England | SabrangIndia News Related to Human Rights Fri, 07 Oct 2016 09:26:54 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.2.2 https://sabrangindia.in/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Favicon_0.png England | SabrangIndia 32 32 Can there be an ‘English Islam’? https://sabrangindia.in/can-there-be-english-islam/ Fri, 07 Oct 2016 09:26:54 +0000 http://localhost/sabrangv4/2016/10/07/can-there-be-english-islam/ '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 […]

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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.

English Islam 
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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What place is there for religion in modern life? https://sabrangindia.in/what-place-there-religion-modern-life/ Thu, 26 May 2016 12:49:09 +0000 http://localhost/sabrangv4/2016/05/26/what-place-there-religion-modern-life/ Photo credit: Huffington Post It has been reported that nearly half the population of England and Wales now considers itself to have “no religion”. This sudden rise – from 25% to 48.5% over just three years from 2011 to 2014 – seems a bit too steep to be totally credible. But then, the last survey […]

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Photo credit: Huffington Post

It has been reported that nearly half the population of England and Wales now considers itself to have “no religion”. This sudden rise – from 25% to 48.5% over just three years from 2011 to 2014 – seems a bit too steep to be totally credible. But then, the last survey in Scotland put the proportion of “nons” at just over half (52%). Even if we approach these figures with some scepticism, it is still sobering news for churches and other religious communities. So what explains it, and what does it mean for the future of religion in the UK?

You could account for some of this on the basis that people these days are not “joiners”: they don’t practise things in public, especially when these things take up precious time. Golf club membership is likewise in decline. Or, it could be that people are making things clearer about where they stand: they’ve found something else – whatever that might be – and religion no longer occupies that space.

Religion, it seems, comes from the Latin “re-ligere”, which has to do with “tying” and “binding”. And people don’t like to be bound: they feel they have enough ties – such as family commitments, working, paying taxes and giving to charity – without adding another one by taking up religion.

Moreover, to take the Christian Church more specifically, religious institutions have an image problem: rarely at the cutting edge of fashion, usually two paces behind. It has also had its fair share of scandals, from the clerical abuse of minors, to its long-running divisions over human sexuality.

Doing good

Yet most people would acknowledge that the church does a lot of good: the care homes it runs, the charitable work it quietly does, the donations and care packages it sends to many far-off places, and its leaders, who often sound the voice of peace and moderation at times of public and international crisis. The prayers and the piety of that religious woman next door is normally welcomed, rather than despised.

It’s just that religion doesn’t seem very useful, very aspirational, very necessary for getting on, in life, in work, in love. If anything, it complicates things. And yet, the Christian gospel (if I can reach for an example in the area I know best) combines the virtues of a reflective life with a life of actions done with other people, modelling charity amid disagreement. Faith can integrate a life, on the basis that one is known and loved by the One who gave one life and gives life to all things, who always comes amid suffering and human wickedness to call us back to himself.

I wonder how much this “religion for life” – as something which binds wounds and ties the fragmented and diverse bits of our lives together, giving them focus and enduring direction – is something that people are aware of, when they think of religion (assuming that they ever do).

No small end in sight

All this does not mean that religion needs to end small, even if it is likely that, as numbers decline, the church will increasingly be rooted in smaller communities and smaller buildings, helping to accentuate the personal aspect of church, while being a place for sacred worship and still space.

When it talks, it will still speak with a voice neither shrill nor faltering; it will seek to weigh traditional values and structures together with new insights and modern demands. For instance, the Church of Scotland ordained its first woman minister in the 1960s, just as women were first becoming business chiefs and political leaders.

It will seek to spot what in any given social trend is to be affirmed, and what is to be denied. It will ask questions, represent other viewpoints, try to be a cradle of wisdom and cool heads with warm hearts, with the confidence that comes from knowing that my career, my health, my family are not everything, even while they are valuable gifts. It won’t pontificate, but will witness clearly to the truth as it has been revealed to it, not by claiming to own it, but pointing away from itself towards it. It won’t always be hard and it won’t always be soft.

This story was first published on The Conversation.

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