ubiwar.com

[Cross-posted from Complex Terrain Lab]

On Monday 13 May, Dilwar Hussain of the Islamic Foundation led an evening seminar at King’s College London, ‘British Muslims: Identity, Integration and Policy’. Hussain is the well-respected head of the Policy Research Unit and Senior Research Fellow at the foundation, and also serves on the board of the Commission for Racial Equality in the UK. Hussain is the co-author of British Muslims Between Assimilation and Segregation: Historical, Legal and Social Realities (2004) and has also written several op-eds, not least a rebuke to charges of extremism laid at the door of the Islamic Foundation by the BBC Panorama programme in 2005.

Hussain describes the construction of modern British ‘Muslimness’ - encompassing a plurality all too often overlooked - as an ongoing negotiation of inherited identities. First, as the ‘Other’ (black), passing through the continental (Asian), national (Pakistani, Bangladeshi, etc) to the current situation in which many Muslims define their primary identity as religious. He outlined the internal and external drivers of this evolution, the latter including the oil crises and Middle East wars of the 1970s, the Iranian Revolution in 1979, and the Satanic Verses affair a decade later. Critical events of the 1990s, like the genocide in Bosnia, 9/11 and 7/7 further served to polarise Muslims in opposition to notions of statehood and nationality, preferring instead to identify with their religion and the global ummah. More than ever, the tensions of hyphenated identity are being laid bare.

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