THE SUNDAY TIMES: A bishop caused uproar last week by exposing ghettos of Islamist extremism. But Muslims everywhere are cutting themselves off from society in other, equally dangerous ways
Perhaps it had to be someone like Michael Nazir-Ali, the first Asian bishop in the Church of England, who would break with convention and finally point out the elephant in the room.
His comments last week about the growing stranglehold of Muslim extremists in some communities revived debate about the future of multiculturalism and provoked a flurry of condemnation. Members of all three political parties immediately clamoured to dismiss him. “I don’t recognise the description that he’s talked about – no-go areas and people feeling intimidated,” said Hazel Blears, the communities secretary.
A quick call to her Labour colleague John Reid, the former home secretary, would almost certainly have helped her to identify at least one of those places. Just over a year ago Reid was heckled by the Muslim extremist Abu Izzadeen in Leytonstone, east London, during a speech on extremism, appropriately. “How dare you come to a Muslim area,” Izzadeen screamed.
That picture is mirrored outside London. One of our country’s biggest and most deprived Muslim areas is Small Heath, in Birmingham, where Dr Tahir Abbas, director of the Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Culture, was raised. With a dominant Asian monoculture, low social achievement and high unemployment, Small Heath is precisely the kind of insular and disengaged urban ghetto Nazir-Ali was talking about.
Reflecting on his experiences there, Abbas is critical of his peers who don’t stray beyond their area. “They haven’t seen rural Devon, a stately home or Windsor Castle,” he says. That refusal to engage with anything beyond the community is suffocating young Muslims by divorcing them almost entirely from Britain’s cultural heritage and mainstream life.
And their feelings of separation have been further reinforced by the advent of digital broadcasting, which has swelled the number of foreign language television stations in Britain, creating digital ghettos. Islamist movements such as Hizb ut-Tahrir (of which I was once a senior member) have been quick to spot the opportunities this affords them. In 2004 the group launched a campaign aimed at undermining President Pervez Musharraf by broadcasting adverts on Asian satellite channels, calling on the Pakistani community in Britain to “stop Busharraf”.
Manzoor Moghal, chairman of the Leicester-based Muslim Forum, is unequivocal about the dangers such Islamification poses. “We have a cultural and social apartheid which fundamentalists thrive off,” he says. Muslim Britain is becoming one big no-go area >>> By Shiraz Maher
Mark Alexander (Paperback)
Mark Alexander (Hardback)
