jubilation on 28 February when JI’s vice-president Delwar Hossain Sayeedi was sentenced to death by an ‘International Crimes Tribunal’. The jubilation turned to horror when Jamaat supporters clashed with police, with some 100 fatalities. These events were mirrored in Tower Hamlets when protagonists and antagonists of JI met in Altab Ali Park and violence ensued. This indicates that the rival factions shaped by the 1971 Liberation War still resonate across a new generation among Bangladeshi diaspora communities.Footnote ³¹

The role of such Islamist parties in the UK continues to invite media and academic attention and featured in the 2008 ‘Contextualising Islam in Britain’ report. The latter, produced by a combination of Muslim academics, religious scholars and activists decried such politics as ‘utopian’ and pointed out that:

Clearly, these two examples of ‘Muslim politics’ indicate that the ‘lack of a coherent Muslim agenda, which, in turn, is the result of divergent Muslim voices’.Footnote ³³

The Inter-Cultural Leadership School (ICLS): A Contribution to Developing a New Leadership

Aware of the emergence of such ethno-religious politics in Bradford, churches have sought to contribute to developing a new leadership which can work across religious and ethnic divides. In June 2001 two Anglicans, the Archdeacon and the Inter-Faith Adviser, with a Muslim colleague in the Bradford Council for Mosques, organized a conference entitled ‘Shared Citizenship, across Separating Communities: A Christian–Muslim Contribution’, where convergences and divergences with regard to attitudes to politics, urban regeneration, local schooling, business and community-building were explored. Two leading policy makers, a Christian and a Muslim, were invited from each of three cities in Europe which also had growing Muslim communities – Rotterdam, Berlin and Copenhagen – to share their experiences. Local policy makers were also invited to enhance their ‘religious literacy’.

A civil servant from the Council of Europe, who had responsibility for asylum and immigration work, attended the conference and suggested that as a follow up, an Inter-Cultural Leadership School should be piloted in Bradford. This had been attempted in embryonic form with young professionals in post-conflict Bosnia. So the four-day residential ICLS was born with Regional Development Authority funding. Invitees were young professionals in their twenties, chosen from the majority, notionally ‘Christian’ communities, Asian Muslim communities, and from a third category dubbed ‘humanist’ (this enabled Sikh, Hindu and secular participation).

The participants, usually no more than 15, were drawn from two overlapping categories: the first, those identified as actual or potential role models within their respective communities, especially for the 13–16 year olds whom policy makers could not reach; the second category comprised professionals – police, lawyers, businessmen, teachers, youth workers, and fast-track young local authority employees, young clergy and imams – all of whom wanted to develop cross-cultural competences. In the four-day residential school they were taught a range of skills: one day was devoted to ‘religious literacy’: the ICLS provided a ‘safe space’ to enable participants to ask all sorts of questions and to begin to craft a vocabulary to talk about difficult issues. The second day was devoted to developing conflict resolution skills; the third leadership skills and the fourth media skills.

The four days began a process to develop a new leadership at ease with religious and cultural diversity, as well as creating opportunities for friendship and trust to emerge. In the following few years an ICLS met, often twice a year, and developed an ongoing group of alumni – Society for Intercultural Leadership (SOIL) – and pioneered innovative projects within the city. The model was exported to other English cities and with seed money from the European Commission, was piloted in European cities, as well as Indonesia and Pakistan. The ICLS has honed a series of principles which can be downloaded from its website, wwww.intercivilization.net. Near Neighbours money has been used latterly to continue the model, slightly adapted under a new name, ‘Catalyst’.

Whose Incorporation, Which Islam?

While the overall picture of Muslim incorporation provides grounds for cautious optimism, this picture has to be qualified if the focus shifts and the question considered of what Islamic advice is available to different Muslim communities – not least the large majority with roots in South Asia, especially Pakistan – regarding the challenge of learning to live as a minority in a non-Muslim society.

It is worth beginning with a striking observation made by a Danish political scientist about the specificity of British Muslims in a book eliciting and evaluating the views of Europe’s new Muslim political elites.Footnote ³⁴ By ‘elites’ Jytte Klausen is referring to parliamentarians, city councillors, community activists and professionals involved in civic and self-consciously Muslim organizations in Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Great Britain, France and Germany. On the basis of asking two questions – Is Islam compatible with Western values? Should Islamic religious institutions be integrated into existing frameworks regulating relations between church and state? – she generated a four-fold typology of Muslim models for integration: ‘secular integrationists’ who answered both questions in the affirmative; ‘voluntarists’ who agreed that Islam was compatible with Western values but did not want institutional integration; ‘neo-orthodox’ who think that Western norms are incompatible with the exercise of Islam and oppose the integration of Islamic institutions to existing European frameworks for the exercise of religion; and ‘anticlericals’ who consider Islam is incompatible with Western norms but favour assimilation. In five of the six European countries, the neo-orthodox account for between 10 and 22 per cent – in the UK the figure is 71.4 per cent.Footnote ³⁵

Klausen characterized the neo-orthodox as those who:

This notion of separation is also explicit in the teaching and impact in Britain and the West of leading Arab Islamist scholars, such as Yusuf al-Qaradawi, Muhammad al-Ghazali, Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah. A recent monograph concluded that they represent one pole in the debate among Europe’s Muslims. They called on Europe’s Muslims ‘to create a parallel Muslim society in the West, to operate politically within the Muslim nation [ummah] framework and to actively proselytize’.Footnote ³⁷ However, an alternative Islamic narrative is emerging in the works of thinkers and activists such as the Egyptian born Swiss national, Tariq Ramadan and the Egyptian Amr Khaled, both resident in the UK, Ramadan as an academic in Oxford, and Khaled in Birmingham. They represent an opposite pole, seeking to create space for Muslims to engage British society between assimilation and self-segregation. Khaled is a Muslim equivalent to US televangelists, at home with the new social media, and like them outside the ranks of traditional scholars. ‘Khaled’s ideal immigrant is a conscientious, practising Muslim, who proudly takes part in Western professional, social and voluntary organizations … without shedding his Islamic religion and culture.’Footnote ³⁸

Imams, Gender, Science and Sectarianism

There are good examples of a new generation of young Muslim graduates developing new community organizations, outside the control of mosques, which seek to empower Muslim women and to engage with wider society in cities across the country, as documented in a recent study focusing on Birmingham.Footnote ³⁹ However, the picture becomes much less positive if the focus shifts to the discourses and practices commended by traditionalist trained scholars – the ‘ulama – who dominate most mosques and Islamic institutions, a world largely outside the purview of policy makers, academics and the media.

To illustrate the attitudes towards gender, intra-Muslim sectarianism, science and wider society within this relatively closed world, examples will be offered from a recent English publication by a young, Bradford-based, Muslim scholar, Shaykh Mufti Saiful Islam, a legal specialist – a mufti – of the Hanafi legal school, the most influential of the four Sunni legal schools in Britain. His book of legal judgments entitled ‘Your Questions Answered’ was published in 2010 with a significant print run of 5000 copies. The mufti is patron of two private Islamic schools, one primary, the other secondary, as well as running a non-residential Islamic seminary for those with jobs and family responsibilities.

He belongs to the Deobandi Sunni tradition, which along with the Barewli Sunnis, are the two most numerous traditional ‘schools of thought’ in South Asia and Britain. The shaykh, born in 1974, belongs to the first generation of Deobandi legal scholars to be trained in Islamic seminaries in the UK. The Deobandi ‘school of thought’ emerged after the Indian mutiny in 1867. From the first, it was:

In Britain, about half of the mosques are Deobandi with some 16 out of the 25 residential seminaries in the UK belonging to this tradition. Their main traditional Sunni rivals, the Barewlis, only boast five. The ethos and curriculum of the Deobandi seminaries in Britain carry the impress of the mother houses in South Asia. The student is initiated into collective wisdom of the past studied as an act of piety rather than through a critical lens. Medieval texts are assimilated in an a-historic and a-contextual manner. A teacher-text centred approach and memorizing-based methods are normative, rather than critical enquiry.Footnote ⁴¹

The Deobandi institution building is unrivalled across Europe. Mufti Saiful Islam, then, is no maverick but embedded in one of the two most significant traditional Sunni groups in the country. His writings illustrate how the tradition has begun to articulate itself in a very different context.

The tone of his work is captured by the comment on the back cover of the book:

In an answer to the question: ‘Can you explain what Evolution is and how wrong Charles Darwin’s theory is regarding man? What does the Holy Qur’an say about the beginning of life?’ Saiful Islam’s answer is unmistakeably creationist. The mufti asks rhetorically: ‘Did a one-celled being evolve into an ape-like creature and man evolved from him or was man as he is now, from the beginning?’ and concludes triumphantly with a quotation for the Qur’an (15:26-29).Footnote ⁴²

Saiful Islam is here drawing on the writings of the Turkish writer Adnan Oktar, known by his pen name Harun Yayha, a creationist hugely influential across the Muslim world. Through a foundation Oktar set up in 1991, he has ‘over 150 books published under his name in over a dozen languages, well-produced but cheaply sold magazines, audio-visual material that is often distributed free’.Footnote ⁴³ Saiful Islam’s bookshop includes many such titles.

Saiful Islam’s views on gender are clear. A questioner asks: ‘Many Muslim sisters travel to far towns … even to different countries for higher education or employment without any mahram [a person to whom marriage is not permitted] … Is it permissible for them to travel without a mahram?’ The mufti is categorical in his answer:

The mufti reminds his readers that one of the signs of the Day of Judgement is that ‘businesses will expand to the extent that the wives will begin to assist their husbands to conduct trade’.Footnote ⁴⁵

In his answer to whether family planning is allowed, he states that it is generally frowned upon:

This is a somewhat coded way of saying that to copy non-Muslim Britons and to have small families is to become like them, unbelievers. Further, large numbers is all about power, at least in a pre-modern world. The mufti seems totally unaware of how these comments might be construed by Christians and other non-Muslims.

Saiful Islam’s patriarchal views are hardly eccentric. In a recent study of 1000 years of Qur’anic and legal commentary, across the pre-colonial Muslim world, of the Qur’anic verse which permits husbands to beat disobedient wives – 4:34 – a female Muslim scholar concludes that this verse was foundational for the view that while ‘men have direct, unfettered access to God … women’s relationship to God is mediated by men, who must oversee their wives’ moral well-being’.Footnote ⁴⁷

With regard to a third issue, the mufti seems unconcerned about the danger of importing and thus recycling in Britain intra-Muslim sectarianism. The very opening chapter of his book on ‘belief’ locates the work firmly within the bitter Deobandi-Barewli sectarian environment of South Asia, as it challenges views shared by most Barewli Sunnis for whom the Prophet is bearer of God’s light, has knowledge of ‘the unseen’, and is omnipresent.Footnote ⁴⁸

Throughout this work, the impression is given that Islam is a self-contained world. Readers are reminded that:

The answer to this rhetorical question is clear. There is little warrant here for relating to people of other faiths, still less the possibility that wider society may have something to teach Muslims. The overall logic is to create a parallel world, minimizing interaction with non-Muslims.

Imams and Conflict Resolution

Of course, not all British-trained Deobandi scholars share this isolationist mind-set. The chaplain to the first female Muslim Lord Mayor in Bradford, mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, is himself a Deobandi. He trained to teach in a state school where he learned new skills and competences. So it is with ‘ulama who become chaplains in colleges, prisons and hospitals.Footnote ⁵⁰ This latter category – the few who have moved out of their comfort zone in mosque and ethno-Muslim residential enclave – have been those with whom Christians in Bradford have particularly sought to engage.

Between November 2004 and June 2005, the inter-faith adviser and a colleague in the Peace Studies Department at Bradford University, ran two one-day workshops: ‘Muslim Scholars and Conflict Resolution’, and ‘Working with Conflict in Muslim Families during Separation and Divorce’. They identified five English-speaking scholars who were either chaplains or had done some teaching and set out the aims: to share current research on the experience of Muslim families during divorce in a non-Muslim environment; to discover peacemaking resources within the Islamic tradition; and to identify local agencies with which they could collaborate. They all agreed to participate, the feedback was positive, and they pressed for another meeting with local professionals.

A second workshop followed involving 15 people, of whom five were imams and the rest representatives from the police, senior family lawyers, Child and Family Court Advisory Service, family mediation, and local community and advice agencies. Ten participants were from the local Pakistani community. The police welcomed the opportunity to meet imams; one worker from a key agency had not been aware that there were local sources of specialist knowledge on Islamic jurisprudence, while a senior lawyer realized how little he knew about Asian Muslim family dynamics. The imams, for their part, felt confident enough to open channels of communications with key local professionals. From these two preliminary workshops a further short course on developing skills in working with conflict in Muslim families was developed.

In all, a safe space was created and a beginning made in addressing sensitive issues such as forced marriage, family violence, gender differences in divorce, finance and property arrangements. Professionals and imams alike benefited.

The friendship and trust developed yielded other shared activities, including a mixed cricket team of imams and clergy from Bradford playing a mixed team from another city, Leicester. In 2008 this platform of trust enabled a working party of Deobandi imams and Anglican clergy to produce national guidelines to improve relations between imams and clergy. This document was launched in Bradford Town Hall with much media fanfare in October 2008 and was signed by the Bishop of Bradford and leading Deobandi scholars.Footnote ⁵¹

These positive examples of engagement between imams, clergy and other local professionals, indicate what can be achieved, through hard work, patience and identifying issues of common concern. However, those imams involved will remain a trickle until their paymasters in the mosque committees decide that along with leading prayer, preaching, teaching and conducting the rites of passage, their imams should be given a public and civic role and provided with appropriate training. Another problem is language proficiency in English: a survey of 300 mosques in 2008 indicated that 92 per cent of the imams were foreign born and trained, with only 6 per cent speaking English as their first language.Footnote ⁵²