Multiculturalism, Britishness, and Muslims | openDemocracy

A somewhat (over) lengthy piece by Tariq Madood on British multiculturalism and Islam, but nevertheless interesting and rich in its reflections:

The Islamic-modernity argument counters by positioning the sharia not as a body of unchanging law, but as a set of ethical principles with legal conclusions that apply only to specific places and times and thus have to be continually reinterpreted; the effect is to place the ethical over the legal and the political see Ziauddin Sardar, The Future of Muslim Civilization [Mansell, 1987] and Tariq Ramadan, Western Muslims and the Future of Islam [Oxford University Press, 2005. This is an example of how scholarship can draw on extra-European heritages and reinterpret them in a context of a democratic citizenship.

As Muslims’ discussion of these matters develops, and as their discourse becomes an integral part of British debates, one positive effect could be that a broader range of Muslim voices or civic participants are able to contribute. Such a development would reflect a healthy internal variety among Muslims as within any group, part of which is that different individuals or members will want to locate themselves variously across the representational landscape secular, religious, close to government, distant from political parties. That, after all, is true integration; new groups should have similar opportunities to old groups and do not need to conform, or feel obliged to conform, to a special “minority” perspective.

These discursive and institutional processes have two implications. The first is that an increasing acceptance that Muslims can politically organise “as Muslims” without any sense of illegitimacy – in raising distinctive concerns or having group representation in public bodies, for example – means allowing them to choose the paths they think appropriate at different times, in different contexts and for different ends.

The result will be a democratic constellation of organisations, networks, alliances and discourses in which there will be agreement and disagreement, in which group identity will be manifested more by way of family resemblances than the idea that one group means one voice.

The second implication is that where there is “difference” there must also be commonality. That commonality is citizenship, a citizenship seen in a plural and dispersed way. There is no contradiction here, for emphasising and cultivating what we have in common is not a denial of difference – it all depends upon what kind of commonality is arrived at, something that cannot be taken for granted. Difference and commonality are not either-or opposites but are complementary and have to be made – lived – together, giving to each its due.

More than that, commonality must be difference-friendly, and if it is not, it must be remade to be so. This does not mean as a corollary weak or indifferent national identities; on the contrary, multiculturalism requires a framework of dynamic national narratives and the ceremonies and rituals which give expression to a national identity. Minority identities are capable of generating a sense of attachment and belonging, even a sense of a “cause” for many people. If multicultural citizenship is to be equally attractive to those people, it needs a comparable and counterbalancing set of emotions; it cannot be merely about a legal status or a passport.

A sense of belonging to one’s country is necessary to make a success of a multicultural society. An inclusive national identity is respectful of and builds upon the identities that people value and does not trample upon them. So integration is not simply or even primarily a “minority problem”. For central to it is a citizenship and the right to make a claim on the national identity in the direction of positive difference.

Multiculturalism, Britishness, and Muslims | openDemocracy.