British Muslims. The kiss of death

Pro-Muslim policies may undermine those they are intended to support

LORD AHMED, one of the four prominent Muslims who have been elevated to the peerage, says life at the top has been full of nice surprises. When he entered the House of Lords, the sages who study and enforce Westminster's arcane traditions initially demurred at his request to take an oath on the Koran: this would require a change of law which might take up to a year to pass. So he urged them to delve more deeply into the tradition; and in a bold act of legal interpretation - ijtihad, in Muslim parlance - it was decided that since the House of Lords was Britain's top judicial authority, it could set its own rules in respect of swearing-in ceremonies. So he should just take his oath on Islam's holy writ, and a precedent would be set for the next millennium or so. Soon after, the House of Lords, where regular worship is led by the Anglican bishops who sit in it, acceded to his request for a Muslim prayer room to be set aside on the premises.

Similar facilities should soon be created at many British police stations, predicts Dal Babu, the head of the Association of Muslim Police Officers. Scotland Yard, the London police headquarters, already has a place for Muslims to pray; as smaller stations follow suit, more Muslims will take advantage of the “fantastic opportunities” of a police career, he believes.

In one way or another, the institutions that run Britain are trying to adapt to the needs and sensibilities of the Islamic community. The monarchy is setting an example: Prince Charles, who has a long-standing interest in Islamic art and architecture, has said that “Islam can teach us today a way of understanding and living in the world which Christianity itself is the poorer for having lost.” The future head of the Anglican church has made at least three speeches about Islam's virtues this year. The attention he has paid to the subject has made him the establishment's most popular figure among Muslims (though, given current attitudes, the competition is not fierce).

The Financial Services Authority, the City's regulator, has just approved the country's first Islamic bank (see box). The Foreign Office devotes considerable resources to providing medical and consular services for the 20,000 or so Britons who go on pilgrimage every year to Mecca; it recently appointed its first Muslim ambassador (to Bangladesh). The defence ministry says it has retained the services of a senior figure in British Islam to advise it on faith issues as they affect the 300-or-so Muslims in the forces - such as whether soldiers can be expected to do hard training while observing the Ramadan fast. (The answer is that they should postpone their training for a month.) Eton, an elite private school, has hired a Muslim cleric to join the raft of Christian clergy who minister to its pupils' spiritual needs.

This sort of flexibility prompts Lord Ahmed to say that in Britain, the establishment is “more welcoming to Islam than in any other country in Europe”. This does not mean, he agrees, that everything is rosy for British Muslims: coming from the north of England, he acknowledges the “huge problems of social exclusion” that face his co-religionists who will never wear ermine. But, in his view, British and European institutions offer Muslims opportunities to improve their lot, politically and financially, which have not been fully exploited. Sometimes, he suggests, it is just a matter of overcoming shyness.

But for other Muslim politicians, a real dilemma - to join the establishment, or to fight it - does exist, and it has grown sharper since the local and by-elections this summer which showed that the Iraq war had lost Labour the support of many Muslims. Lady Uddin, a Labour peeress from east London, admits that loyalty to her party and credibility among ordinary Muslims have become harder to combine. She says she is dismayed and frustrated by the government's lack of interest in regaining Muslim trust.

The government, meanwhile, faces a “kiss-of-death” problem: the more it tries to accommodate leading Muslims, the more its partners risk being seen as patsies. The Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), an umbrella movement of hundreds of smaller organisations, is the government's most important interlocutor. It has spoken out boldly in favour of co-operation with police against terrorism. But some Muslim grandees learned a hard lesson in 2001 when Tony Blair persuaded a number of them to endorse the Anglo-American attack on Afghanistan. They have not regained the credibility they lost on the street. That's partly why the MCB is careful to wag its finger at the government over issues ranging from female attire to foreign policy, everywhere from the Middle East to Kashmir to Chechnya.

Even Lord Ahmed is critical of the government's strategy for wooing Muslims. It has, he says, sometimes been too elitist and top-down. As he puts it, “we Yorkshiremen don't like policies handed down to us by London.”

Article suggests that pro-Muslim policies by the UK government and other pillars of the establishment may undermine those they are intended to support.

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