Learn English or leave? Mind your language, Mr. Cameron: Shasta Aziz

Valid points:

If Mr. Cameron’s government is serious about immigrant women learning English, it first needs to reverse the deep funding cuts it has made to organizations providing these services.

Of course, speaking English is going to assist any woman living in the U.K. and will help her to navigate through her daily life with more confidence and ease. But no amount of learning English is going to help integrate a woman if her and her ilk are marked as a problem and a catalyst for fragmenting society.

This is the subtext behind much of the hysterical tabloid media coverage of Muslims in Britain, in the age of the so called war on terror.

Many Muslim women here tell me that they feel increasingly uncomfortable in the country of their birth. They feel exhausted by having to constantly explain who they are and to prove they are loyal to their country every time there is a terrorist atrocity in the world – because the default position is they’re guilty by association.

The politics of identity are becoming more and more loaded in an increasingly polarized world. It is becoming harder especially for young British Muslims to navigate their way through all the noise and increasingly hostile discourse around what it means to be a Muslim in the west.

Monday’s announcement is simply another failed and missed opportunity by the British government to build a meaningful dialogue with a section of the population that it needs to urgently reach out and engage with.

One Muslim woman I interviewed in London after the terrorist attacks in Paris late last year asked me “how am I expected to feel comfortable and at ease in my society if every time I leave my house I’m looking over my shoulder to see who might physically attack me because I’m a visible Muslim woman who wears a hijab? How can anyone expect me to feel like a valued member of my society?”

That is a very good question – and one Mr. Cameron should start thinking about carefully.