Asif Majid, PhD Canddiate in Anthropology, Media, and Performance, University of Manchester

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Prayers in the street in Finsbury Park after the attack on June 19. Yui Mok/PA Wire

Neil Basu, deputy assistant commissioner for the Metropolitan Police and senior national coordinator for counter terrorism, commended the response of the Muslim community, who stopped the man suspected to have carried out the attack before turning him over to police. One man who apprehended the man told the BBC that the individual had said he “wanted to kill Muslims”.

The Finsbury Park attack occurred just after the murder of a teenage Muslim girl in Virginia and an attempted vehicular attack on Iraqi migrants in Sweden. There is little doubt that this incident targeted the Muslim community, and while we cannot speculate as to what exactly motivated this violence, such an incident demands that we reflect on the harm that Islamophobia can cause.
 

Heightened tensions

The attack took place near Finsbury Park Mosque and the Muslim Welfare House on Seven Sisters Road, north London. Finsbury Park Mosque is infamous because the violent extremist, Abu Hamza, preached there before his arrest in 2004. Since then, under new leadership, the mosque and its leaders have made outstanding contributions to the local community, which has been recognised nationally. Regardless of this recognition, parts of the press continue to demonise the mosque.

On the night of the attack, Mail Online referenced Hamza – who was sentenced to life in prison in the US in 2015 – in their headline for a report on the attack.

As a researcher on Islamophobia, I have had the opportunity to speak with members of the mosque’s leadership a few times. I recall a conversation I had with Mohammed Kozbar, then chairman of the mosque, in 2012 about a pig’s head left on the gate to the mosque in 2010 and a hoax anthrax threat sent to the mosque in 2011. He told me then that the community was feeling vulnerable and fearful. He reminded me as well that the media rarely, if ever, reported on the positive contributions made by members of the mosque.

In 2015, in a report for Tell MAMA (the UK’s primary watchdog for anti-Muslim hate) and the Metropolitan Police, I identified a cluster of nine anti-Muslim hate crimes and incidents targeting the mosque. The misplaced association of the congregation with violent extremism continues to make the site a target for hate. In this sense, it should sadly come as no surprise that Finsbury Park has been targeted once again.

Islamophobia and anti-Muslim hatred have demonstrably increased year on year. This is evident in police data that I have reviewed from 2012 to 2014 and in reports by Tell MAMA that include data from victims, charities, and police forces across the country. Between May 2013 and September 2016, 100 mosques were targeted and attacked.
 

Spikes of hate tend to follow attacks perpetrated by Muslims in the UK and abroad. These dynamics are evident in research on the attacks in Paris in 2015. The three atrocities that claimed lives in Westminster, Manchester, and London Bridge have led to a major increase in anti-Muslim hate based both on police evidence and reports from Muslim communities.

These spikes are not localised and they affect Muslim communities across the country. In this sense, the way that Muslims are framed in reporting on terrorism directly harms communities by putting them in the cross-hairs of lone criminals, angry citizens, and extreme right-wing terrorists.
 

Anti-Muslim hate plays a role

This attack, as the Metropolitan Police were quick to note, has all the hallmarks of a terrorist incident, and it is being investigated as such. More details about the attacker’s motivation is likely to emerge as the investigation continues.

There is a blurry line between hate crime and terrorism. And it is difficult to impute any kind of causality between far-right extremists and such an attack.

What is clear, however, is that irresponsible sensationalism and the growth of Islamophobia inspires fear, anxiety, and hate towards Muslims. A report published in May from the Home Affairs Select Committee showed that social media is an important medium for sharing and distributing these sentiments. Platforms such as Facebook and Twitter provide an environment in which cliques of users normalise and legitimate anti-Muslim ideologies.

It is important that the Finsbury Park investigation questions whether or not the attacker was influenced by extreme right-wing opinions disseminated online. However, it is also crucial to see if this individual was influenced by the press when he selected Muslims in the Finsbury Park area as his target.

Whether or not this incident is considered a terrorist attack should not distract us from the bigger problem: the failure of politicians and the media to effectively counter Islamophobia has caused Muslims to become targets of violence on their way home from prayer.
 

Bharath Ganesh, Researcher, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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'Englishness' is often set at odds with Islam, but in reality both these identities are malleable and porous. We must follow in the footsteps of Muslims throughout history in embracing new cultural formations.

 
Image: AP/Lefteris Pitarakis

Each year, the pilgrimage to the Islamic holy city of Mecca takes place – millions of people from various nationalities descend, and perform the Hajj, the Islamic pilgrimage. As usual, thousands of Muslim Britons joined their co-religionists, and the UK Foreign Office has a consular office in Mecca that assists them. This year, the UK’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia accompanied them – as a pilgrim himself. Her Majesty’s representative, Simon Collis, happens to be a Muslim – an English one, which seemed to take the media thoroughly by surprise. But is it actually as unusual as it seems?

Britain has British Muslims, and Muslims are integrated into British society. Their loyalty might be contested by parts of the right (and the left), regrettably – but generally, it’s now longer controversial to make the argument that Britishness and Islam can be strongly related. After all, there is an established history in the UK around speaking of Britishness as a modern, civic, and less essentialised nationalism – and, as such, can easily incorporate a variety of identities under the rubric of multiculturalism, which often relates identity to institutions and language. In that regard, Britishness is far similar to an American style of civic nationalism – and it’s relatively easy for Muslim identity to exist in that kind of universe.

But, there’s another kind of relationship to explore, which was raised inadvertently by our ambassador’s pilgrimage, as well as two recent conferences held by ‘British Futures’ (‘A Very English Islam’) and in Cambridge, by Cambridge Muslim College. That is the relationship between Englishness and Islam – which, according to people such as the former chair of the Conservative Party, Sayeeda Warsi, and Cambridge University theologian, Dr Timothy Winter, is a very strong relationship indeed. Claiming a positive relationship between Englishness and Islam, rather than simply Britishness and Islam, is a far bolder statement – because traditionally speaking, Englishness hasn’t been conceived as a kind of civic citizen-based nationalism at all. It’s been interpreted far more as an essentialized identity – one that relates to race, and also religion. And in England post-Brexit referendum, particularly with the noticeable rise in anti-Muslim sentiment via right-wing nativist populists, suggesting that Muslims of England could not only be considered British, but English, could be ever more intriguing.

As far as the likes of Winter and Warsi are concerned, there is no intrinsic or philosophical quandary to speaking of an English-Muslim expression of culture. Historically, there were many English Muslims, who were either converts or descendants of them, similar to Christians and socially, they were deeply embedded in English culture. It is an interesting perspective – and one that becomes more pertinent in the UK post-Brexit, and the rise of even deeper identity politics among the English, and also the increasing of anti-Muslim sentiment in the UK and beyond.

The question then arises – can Islam be accepted in the UK only as part of and via that multiculturalist discussion and civic nationalism of Britishness? Or can Islam be more embedded and indigenous – can it become intrinsically connected to Englishness, for example, in the same way that English Jews and English Catholics are English? It is not simply a question pertaining to whether or not Islam has that capacity of openness – but whether England does as well.  

There is a cultural question to be considered here. The majority of British Muslims today were born in the UK – but they descend from either expatriates or are the grandchildren of expatriates. Those original migrants were not, by and large, expecting to stay in the UK – but that has already changed for that generation, let alone their children and grandchildren. Their children and grandchildren have no such doubt. They’re not ‘staying’ anywhere – this is their home. This is why so much cultural creativity is taking place already in Muslim communities around the UK, even if more can be done.

Nonetheless, those migrants came from a different ethnicity from the majority of Britons – and pluralism has not exactly had an easy time in Europe until the latter half of the 20th century. The upsurge of populist politics, and the mainstreaming of racist tropes, which we have seen across the continent, as well as across the Atlantic Ocean, is not something to be taken lightly.

That issue of pluralism remains pertinent – not simply in terms of rejecting racism in the context of our laws and policies in the UK. But also on a deeply internal, cultural level – are we, as English men and women, willing to conceive of Englishness as a more open construct that could not only incorporate Muslims as British citizens, but as English, and Islam as an English religion? It’s not a foregone conclusion – but it does have serious ramifications for how we consider identity in England, the UK and Europe today.

As for Muslims, there is also the question of not only ethnicity, but religion. Is Islam a barrier to this kind of ‘indigenous’ exercise? Or are there resources within the Islamic tradition to allow for the indigenization of religious expression in ‘new’ countries?

Where Islam’s adherents are a majority, cultural embeddedness is plainly not an issue – otherwise, for example, Nigerian Islam would look, culturally, like Moroccan Islam. It patently does not – even though, on a religious level, they are the same in terms of their approach to Sunni doctrine, law and spirituality. But what about in a minority context? Is it the same? Or is Islam impervious to becoming connected to the land, except where Muslims run the show?

Winter argues in his own writings that Islamic tradition isn’t a barrier to a minority cultural expression of Islam – indeed, he considers Islamic tradition to enforce an imperative behind forming an English Islamic cultural expression. There are certainly historical precedents for that – in China, for example, where Muslims have lived for more than a millennium, without political supremacy, and a profoundly Chinese expression of Islam is incredibly evident. The same can be said for South Africa, where Muslims, including the most deeply traditional and orthodox, are intrinsically South African. Other illustrations abound. If history is anything to go by, Muslims have proven culturally extremely malleable historically, while maintaining Islamic creedal and canonical traditions.

Far beyond England – in Wales, across the European continent – the issues of Islam and being indigenous is a poignant one. The resources and ingredient for organic, localized and culturally embedded forms of Muslim religious expressions in England are all there. The real question is whether we’ll prefer to see that kind of future in Europe – or one where we are far more separated from each other, or, as both the populist right and religious extremists would prefer, worse. The choice is really ours.

(This article was first published on Opendemocracy.net)

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Belief in the negativity of homosexuality from the perspective of one’s faith could cause some gay Muslims to develop internalised homophobia and, in some cases, to doubt the authenticity of their Muslim identity.

Image: shutterstock. Nando Machado/Shutterstock.com

The Orlando shooting was a hate crime against gay people – even if, once it emerged that the attacked had been a Muslim, many people claimed this as a terrorist attack rather than a hate crime. And, in an important sense, this was also a terror attack, since its aim was to spread fear in the LGBT community.

Since the massacre there has been a lot of speculation about Islam and homosexuality and there are fears that one man’s despicable act of terrorism could fan the flames of Islamophobia and other forms of social exclusion, leading to discord and unrest in an era of elevated Islamophobia.

It is difficult to define the “Islamic position” on homosexuality, as a monolithic phenomenon, simply because Islam is a very diverse faith group with some 1.6 billion followers on six continents. In most Muslim countries, homosexuality is illegal and in some countries, including Iran and Saudi Arabia, it is punishable by death. But in others, such as Jordan and Turkey, homosexuality is not considered a crime.

Most Islamic scholars are in agreement that homosexuality is incompatible with Islamic theology. They tend to draw on the story of Lot in the Koran (also in the Old Testament) which recounts the destruction of the tribe of Lot allegedly due to their engagement in homosexual acts as “evidence” for God’s condemnation of homosexuality. Many scholars also cite the Ahadith (statements attributed to the Prophet Muhammed) that are condemnatory of homosexuality. Theological and legal condemnations of homosexuality can engender perceptions at a social level that homosexuality is wrong and that it should not be permitted.

Muslims on homosexuality

In 2009, a Gallup survey revealed negative attitudes towards homosexuality among European Muslims. In France, 35% of Muslims viewed homosexuality as “morally acceptable” (versus 78% of the general public). In Germany, 19% of Muslims viewed it as morally acceptable (versus 68% of the general public). In the UK, none of the Muslim respondents viewed homosexuality as morally acceptable (versus 58% of the general public who did).

Earlier this year, a survey commissioned by Channel 4 was conducted among a random sample of 1,081 individuals who self-identified as Muslim. The results found that 18% of the British Muslim respondents agreed that homosexuality should be legal in Britain while the majority (52%) disagreed. Conversely, only 5% of the general public thought homosexuality should be illegal. Furthermore, 47% of the British Muslim respondents indicated that they did not believe that it was acceptable for a gay person to become a teacher. These data suggest that there are low levels of acceptance of homosexuality in Muslim communities in the UK.
However, qualitative interview data can provide more nuanced understandings of what Muslims think and why they might hold these views.

In my research into attitudes concerning homosexuality among samples of first and second-generation British Muslims of Pakistani descent, I found that attitudes tend to be largely negative. Although research into attitudes towards homosexuality in the general population points to demographic variables, such as age and level of education, as key determinants of the nature of attitudes, this has not been the case in my own work with British Muslims. Muslims of various ages, education levels and socio-economic backgrounds have participated in my studies and generally perceive homosexuality in negative terms. In substantiating these attitudes people often draw on holy scripture. As one 54-year-old woman said:

It says it in the Koran that it’s wrong and sorry I’m not the one who made it. It’s what the God revealed to the Prophet so it’s the truth and that’s my belief system.

Many interviewees draw upon holy scripture as the basis of their views regarding homosexuality. There appears to be a desire not to “re-interpret” holy scripture – to accommodate homosexuality – because of the divinity of its origin. Moreover, there was a fundamental rejection of essentialist arguments concerning the origins of sexual orientation – that people are born gay and that they do not “choose” to be gay – and interviewees often argued that people had “chosen” to be gay. One 28-year-old man said:

God doesn’t create gay people. It’s a path they’ve chosen and that’s an incorrect path according to our faith.

Indeed, previous research has shown that believing the essentialist argument regarding homosexuality is correlated with less discrimination and greater acceptance.

What does the Koran say about homosexuality? Lord Harris/BritishMuseum, CC BY

First-hand relationships

Although many British Muslims may disapprove of the concept of homosexuality, several individuals reported positive first-hand experiences of contact with LGBT people. A 45-year-old man said:

Homosexuality is wrong, I believe … I have a gay neighbour and he lives with his partner. He’s a very nice guy – both of them [are]. They are very respectful. We consider them friends.

Some people spoke fondly of their LGBT friends, neighbours and acquaintances, suggesting that first-hand contact may challenge homophobia which exists at an abstract, conceptual level. It is also vital to stress that the Muslim interviewees overwhelmingly rejected violence against LGBT people. As one woman put it:

Violence and hate crimes are un-Islamic. We are not supposed to kill or hurt others, as Muslims. No, they can’t have it both ways so they won’t be accepted in our community but it’s for God to punish, not us.

It was difficult for British Muslim interviewees to accept homosexuality given the overwhelming “evidence” of its prohibition in Islam. Individuals simply had no positive theological frame of reference given the absence of LGBT affirmative voices at an institutional level. This led some individuals to view endorsement of homosexuality as a violation of their religious faith and its norms:

Being gay is un-Islamic and so is encouraging it.

Put simply, the acceptance or endorsement of homosexuality was perceived as contravening key tenets of Islam.

Gay Muslims speak out

Clearly, the stigma attached to homosexuality in Islamic communities can have profound effects for those Muslims who also self-identify as gay. For almost a decade, I have been researching the social psychological aspects of being Muslim and gay. In view of the generally negative attitudes towards homosexuality in Muslim communities and the silence that can surround discussions of sexuality, most of my Muslim gay interviewees have manifested a poor self-image and low psychological well-being. Many view their sexual orientation as “wrong” and, thus, express a hope to change it in the future. One young gay Muslim man said:

It’s [being gay] wrong, really, isn’t it? … In the mosque we’re told that Shaitan [Satan] tries to tempt Muslims because he is evil and he makes us do evil things. I know that doing gay things is evil but I hope I’ll change my ways and take the right path soon … It’s all about temptation, really. Life is a big test.

Those gay Muslims who conceptualise their sexuality as immoral and wrong can understandably struggle to derive self-esteem, which is key to well-being. They may come to view their sexual orientation as “evil” and resist it. Some attempt to change their sexual orientation, sometimes by entering into marriages of convenience. This conceptualisation of homosexuality stems from their understanding of the Islamic stance on it. Said by a 28-year-old man:

What the Prophet said was right and that’s always going to stand, yeah. Men having sex with other men was wrong in his eyes. He hated it.

It is easy to see how belief in the negativity of homosexuality from the perspective of one’s faith (which, in countless studies has emerged as an important identity among British Asian Muslims) could cause some gay Muslims to develop internalised homophobia and, in some cases, to doubt the authenticity of their Muslim identity.

Sadiq Khan, mayor of London, received death threats after voting in favour of same-sex marriage. Daniel Leal-Olivas / PA Wire/Press Association Images

Gay Muslims may cope with this internal conflict in a number of ways. While some hope to change their sexual orientation and to “become” straight, others may deny that they are actually gay:

Maybe I’m not bisexual because I’ve never been with a woman but I can’t call myself gay either … I refuse to do that because I just don’t feel gay.

Crucially, in making sense of the “causes” underlying their sexual orientation, some gay Muslims were of the view that they had “become” gay as a result of their social environment and consequently blamed British society:

I’m gay because I was brought up here [in Britain] but I reckon if I’d been brought up in Pakistan then I would have turned out straight because this doesn’t happen that much there. Like I haven’t heard of any gays in our village. Here there are clubs and that and so I just kind of fell into the gay culture.

We tend to attribute aspects of our identity that we see as undesirable to external factors. This is a means of protecting one’s sense of self from threats. Some of the gay Muslim interviewees in my studies have identified British (or Western) culture as the reason for their sexual orientation.

Reconciling homosexuality and Islam

Many individuals of religious faith struggle to accept homosexuality given the centrality of heterosexuality to faith life, according to most faith groups. Muslims are no exception. Individuals use all sorts of strategies for protecting their sense of identity and some of these strategies can actually have poor social and psychological outcomes. Social psychologists have long argued that intergroup contact is a good starting-point for improving relations between different social groups.

Universities are obvious contexts in which different groups can come together – LGBT and Islamic student societies on university campuses could collaborate with the aim of increasing inter-group contact between Muslims and LGBT people (and indeed those who identify with both categories).

Of course, inter-group contact needs to be characterised by positive images of the outgroup. So there needs to be much more discussion of homosexuality in Muslim communities – which will admittedly be difficult given the cultural taboo around sexuality. Faith and community leaders should broach the topic. My view is that people need to be exposed to LGBT affirmative images. This has already happen to some extent.

As I’ve written elsewhere, the Eastenders storyline concerning Syed Mehmood, a gay Muslim character who struggles to come out to his parents, generated some discussion in the British Muslim community and led some individuals to acknowledge the existence of homosexuality within their community.

Coming out: Syed from Eastenders on Twitter. Twitter

This is a positive step forward and one that can be built on. Similarly, there needs to be more acknowledgement and acceptance of faith groups in LGBT contexts which tend to be secular. In my research, I’ve also found that gay Muslims can face Islamophobia on the gay scene, which can hinder their sense of belonging in these spaces.

In addition to improving relations between groups, it is likely that this exercise will have positive outcomes for well-being among those individuals who self-identify as Muslim and gay. Growing up in an environment in which you are led to believe that your sexual orientation is wrong, sinful or symptomatic of mental illness can lead to profound social and psychological challenges, including internalised homophobia, low self-esteem, depression and, in some cases, suicidal thoughts.

The reasons underlying the horrendous attacks perpetrated by Omar Mateen in Orlando may never be fully understood. But if it is true that he was a closeted homosexual – it was reported that he had used gay dating applications and frequented gay bars, including the one that he attacked – he clearly had a very difficult relationship with this aspect of his identity. There is already some empirical evidence that homophobia is associated with homosexual arousal, which suggests that homophobia might be a means of distancing homosexuality from one’s sense of self.

Could it be that his actions were in part a result of his internalised homophobia? Did he attack the LGBT community in an attempt to distance his own sexuality from his sense of self?

In any case, we as a society have a responsibility to acknowledge diversity and to allow people the space and opportunity to self-identify in ways in which they choose. We have a responsibility to challenge prejudice (of all kinds) when it shows its ugly face. We have a responsibility to support and protect minorities who are vulnerable to marginalisation and exclusion. Sometimes this will be challenging particularly when it means that we have engage with sensitive issues such as religious norms and customs but we must persevere – for the sake of freedom, peace and well-being for all of society.

(The writer is Professor of Psychology & Sexual Health, De Montfort University).

(This article was first published on The Conversation).

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