Part two Response to Tariq Modood – Accommodating religions: Who’s accommodating whom?

A key intention of our original paper was to open up a discussion about the increasing influence that religious groups are having on social policy in the UK. In this regard, we very much welcome Professor Tariq Modood’s response and contribution to the debate on ‘multiculturalism’s new fault lines’. The concern we expressed in our original argument focused on the increasing accommodation of religion within state multiculturalism in both general terms, and also in the case of particular substantive demands that were being accommodated. In doing so we argued that this represented a dangerously uncritical attitude to the growing influence of religious absolutism and fundamentalism, particularly in the UK and also further afield.

Professor Modood has responded to this by characterizing our position as a form of ‘radical secularism’ and thereby implying that we want to exclude altogether the contribution to the public sphere of people who are inspired by religion. For him the affirmation of religious identities is essentially an expression of ‘ethnic minority self-assertions, mobilizations and political claims-making’, a new and important manifestation of ‘multicultural citizenship’. Accordingly, within a framework of classic liberal multiculturalism, the policy challenge then becomes one of seeking out ways to extend citizen rights through developing policies that accommodate, as far as possible, the demands made by new religious social movements. Implicit within this position is a conception of religious identities as relatively benign, or at least no less or more problematic than expressions of difference based on other markers such as class, ‘race’, gender, ethnicity or sexuality. Hence, just as the political ‘black’ identity amongst South Asian and African-Caribbean activists during the 1970s and 1980s offered a powerful signifier to mobilize a collective sense of opposition to White European imperialism and racism, the same logic today applies to new faith-based communitarian identities, in particular Muslim communities.

By characterizing us, somewhat misleadingly, as ‘radical secularists’, Professor Modood has we feel missed the point of our earlier argument. We do not see religion, religious ideology or religious ‘leaders’ as inherently good or bad; indeed history shows that religious movements can be anything from radically revolutionary to utterly reactionary as well as everything in-between. There is equally no disagreement between Professor Modood and us over the fact that minority group identities are formed out of lived experiences, often of marginalization and oppression, and that the persecution faced by religious minorities must be confronted and challenged. What we feel Professor Modood fails to consider is the nature of the religious movements and organizations that claim to represent these concerns. Often what we see in these types of situations is a nominal citizenship designed to assuage these sentiments through symbolic gestures, e.g. provision of halal meat for Muslims, allowing Sikhs to wear turbans on building sites, partial state funding of faith schools and public recognition and celebration of festivals. Rather than the multicultural citizenship Modood aspires to, the result of these sorts of initiatives is what Chetan Bhatt (2008) has termed a kind of ‘infra citizenship’ whereby the ordinary and largely secular aspirations of the community – access to education, health, employment, housing and personal and community safety – come to be mediated by self-appointed community leaders who often have a different set of priorities. This is a point a number of commentators have made when they make the point that multiculturalism has rapidly become a discourse of ‘multifaithism’, with a privileged position granted to religious leaderships within minority communities (Yuval-Davis, 2011).

While this kind of symbolic accommodation has been the order of the day for some time, our concern is that we are now seeing an ascendency of particular forms of religious fundamentalism and absolutism, and for us this was demonstrated by responses of the State to the Shabina Begum case. We argued in our original article that it was crucial to consider what this young woman’s demand to be allowed to wear a jilbab, a form of Islamic dress that practically covers the entire body, actually represented. Rather than seeing this simply as a benign expression of her religious identity, we saw this demand as expressive of a newly assertive ideological vision of Islam, inspired and supported by the group Hizb-ut-Tahrir. This conception explicitly rejected other versions of Islamic dress, which the Educational Authority had developed in consultation with the local Muslim community in Luton, as these were seen as too accommodating to other more secular forms of Muslim identity. This instance is significant for the way it shows up the contradictions in Modood’s position; on one hand his ideas would lend support to an acceptance of her demands on the basis of ‘religious accommodation’, but the irony of this is that the version of Islam being espoused here is based on the specific rejection of the very kind of ‘multiculturalism as dialogue’ that Modood is arguing for. This was what we meant when we noted that, while Modood was strongly opposed to fundamentalists, they were ‘able to utilize the same arguments as he does against secular definitions of civil society’ (Singh and Cowden, 2011: 355–356). Hence our argument is not that faith has no positive role in civic society, it is rather that in abandoning secularism as the terrain on which these issues are dealt with, this very easily becomes a slippery slope in which ‘moderate’ demands for religious accommodation open the door to absolutist forms of religious discourse.

In this sense, the Shabina Begum case was as much about new demands for religious accommodation, which are themselves expressions of ‘hegemonic struggles taking place within faith organizations’ (Singh and Cowden, 2011: 354). When one looks at the way these issues are being played out in an international context – and it is very important to note that fundamentalist movements are global movements – Modood’s idea that these forms of religious identity can be understood simply as extensions of secular identity and anti-oppressive struggles looks somewhat naive. If one were to look at the anti-racist movement of the 1980s, there were within that, religious and cultural identities present. But what brought people from quite distinct cultural, ethnic and geographical separations together was the political and secular identity of being ‘black’. That is not to say that the term black was without its problems; but we also need to see the strengths of this in terms of it acting as a bulwark against sectarianism and also as a vehicle to develop a politics of solidarity and struggle. It was the Rushdie affair of 1988–9 that was the crucible for the attack on a secular black identity, and while progressive opinion was often confused and divided about what response to take to the book, one group, Women Against Fundamentalism (WAF, 1990), took a strong stance in favour of the book and against the fundamentalist attack on Rushdie. In staging a counter-demonstration to the march in London in 1989 calling for the banning of the book, these women were vilified as ‘whores’ by many of the demonstrators, and the implication of this abuse was that secular feminism, as well as other secularist and ‘Western’ ideologies, had ‘corrupted’ these women. This moment demonstrated the rise of particular kinds of religious discourse at an ideological level, and their attempt to displace secular concepts of anti-racist struggle, but it also has a specific significance for women, as fundamentalists have a major concern with women’s roles as upholders of the supposedly unchanging morals and traditions of the whole community. As Women Against Fundamentalism have continued to argue:

Women who refuse this role may risk being demonised, outcast from their community, subjected to physical violence or even killed. The control of women’s minds and bodies is at the heart of the fundamentalist agenda. (WAF, no date)

While we have no doubt about Modood’s personal rejection of fundamentalist social policies, we argue that his position lends credence and authority to those with very different motivations than his. This is because his very elevation of the category ‘Muslim’ is indicative of a desire to invest in a specifically religious dimension of identity in opposition to other secular categories of which there are many. Amartya Sen is another important public intellectual who has warned against the reduction, or what he terms the ‘miniaturization’ of people, to singular identities. Unlike Modood, Sen (2006) is extremely critical of what he terms a ‘communitarian’ conception of identity which he feels ultimately undermines individual freedoms. Instead, Sen offers a notion of ‘plural monoculturalism’ through which identity becomes increasingly understood as something to be ‘discovered’ rather than chosen, or worse still imposed, as it is in areas with significant fundamentalist influence.

We also feel that in his advocacy of multicultural citizenship Modood implies that fundamentalists can be dismissed as a kind of lunatic fringe. While this once may have been the case, one only has to look at various countries in the world to see not only how much influence they have acquired, but also how much havoc they are wreaking not least in Muslim dominated countries (Kepel, 1994; Sen, 2006). Tunisia, the apparent success story of a moderate democratic Muslim government very recently witnessed the killing of a leftist secularist opposition politician, Chokri Belaid, by Salafists (Guardian, 8 February 2013). Closer to home in France, Marieme Helie Lucas’s writings have demonstrated the huge rise in fundamentalist influence in the impoverished suburbs of French cities:

Aicha, social worker, age 34, living in a suburb near Paris said in 2004: ‘Today, the little brothers are the ones who tell their mother: your daughter must be veiled. This is the culture of the suburbs. What upsets me? that the extremists monopolize the attention of the state and of the media. Nobody listens to Muslims who do not create any problem, who practice their religion in the private sphere.’ And Fadoua, student, age 25, living in a suburb near Paris: ‘In my suburb, the streets belong to boys, girls stay at home. The outside space, the right to speak, everything is limited. I do not want to be limited to that.’ (Lucas, 2011)

Modood would no doubt respond to these instances by characterizing this form of discourse as ‘ideology’ rather than religious identity as such. What we would like to know is what this ‘non-ideological’ religion that Modood refers to actually is? Where does this exist? If one looks at the expression of Islam in the Parisian banlieues, or the Protestant/Catholic divide in Northern Ireland, it is clear that religious identities are now resonant precisely because of state sponsored processes of ‘othering’. But in the response to this, one must equally ask where the distinction between simple faith and ‘ideology’ is drawn? The whole point we were making about the Shabina Begum case is that it isn’t that clear where one starts and the other ends. And equally when we talk about religion, we are talking not just about particular sets of ideas or philosophies, but about the influence and power of organized movements with highly defined programmes and agendas. Again, it begs the question; do such movements represent faith or ‘ideology’?

We would therefore argue that Modood’s attempt to resolve these problems through a distinction between the simple believer and the ‘ideologist’ is untenable. One has only to look at the way this same distinction between, if you like, the ‘good Muslim’ and the ‘bad Muslim’ tied Tony Blair’s governments’ anti-terrorist policies known as PREVENT up in knots, where on one hand entire Muslim communities were placed under surveillance, while at the same time the government was financially sponsoring an organization like the Muslim Association of Britain, which made no secret of its desire to introduce Sharia Law into the UK. In an article in the London Evening Standard (7 July 2008), Ed Husain, the former Islamist activist, points out how an event supported by the then Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, entitled IslamExpo at London’s Olympia, seemingly aimed at promoting a ‘non-ideological’ version of Islam, was anything but:

The most frequent speakers at this event are advocates of suicide bombing. The directors of Islam Expo Limited, as registered at Companies House, include well-known supporters of clerics who provide theological support for suicide bombers. (Husain, 2008)

One of the implications and problems of accommodating religion into social policy is that of where one draws the line in seeking to accommodate religious demands. The provision of halal meat is one thing, but what about emergent Muslim demands for Sharia Law? How would the idea of ‘multicultural citizenship’ resolve demands for the introduction of parallel systems of personal law for religious minorities, such as that which currently exists in India? And, what mechanisms/safeguards would be available to ensure that the views of secular or moderate Muslims, who may wish to oppose such demands, but who may not in any way be as organized as the religious movements, are registered?

We noted earlier that Modood suggested at the end of his response that we were, at the core of our argument, ‘radical secularists’. While we don’t accept this characterization of our position, we do concede that we could have been clearer in defining secularism; and we accept that our definition was implicit rather than explicit, at the same time as welcoming further discussion on varieties of secularism. But Modood also alleges wrongly that we accuse him of homogenizing religion. We don’t accuse him of this – rather our concern is that he fails to recognize hegemonic struggles taking place in religion.

To conclude, we reiterate, the primary aim of our paper was to highlight what we feel are real and serious fault lines in contemporary multiculturalism and that these cut across different lines. We find ourselves at a point where models of analysis and policy have seemingly fragmented and what little consensus there was once amongst ‘progressives’ and those concerned with confronting racism and social injustice appears to have waned. Against the backdrop of neoliberalism and economic austerity, we are increasingly witnessing an alarming rise in attacks on migrants and minorities of all faiths across the globe, alongside increasing violence against women, often religiously inspired. At a moment such as this the task is not so much speculating about the future, as urgently identifying a viable and acceptable framework for developing analysis, policy and social action to defend the oppressed and this is our primary concern.

Like Modood we believe that a state that seeks to value ‘difference’ and facilitate integration is certainly more desirable than one that functions to ignore or worst still obliterate minority cultural identities, but we also think that if you want this, you have to ask the more fundamental question of what it is that divides people. One has to only look at the current state of Northern Ireland to see the way organized religion continues to derive its power, at both the level of identity as well as the level of political power, through the maintenance and nurturance of these divisions. Yet as several weeks of rioting by working class Unionists in January 2013 in the flag protests showed, a preoccupation with the foregrounding of group identities can actually inhibit discussion of real solutions. When we talk about integration, why aren’t we talking about class, poverty, unemployment, gendered violence or the lack of decent education, rather than furthering a preoccupation with religious and cultural identities?