The UK keeps missing the mark on anti-Muslim hate

Here in the United Kingdom, we've just been through an anti-Muslim pogrom, but you wouldn't know it. Reading media coverage of the past few weeks, you wouldn't think that anti-Muslim hate was the driver for the riots throughout the country.

One month on, everyone here is talking about "race" riots or the "disturbances." A recent BBC article on how our prime minister should address the "root" causes of the riots failed to mention anti-Muslim hate even once. And on Friday, a UN committee urged Britain to pass measures to curb hate speech and xenophobic rhetoric, yet also failed to mention Islamophobia.

However, the rioters weren't targeting churches, synagogues, Hindu temples or Sikh gurdwaras, but pointedly mosques, and in one case even Muslim graves. The trigger for the anti-Muslim riots in Southport stemmed from orchestrated disinformation online, that the criminal behind the murders of the little girls at a dance class was a Muslim and an asylum seeker.

The rioters' target was Muslims, without any doubt, which then widened to include brown and Black people.

Nothing happens in a vacuum. Historic anti-Muslim prejudice, coupled with decades of unbridled anti-Muslim discourse in this country at every level of society, just needed a spark to light the fire.

Southport was that spark.

Downplaying Islamophobia

While some politicians and media reports initially acknowledged that Muslims were the target of last month's attacks, this fact is now being downplayed.

The UK has laws that allow courts to prosecute crimes motivated by religious hatred, but so far, it seems rioters have mainly been charged with "racially aggravated" offences, not "religiously aggravated" ones, which again downplays the anti-Muslim driver.

If my suspicions are correct, it seems very likely that the Labour government will not be addressing Islamophobia specifically or in any meaningful way in any investigations going forward.

Doing so would mean a complete rethink and rehash of the status quo and involve making significant institutional changes - throughout the entire public sector, including the Criminal Justice system, from the welfare services' understanding of Muslim needs, to police handling of anti-Islam hate crimes.

How did we get here? There has always been a denial of the existence of Islamophobia in mainstream British discourse. Instead, mainstream media, the public sector and the government appear to prefer looking at the problem from the lens of race.

Two types of hate

Many will not understand why it matters that anti-Muslim discrimination should be distinct from race. Let me explain.

To have effective solutions to problems, you must identify the correct root causes. You cannot lump Islamophobia and racism together, as they are two different types of hate. They require a different approach to policies to achieve positive outcomes.

Islamophobia is a deep-seated prejudice and fear of Muslims in the Western psyche, which results in abuse and discrimination.

For over a millennium to the present day, Europe has been at odds in many ways with Islam. Think of 800 years of Muslim Spain, the Crusades and the Ottomans in Europe. These conflicts have resulted in some European historians and politicians portraying Muslims as the 'bogey men', 'sexual deviants', 'oppressors of women', 'barbaric', and now 'terrorists', a people who pose numerous threats to the West.

All this is reflected in European history, literature, arts, media and Hollywood (see Jack Shaheen's documentary Reel Bad Arabs).

When your brain has been hardwired subconsciously to fear and hate Islam and Muslims, it doesn't take long for anti-Muslim tropes to take root and translate into discriminatory behaviour, abuse and attacks. This is the history of Islamophobia. It's not about colour, but a long-standing prejudice and hatred of Islam and Muslims.

Racism, on the other hand, is based on discrimination due to skin colour and ethnic origin. It has its own history.

It is based on European theories of races, with white races considering themselves to be the superior race and Black and brown races being put at the bottom. Both of these types of hate are used to justify slavery and colonialism.

Sometimes Islamophobia and racism intersect, but they must still be treated as separate types of hate, for there to be effective solutions to both.

In the UK, the anti-racism movement that developed in the 1950s to address colour racism was staunchly secular and solely about skin colour. In fact, religion or religious discrimination was deliberately removed from the movement as it was "too divisive," as I was told at a training session by Ambalavaner Sivanandan himself, the famous anti-racist activist.

The movement in the UK started as new immigrants of colour and diverse faiths arrived to a post-war Britain, where they faced racist abuse, attacks, riots and racially motivated murders.

By the 1970s and '80s, diverse communities became united because we were all being targeted over our skin colour. But even then, anti-Muslim discrimination was present if you had eyes to see, in the form of the murder of a Muslim pupil at a school with anti-Muslim attitudes, and the murder of a young prison inmate amid Islamophobic prison officers.

These instances of anti-Muslim hate were never classified as such, because the policy makers only saw racism, not religious hate.

Race equality left Muslims out

Following the race riots of the early 1980s, the government instructed the public sector to introduce race equality initiatives. As a race relations officer, I very soon discovered being united against colour racism was one thing, but forcing "race labels and identities" on us as Blacks and Asians, and then using them to provide services for diverse religious and cultural communities in the public sector was another thing.

In fact, it was disastrous for Muslims. Indeed, the Race Relations Act 1976 only protected racial groups, and Muslims being multi-ethnic and a faith group, were not protected.

I began to see the government and the public sector’s total lack of understanding even of the existence of Muslims; we were invisible to them.

Muslims have long been, and still are, one of the most socio-economically and health disadvantaged communities in the UK, and that’s because they were rendered invisible by omission; either not accessing services, or the services provided were insensitive or inappropriate.

For example, when it came to fostering and adoption, Muslim children were put in same-race placements, rather than same-faith ones. So a Nigerian Muslim child would be placed with African-Caribbean Christians, and a Pakistani Muslim child placed with Indian Hindus.

For us as Muslims, our priority is that Muslim children should be placed in Muslim families, even if an ethnic/racial match isn't always possible.

In the UK, the Census did not have a question about religion until 2001, so it was difficult to quantify the discrimination Muslims faced.

Lobbying for change

In 1985, I founded An-Nisa Society, to work for the welfare of Muslim families and promote awareness of the issues I had identified.

After many years of lobbying and campaigning, there were small wins and big breakthroughs, including the 2010 Equality Act which finally included "religion and belief" as a protected class. We now had legislation criminalising religiously aggravated hate crimes and incitement to religious hatred.

Our work on social programs such as counselling for Muslim communities also demonstrated that faith-based initiatives tended to have better social and economic outcomes.

Yet despite these leaps in progress, with more Muslims now in politics and the public sector, Islamophobia has increased, as witnessed in the pogrom.

That’s because the race approach remains dominant.

Muslims need to educate themselves

The worst obstacle to getting Islamophobia addressed is Muslims themselves.

Muslim community leaders, who do not understand how Islamophobia works and have themselves been programmed to believe that Islamophobia equals racism, offer the government and policy makers nothing practical and workable to tackle true Islamophobia.

It’s institutional Islamophobia that impacts Muslims much more deeply. As they have no expectations from the public sector of being offered much-needed faith and culturally appropriate services, they do not understand that this lack of access to such services directly leads to their social exclusion. Instead, they have become used to seeing everything in "race" terms and accept the status quo.

The biggest blow to the struggle was the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on British Muslims definition of Islamophobia as a "form of racism" in 2017, which put back all the gains we had made and been widely accepted and promoted by Muslim politicians and leaders.

All our battles to decouple Islamophobia from racism were reversed with that definition.

Aftermath

In the aftermath of these most recent anti-Muslim riots, I fear that my country will fall back into the default position of only seeing minority communities as "racial" groups and treating us all as if we are all one homogenous group.

What this will mean is that if any action is taken by the government to identify and address the root causes of the riots, they will be looked at in terms of race. Islamophobia will be subsumed under colour racism and resolutions will not be substantive in their scope and strategies devised.

But churning out the same old race-based rhetoric and strategies that have failed British Muslims for decades isn't going to work.

I'm not hopeful that any practical institutional policies will be produced to tackle anti-Muslim hate in the places it manifests, including social media, political settings and institutions, allowing Muslims to become a vilified underclass.

But the Equality Act gives us the tools to address Islamophobia in the way we are treated and receive our services, we need to properly utilise it. We now have laws to address anti-Muslim hate crimes, but we must press the police and the Criminal Justice System to use them. This is an opportunity for change.

Decades ago, if we had undertaken the right steps to address Islamophobia and if we had invested in a dynamic Muslim civil society equipped to address our multi-faceted needs and able to expertly advocate for us – we might not have had the situation we are in now.