What do British Muslims really think?
What do British Muslims really think? | The Sunday Times Magazine | The Sunday Times
Should homosexuality be illegal? Should wives always obey their husbands? And can a man have more than one wife? The most comprehensive survey of British Muslims ever conducted reveals controversial attitudes. Trevor Phillips argues that the time has come for a more muscular approach to integration
As a doctrine of religious belief, Islam has never held any terrors for me. I was born in London but grew up in a developing country, now called Guyana, where one in 10 people worshipped Allah - roughly twice the proportion in Britain today. To me, the Muslims were just boys with names like Mohammed and Ishmael; in most things that mattered - could they play cricket or do calculus, for example - they seemed no different from the rest of us.
Liberal opinion in Britain has, for more than two decades, maintained that most Muslims are just like everyone else, but with more modest dress sense and more luxuriant facial hair; any differences would fade with time and contact. Britain desperately wants to think of its Muslims as versions of the Great British Bake Off winner Nadiya Hussain, or the cheeky-chappie athlete Mo Farah. But thanks to the most detailed and comprehensive survey of British Muslim opinion yet conducted, we now know that just isn’t how it is.
The survey of British Muslim opinion - What British Muslims Really Think - will be published in full by Channel 4 later this week. I was asked to examine the results and interpret them. When I was chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, I played a principal role in the creation of UK laws against religious discrimination - and it was a report that I commissioned exactly 20 years ago that first introduced the term Islamophobia to Britain.
I thought this latest exercise would be intriguing. In fact, it has turned out to be astonishing. The data collected by the respected research firm ICM shows what the polling experts call “a chasm” opening between Muslims and non-Muslims on such fundamentals as marriage, relations between men and women, schooling, freedom of expression and even the validity of violence in defence of religion. And the chasm isn’t going to disappear any time soon; indeed, the gaps between Muslim and non-Muslim youngsters are nearly as large as those between their elders.
The good news is that the new survey tells us that the majority of British Muslims probably do identify with Nadiya and Mo - albeit with some worrying exceptions. What British Muslims Really Think reveals a Britain we normally don’t hear from. Too often, this section of society is spoken for by self-styled community leaders, or interpreted by academic experts. What’s different about this survey is that it reveals British Muslims speaking for themselves.
To start with, the research was conducted in the old-fashioned way - face to face. The pollster, ICM, was determined to avoid the failures associated with phone and internet polls that led to the political miscalculations in both last year’s general election and the Scottish referendum. It also wanted to avoid the perils of “code-switching”: the all-too-human minority impulse to fit in, to shape your response to meet the expectations of the majority population and to disguise the answer that you think will be too disturbing for people from a different culture to hear. The ICM methodology makes this probably the most revealing inquiry into Muslim opinion yet conducted in this country.
Its findings are striking. And they provide the sternest test yet for diverse Britain’s moral agenda: do we still believe in diversity - even when it collides head-on with our national commitment to equality, between men and women, gay and straight, believers and non-believers? For many years we’ve dodged the tough questions, so this research makes for troubling reading. What it reveals is the unacknowledged creation of a nation within the nation, with its own geography, its own values and its own very separate future.
There are now nearly 3m Muslims living in Britain. Half of them were born abroad, and their numbers are being steadily reinforced by immigration from Africa, the Middle East, eastern Europe and the Far East, as well as the traditional flow from the Indian subcontinent. The best projections suggest that, by the middle of the century, the number of Muslims in Britain and elsewhere in Europe will at least double, given the youthfulness of the communities.
More than eight in 10 Muslims say that they are happy living here, and feel British. Their preoccupations aren’t that different from most people’s: family life, their children ’s future, economic security. But Muslims also prize the British way of life for a reason increasingly unimportant to non-Muslims: freedom to practise their religion any way they see fit. In the Indian subcontinent, Muslims are subject to Hindu persecution. In Nigeria, north Africa and the Middle East, the brutal Islamists of Boko Haram, Isis and al-Qaeda make the slightest deviation a potential suicide mission.
As a young stand-up comic, Aatif Nawaz, told me: “It’s a privilege to live in a country like the UK, which lets us practise our belief. I firmly take this as a privilege. We’re free to go to the mosque, we can pray, we can dress the way we want. We’ve got halal food pretty much everywhere in the UK now - what a time to be alive!”
But while Muslims clearly like Britain, many are not as enthusiastic about their non-Muslim compatriots. Levels of intermarriage are extremely low compared with other minorities: according to the ONS, fewer than one in 10 Muslim Britons of Pakistani or Bangladeshi heritage are in inter-ethnic relationships. (Whereas more than four in 10 African-Caribbeans are in a mixed relationship.) Even fewer relationships between Muslims and non-Muslims produce children - just 3% of Pakistani or Bangladeshi-heritage children live in mixed households. According to ICM, more than half mix with non-Muslims daily, probably at work or college - but 30% never translate that into a friendship that would take them into a non-Muslim’s house more than once a year. One in five never enter a non-Muslim home.
I have some sympathy for this apparent standoffishness. This isn’t always a deliberate policy of self-segregation. As a child, I had some friends whose homes were effectively barred to me - kids I’d played football with all day would be bustled inside at tea time with no invitation to cross the threshold. One of my sisters discovered that her “best” friend had somehow forgotten to invite her to her 17th birthday party. But the separation here isn’t just down to white bigotry. It’s also a consequence of the entrenched residential segregation of which I warned over a decade ago, when I spoke of Britain “sleepwalking to segregation”. Today, according to Policy Exchange’s David Goodhart, author of The British Dream, more than half of ethnic-minority children attend schools where white British children are in the minority.
The social costs are still to be reckoned. Anjum Anwar cuts an unlikely figure when we meet her in Blackburn Cathedral, in an elegant dark suit and close-fitting headscarf. But she is a key figure in the local effort to shed the town’s unenviable status as one of Britain’s most segregated towns. She told us that the Muslim population, now approaching 30%, barely mixed with whites.
“There are certain areas that are wholly Asian, others wholly white. So if you have a child who’s attending a school in an area that is predominantly Asian, where would that child meet children and people of other faiths? They’re restricted, aren’t they? So you have a child who goes to school from nine o’clock till about four o’clock, then he will go to mosque maybe, and then Monday to Friday he is in that area. So where would an Asian and a white child actually meet?”
It’s not as though we couldn’t have seen this coming. But we’ve repeatedly failed to spot the warning signs. Twenty years ago, when, as chair of the Runnymede Trust, I published the report titled Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All, we thought that the real risk of the arrival of new communities was discrimination against Muslims. Our 1996 survey of recent incidents showed that there was plenty of it around. But we got almost everything else wrong. We estimated that the Muslim population of the UK would be approaching 2m by 2020. We underestimated by nearly a million. We predicted that the most lethal threat to Muslims would come from racial attacks and social exclusion. We completely failed to foresee the urban conflicts of 2001 that ravaged our northern cities. And of course we didn’t dream of 9/11 and the atrocities in Madrid, Paris, Istanbul, Brussels and London.
For a long time, I too thought that Europe’s Muslims would become like previous waves of migrants, gradually abandoning their ancestral ways, wearing their religious and cultural baggage lightly, and gradually blending into Britain’s diverse identity landscape. I should have known better.
Just months after I had taken over as head of the Commission for Racial Equality in 2003, I visited the town of Oldham, where some one in five of the population are British Muslims. Two years earlier the town had been torn apart by some of the worst race riots Britain had seen in my lifetime. An official government report had spoken of white and Asian communities living “parallel lives”. It couldn’t really be as bad as that, I thought. In fact, it was worse. Speaking to a hall of more than 200 students, one thing was immediately obvious: groups of white and Asian students sat in the same hall - but the groups didn’t mix. It was like looking at a living chess board. And to drive it home, one of the white students made no bones about what was going on. He told me, without rancour or aggression: “When we’re here it’s fine, we get on. But when we leave here on Friday, we won’t see them [Asians] until Monday.” No one dissented.
After the northern riots of 2001, wise heads, such as Professor Ted Cantle, who had written the “parallel lives” report, warned that we could not afford to allow things to drift. But not even Cantle - much less me - foresaw just how divisive the consequences of this kind of segregation would become. Today, we can see that on certain key issues Britain is nurturing communities with a complete set of alternative values. None is more alarming than attitudes towards women.
The contempt for white girls among some Muslim men has been highlighted by the recent scandals in Rotherham, Oxford, Rochdale and other towns. But this merely reflects a deeply ingrained sexism that runs through Britain’s Muslim communities.
Most people think that some Muslim men’s attitudes to women may be a little antediluvian. But it comes as a shock to hear a respected Asian head teacher, Noshaba Hussain, soberly recount the behaviour of small boys in her school - which they had surely picked up from the men in their families.
“The boys used to act as thought police. You know, they would go around and actually hit the girls on their heads if their heads weren’t covered. I even had one boy, one nine-year-old boy, say to me, ‘Why haven’t you covered your head? It is only slags who don’t cover their head.’ ”
The ICM survey provides a torrent of data that backs up the impression that this is a community whose idea of women’s equality lies eons away from the mainstream. Two out of five Muslims - men and women - say they believe that a woman should always obey her husband. Nusrat, a highly intelligent and scholarly student, Sudanese in origin, told me: “If the husband is saying ‘obey’ in the context of asking me to do things that are pleasing to Allah, then by all means, because ultimately my faith teaches me - and teaches many Muslims - that our duty is to Allah first.”
We didn’t get to discuss whether the injunction at sura 4:34 of the Koran to chastise your wife falls under this rubric. I have no doubt that many husbands will claim that it does. The bland Koranic platitude, in my view, hides a clear invitation to legitimise domestic violence.
One in three British Muslims supports the right of a man to have more than one wife, even though it is illegal in the UK. While the support for such a policy is strongest among older Muslims, they are nearly matched in their enthusiasm for polygamy by young Muslims aged 18 to 24. Such unions, of course, would be recognised by sharia law. Amra, a female sharia court judge, says: “In my experience, it’s not men who have demanded it; it’s women. I personally have met women who have said to me, ‘I do not want a full-time husband. I don’t want him under my feet.’ For a man it’s a huge responsibility. For a woman it’s a privilege. ”
The ever-pragmatic Nusrat chimed into our conversation with some advice for the aspirant bigamist: “You have to make sure that you are actually treating your wives in a fair way. I think even Islam says, that even within the Koran, if you have more than one wife, if you can’t do justice to them, don’t have them at all. So you have to actually make sure that you are doing justice by them.”
More than half of the sample reported that they believe that homosexuality should be illegal. Even more opposed gay marriage, and nearly half thought that it was unacceptable for a gay person to teach their children. A quarter supported the introduction of sharia law in parts of the UK - presumably those areas where they thought Muslims constitute a majority - instead of the common statute laid down by parliament. Allah’s law, apparently, need take no heed of democracy.
It should come as no surprise that Muslim liberals are in despair. They knew all of this long ago. And unlike the political elite and the liberal media, they recognise that British Muslim opinion is hardening against them. The journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, who has had to seek police protection because of her liberal views, argues that the optimistic belief that time and social contact will naturally lead to the integration of Muslims is mistaken: “You know, we [liberal Muslims] are a dying breed - in 10 years there will be very few of us left unless something really important is done.”
The results of the Channel 4 survey are hard to argue with. While the majority of Muslims are keen on Britain, a significant minority really would prefer to live their own lives further away from the rest of us. Non-Muslims who live and work in areas with a large Muslim presence have been uneasily aware of the emerging differences for a long time, but many are too worried about being tagged as Islamophobes to raise the debate.
Many people, however, are just unaware. Not long ago, I had an exchange with a leading newspaper columnist who airily assured me that he had many Muslim friends, and that they were integrating just as his Irish Catholic forebears did a couple of generations ago. He could not accept that his own circle of acquaintances - probably doctors, lawyers, journalists - might not be typical of the British Muslim experience.
The problem with Britain’s liberal white elite is twofold. First, they find it hard to grasp that people of colour may not want to reveal their true selves to people who do not share their backgrounds. The fact is that most people of colour are raised to expect that white folks will let them down. And to be frank, most black and Asian Britons will tell you that their expectations are seldom confounded.
Second, Britain’s increasingly deracinated opinion-forming classes are puzzled by the fierce attachment to religion among ethnic minorities. The number of places of worship attended mostly by Muslims and black evangelicals is rising. The fact that Britain’s ethnic minorities are intensely committed to their religious beliefs and practices seems baffling to secular liberals - indeed, somewhat threatening. Some of my journalist friends imagine that, with time, the Muslims will grow out of it. They won’t.
“What I eat is according to my sharia, how I pray is according to my sharia, how I dress is according to my sharia, how I treat the stranger and family members is according to sharia,” says Anjum Anwar. “I think people misunderstand the concept of sharia law. Their only thinking is, uh-oh, once you’ve got the sharia you’ll be chopping heads off and hands off. That is not the case.”
She’s saying to faithless modern hipsters that she isn’t going to give it up. Anwar spends her time actively working to promote integration. But for her that doesn’t mean adoption of non-Muslim ways. The chasm discovered by ICM isn’t going to close any time soon.
Little of this will surprise Britain’s Muslims, even if many would rather it were not said in public. In our northern cities, many of the non-Muslims I’ve met will also recognise the picture we are painting. It won’t be easy to change. Britain’s Muslims are a diverse group; but, rich or poor, British-born or not, most have a deep commitment to their faith. Many are distressed by what they see as white Britain’s increasing secularism, low morals and loss of confidence in many of its own values. Those who told ICM’s researchers that they would prefer to live a more separate life in Britain are sending a clear signal: they really don’t want to adopt much of our decadent way of life.
Oddly, the biggest obstacles we now face in addressing the growth of this nation-within-a-nation are not created by British Muslims themselves. Many of our (distinctly un-diverse) elite political and media classes simply refuse to acknowledge the truth. Any undesirable behaviours are attributed to poverty and alienation. Backing for violent extremism must be the fault of the Americans. Oppression of women is a cultural trait that will fade with time, nothing to do with the true face of Islam.
Even when confronted with the growing pile of evidence to the contrary, and the angst of the liberal minority of British Muslims, clever, important people still cling to the patronising certainty that British Muslims will, over time, come to see that “our” ways are better. And since there are so few Muslims in the corridors of power, they seldom run into anyone who can show them the reality. Those who do want to make a difference are often consumed by fear that they will be seen as prejudiced. So while our liberal elite wrings its hands in anguish and makes school children celebrate Eid, Diwali, Hanukkah - and Easter - hundreds of young people are being seduced to join Islamist fanatics abroad, thousands of young girls are shipped off to have their genitals mutilated, and many more are pressured into marriages they do not want.
I passionately believe that our society is one of the most open and adaptable on Earth. For centuries we have managed to absorb people of many different backgrounds; Britain has changed them and they have changed us, both almost always for the better. But the integration of Muslims will probably be the hardest task we’ve ever faced. It will mean abandoning the milk-and-water multiculturalism still so beloved of many, and adopting a far more muscular approach to integration.
We’ve been here before. When I was head of the equalities commission, it never occurred to me that we should not take action where people claimed their cultural sensitivities required them to discriminate - for example, the Islington registrar who refused to sanction civil partnerships, or the Bristol relationship counsellor sacked for refusing to give advice to gay couples. Both these individuals were black, like me, and cited their profoundly held religious beliefs in defence of their actions. I understood their background, as I share much of it. But my respect for their sincerity did not for a second deter me from opposing what they did.
While many of us are comfortable condemning less numerous and less powerful minorities, we are reluctant to speak clearly when it comes to Muslims. I know that the muscular integration I want to see will be difficult to implement.
It will mean halting the growth of sharia courts and placing them under regulation, even perhaps insisting that they sit in public. It will mean ensuring that, whatever the composition of a school, its governance never falls into the hands of a single-minority group, as in the “Trojan horse” episode in Birmingham.
It will also mean ensuring mosques that receive a steady flow of funds from foreign governments such as Saudi Arabia, however disguised, are forced to reduce their dependency on Wahhabi patronage. And it will mean an end to the silence-for-votes understanding between local politicians and Muslim leaders - the sort of Pontius Pilate deal that had such catastrophic outcomes in Rotherham and Rochdale.
If we really want to create a society in which Muslims and non-Muslims share the burdens and benefits of our democracy, we have a lot of work to do. And that work has to begin by listening to, and hearing, what British Muslims really think, working out how to support them where possible - and deciding how to confront their thinking where it collides with our fundamental values.
Should homosexuality be illegal? Should wives always obey their husbands? And can a man have more than one wife? The most comprehensive survey of British Muslims ever conducted reveals controversial attitudes. Trevor Phillips argues that the time has come for a more muscular approach to integration
As a doctrine of religious belief, Islam has never held any terrors for me. I was born in London but grew up in a developing country, now called Guyana, where one in 10 people worshipped Allah - roughly twice the proportion in Britain today. To me, the Muslims were just boys with names like Mohammed and Ishmael; in most things that mattered - could they play cricket or do calculus, for example - they seemed no different from the rest of us.
Liberal opinion in Britain has, for more than two decades, maintained that most Muslims are just like everyone else, but with more modest dress sense and more luxuriant facial hair; any differences would fade with time and contact. Britain desperately wants to think of its Muslims as versions of the Great British Bake Off winner Nadiya Hussain, or the cheeky-chappie athlete Mo Farah. But thanks to the most detailed and comprehensive survey of British Muslim opinion yet conducted, we now know that just isn’t how it is.
The survey of British Muslim opinion - What British Muslims Really Think - will be published in full by Channel 4 later this week. I was asked to examine the results and interpret them. When I was chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, I played a principal role in the creation of UK laws against religious discrimination - and it was a report that I commissioned exactly 20 years ago that first introduced the term Islamophobia to Britain.
I thought this latest exercise would be intriguing. In fact, it has turned out to be astonishing. The data collected by the respected research firm ICM shows what the polling experts call “a chasm” opening between Muslims and non-Muslims on such fundamentals as marriage, relations between men and women, schooling, freedom of expression and even the validity of violence in defence of religion. And the chasm isn’t going to disappear any time soon; indeed, the gaps between Muslim and non-Muslim youngsters are nearly as large as those between their elders.
The good news is that the new survey tells us that the majority of British Muslims probably do identify with Nadiya and Mo - albeit with some worrying exceptions. What British Muslims Really Think reveals a Britain we normally don’t hear from. Too often, this section of society is spoken for by self-styled community leaders, or interpreted by academic experts. What’s different about this survey is that it reveals British Muslims speaking for themselves.
To start with, the research was conducted in the old-fashioned way - face to face. The pollster, ICM, was determined to avoid the failures associated with phone and internet polls that led to the political miscalculations in both last year’s general election and the Scottish referendum. It also wanted to avoid the perils of “code-switching”: the all-too-human minority impulse to fit in, to shape your response to meet the expectations of the majority population and to disguise the answer that you think will be too disturbing for people from a different culture to hear. The ICM methodology makes this probably the most revealing inquiry into Muslim opinion yet conducted in this country.
Its findings are striking. And they provide the sternest test yet for diverse Britain’s moral agenda: do we still believe in diversity - even when it collides head-on with our national commitment to equality, between men and women, gay and straight, believers and non-believers? For many years we’ve dodged the tough questions, so this research makes for troubling reading. What it reveals is the unacknowledged creation of a nation within the nation, with its own geography, its own values and its own very separate future.
There are now nearly 3m Muslims living in Britain. Half of them were born abroad, and their numbers are being steadily reinforced by immigration from Africa, the Middle East, eastern Europe and the Far East, as well as the traditional flow from the Indian subcontinent. The best projections suggest that, by the middle of the century, the number of Muslims in Britain and elsewhere in Europe will at least double, given the youthfulness of the communities.
More than eight in 10 Muslims say that they are happy living here, and feel British. Their preoccupations aren’t that different from most people’s: family life, their children ’s future, economic security. But Muslims also prize the British way of life for a reason increasingly unimportant to non-Muslims: freedom to practise their religion any way they see fit. In the Indian subcontinent, Muslims are subject to Hindu persecution. In Nigeria, north Africa and the Middle East, the brutal Islamists of Boko Haram, Isis and al-Qaeda make the slightest deviation a potential suicide mission.
As a young stand-up comic, Aatif Nawaz, told me: “It’s a privilege to live in a country like the UK, which lets us practise our belief. I firmly take this as a privilege. We’re free to go to the mosque, we can pray, we can dress the way we want. We’ve got halal food pretty much everywhere in the UK now - what a time to be alive!”
But while Muslims clearly like Britain, many are not as enthusiastic about their non-Muslim compatriots. Levels of intermarriage are extremely low compared with other minorities: according to the ONS, fewer than one in 10 Muslim Britons of Pakistani or Bangladeshi heritage are in inter-ethnic relationships. (Whereas more than four in 10 African-Caribbeans are in a mixed relationship.) Even fewer relationships between Muslims and non-Muslims produce children - just 3% of Pakistani or Bangladeshi-heritage children live in mixed households. According to ICM, more than half mix with non-Muslims daily, probably at work or college - but 30% never translate that into a friendship that would take them into a non-Muslim’s house more than once a year. One in five never enter a non-Muslim home.
I have some sympathy for this apparent standoffishness. This isn’t always a deliberate policy of self-segregation. As a child, I had some friends whose homes were effectively barred to me - kids I’d played football with all day would be bustled inside at tea time with no invitation to cross the threshold. One of my sisters discovered that her “best” friend had somehow forgotten to invite her to her 17th birthday party. But the separation here isn’t just down to white bigotry. It’s also a consequence of the entrenched residential segregation of which I warned over a decade ago, when I spoke of Britain “sleepwalking to segregation”. Today, according to Policy Exchange’s David Goodhart, author of The British Dream, more than half of ethnic-minority children attend schools where white British children are in the minority.
The social costs are still to be reckoned. Anjum Anwar cuts an unlikely figure when we meet her in Blackburn Cathedral, in an elegant dark suit and close-fitting headscarf. But she is a key figure in the local effort to shed the town’s unenviable status as one of Britain’s most segregated towns. She told us that the Muslim population, now approaching 30%, barely mixed with whites.
“There are certain areas that are wholly Asian, others wholly white. So if you have a child who’s attending a school in an area that is predominantly Asian, where would that child meet children and people of other faiths? They’re restricted, aren’t they? So you have a child who goes to school from nine o’clock till about four o’clock, then he will go to mosque maybe, and then Monday to Friday he is in that area. So where would an Asian and a white child actually meet?”
It’s not as though we couldn’t have seen this coming. But we’ve repeatedly failed to spot the warning signs. Twenty years ago, when, as chair of the Runnymede Trust, I published the report titled Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All, we thought that the real risk of the arrival of new communities was discrimination against Muslims. Our 1996 survey of recent incidents showed that there was plenty of it around. But we got almost everything else wrong. We estimated that the Muslim population of the UK would be approaching 2m by 2020. We underestimated by nearly a million. We predicted that the most lethal threat to Muslims would come from racial attacks and social exclusion. We completely failed to foresee the urban conflicts of 2001 that ravaged our northern cities. And of course we didn’t dream of 9/11 and the atrocities in Madrid, Paris, Istanbul, Brussels and London.
For a long time, I too thought that Europe’s Muslims would become like previous waves of migrants, gradually abandoning their ancestral ways, wearing their religious and cultural baggage lightly, and gradually blending into Britain’s diverse identity landscape. I should have known better.
Just months after I had taken over as head of the Commission for Racial Equality in 2003, I visited the town of Oldham, where some one in five of the population are British Muslims. Two years earlier the town had been torn apart by some of the worst race riots Britain had seen in my lifetime. An official government report had spoken of white and Asian communities living “parallel lives”. It couldn’t really be as bad as that, I thought. In fact, it was worse. Speaking to a hall of more than 200 students, one thing was immediately obvious: groups of white and Asian students sat in the same hall - but the groups didn’t mix. It was like looking at a living chess board. And to drive it home, one of the white students made no bones about what was going on. He told me, without rancour or aggression: “When we’re here it’s fine, we get on. But when we leave here on Friday, we won’t see them [Asians] until Monday.” No one dissented.
After the northern riots of 2001, wise heads, such as Professor Ted Cantle, who had written the “parallel lives” report, warned that we could not afford to allow things to drift. But not even Cantle - much less me - foresaw just how divisive the consequences of this kind of segregation would become. Today, we can see that on certain key issues Britain is nurturing communities with a complete set of alternative values. None is more alarming than attitudes towards women.
The contempt for white girls among some Muslim men has been highlighted by the recent scandals in Rotherham, Oxford, Rochdale and other towns. But this merely reflects a deeply ingrained sexism that runs through Britain’s Muslim communities.
Most people think that some Muslim men’s attitudes to women may be a little antediluvian. But it comes as a shock to hear a respected Asian head teacher, Noshaba Hussain, soberly recount the behaviour of small boys in her school - which they had surely picked up from the men in their families.
“The boys used to act as thought police. You know, they would go around and actually hit the girls on their heads if their heads weren’t covered. I even had one boy, one nine-year-old boy, say to me, ‘Why haven’t you covered your head? It is only slags who don’t cover their head.’ ”
The ICM survey provides a torrent of data that backs up the impression that this is a community whose idea of women’s equality lies eons away from the mainstream. Two out of five Muslims - men and women - say they believe that a woman should always obey her husband. Nusrat, a highly intelligent and scholarly student, Sudanese in origin, told me: “If the husband is saying ‘obey’ in the context of asking me to do things that are pleasing to Allah, then by all means, because ultimately my faith teaches me - and teaches many Muslims - that our duty is to Allah first.”
We didn’t get to discuss whether the injunction at sura 4:34 of the Koran to chastise your wife falls under this rubric. I have no doubt that many husbands will claim that it does. The bland Koranic platitude, in my view, hides a clear invitation to legitimise domestic violence.
One in three British Muslims supports the right of a man to have more than one wife, even though it is illegal in the UK. While the support for such a policy is strongest among older Muslims, they are nearly matched in their enthusiasm for polygamy by young Muslims aged 18 to 24. Such unions, of course, would be recognised by sharia law. Amra, a female sharia court judge, says: “In my experience, it’s not men who have demanded it; it’s women. I personally have met women who have said to me, ‘I do not want a full-time husband. I don’t want him under my feet.’ For a man it’s a huge responsibility. For a woman it’s a privilege. ”
The ever-pragmatic Nusrat chimed into our conversation with some advice for the aspirant bigamist: “You have to make sure that you are actually treating your wives in a fair way. I think even Islam says, that even within the Koran, if you have more than one wife, if you can’t do justice to them, don’t have them at all. So you have to actually make sure that you are doing justice by them.”
More than half of the sample reported that they believe that homosexuality should be illegal. Even more opposed gay marriage, and nearly half thought that it was unacceptable for a gay person to teach their children. A quarter supported the introduction of sharia law in parts of the UK - presumably those areas where they thought Muslims constitute a majority - instead of the common statute laid down by parliament. Allah’s law, apparently, need take no heed of democracy.
It should come as no surprise that Muslim liberals are in despair. They knew all of this long ago. And unlike the political elite and the liberal media, they recognise that British Muslim opinion is hardening against them. The journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, who has had to seek police protection because of her liberal views, argues that the optimistic belief that time and social contact will naturally lead to the integration of Muslims is mistaken: “You know, we [liberal Muslims] are a dying breed - in 10 years there will be very few of us left unless something really important is done.”
The results of the Channel 4 survey are hard to argue with. While the majority of Muslims are keen on Britain, a significant minority really would prefer to live their own lives further away from the rest of us. Non-Muslims who live and work in areas with a large Muslim presence have been uneasily aware of the emerging differences for a long time, but many are too worried about being tagged as Islamophobes to raise the debate.
Many people, however, are just unaware. Not long ago, I had an exchange with a leading newspaper columnist who airily assured me that he had many Muslim friends, and that they were integrating just as his Irish Catholic forebears did a couple of generations ago. He could not accept that his own circle of acquaintances - probably doctors, lawyers, journalists - might not be typical of the British Muslim experience.
The problem with Britain’s liberal white elite is twofold. First, they find it hard to grasp that people of colour may not want to reveal their true selves to people who do not share their backgrounds. The fact is that most people of colour are raised to expect that white folks will let them down. And to be frank, most black and Asian Britons will tell you that their expectations are seldom confounded.
Second, Britain’s increasingly deracinated opinion-forming classes are puzzled by the fierce attachment to religion among ethnic minorities. The number of places of worship attended mostly by Muslims and black evangelicals is rising. The fact that Britain’s ethnic minorities are intensely committed to their religious beliefs and practices seems baffling to secular liberals - indeed, somewhat threatening. Some of my journalist friends imagine that, with time, the Muslims will grow out of it. They won’t.
“What I eat is according to my sharia, how I pray is according to my sharia, how I dress is according to my sharia, how I treat the stranger and family members is according to sharia,” says Anjum Anwar. “I think people misunderstand the concept of sharia law. Their only thinking is, uh-oh, once you’ve got the sharia you’ll be chopping heads off and hands off. That is not the case.”
She’s saying to faithless modern hipsters that she isn’t going to give it up. Anwar spends her time actively working to promote integration. But for her that doesn’t mean adoption of non-Muslim ways. The chasm discovered by ICM isn’t going to close any time soon.
Little of this will surprise Britain’s Muslims, even if many would rather it were not said in public. In our northern cities, many of the non-Muslims I’ve met will also recognise the picture we are painting. It won’t be easy to change. Britain’s Muslims are a diverse group; but, rich or poor, British-born or not, most have a deep commitment to their faith. Many are distressed by what they see as white Britain’s increasing secularism, low morals and loss of confidence in many of its own values. Those who told ICM’s researchers that they would prefer to live a more separate life in Britain are sending a clear signal: they really don’t want to adopt much of our decadent way of life.
Oddly, the biggest obstacles we now face in addressing the growth of this nation-within-a-nation are not created by British Muslims themselves. Many of our (distinctly un-diverse) elite political and media classes simply refuse to acknowledge the truth. Any undesirable behaviours are attributed to poverty and alienation. Backing for violent extremism must be the fault of the Americans. Oppression of women is a cultural trait that will fade with time, nothing to do with the true face of Islam.
Even when confronted with the growing pile of evidence to the contrary, and the angst of the liberal minority of British Muslims, clever, important people still cling to the patronising certainty that British Muslims will, over time, come to see that “our” ways are better. And since there are so few Muslims in the corridors of power, they seldom run into anyone who can show them the reality. Those who do want to make a difference are often consumed by fear that they will be seen as prejudiced. So while our liberal elite wrings its hands in anguish and makes school children celebrate Eid, Diwali, Hanukkah - and Easter - hundreds of young people are being seduced to join Islamist fanatics abroad, thousands of young girls are shipped off to have their genitals mutilated, and many more are pressured into marriages they do not want.
I passionately believe that our society is one of the most open and adaptable on Earth. For centuries we have managed to absorb people of many different backgrounds; Britain has changed them and they have changed us, both almost always for the better. But the integration of Muslims will probably be the hardest task we’ve ever faced. It will mean abandoning the milk-and-water multiculturalism still so beloved of many, and adopting a far more muscular approach to integration.
We’ve been here before. When I was head of the equalities commission, it never occurred to me that we should not take action where people claimed their cultural sensitivities required them to discriminate - for example, the Islington registrar who refused to sanction civil partnerships, or the Bristol relationship counsellor sacked for refusing to give advice to gay couples. Both these individuals were black, like me, and cited their profoundly held religious beliefs in defence of their actions. I understood their background, as I share much of it. But my respect for their sincerity did not for a second deter me from opposing what they did.
While many of us are comfortable condemning less numerous and less powerful minorities, we are reluctant to speak clearly when it comes to Muslims. I know that the muscular integration I want to see will be difficult to implement.
It will mean halting the growth of sharia courts and placing them under regulation, even perhaps insisting that they sit in public. It will mean ensuring that, whatever the composition of a school, its governance never falls into the hands of a single-minority group, as in the “Trojan horse” episode in Birmingham.
It will also mean ensuring mosques that receive a steady flow of funds from foreign governments such as Saudi Arabia, however disguised, are forced to reduce their dependency on Wahhabi patronage. And it will mean an end to the silence-for-votes understanding between local politicians and Muslim leaders - the sort of Pontius Pilate deal that had such catastrophic outcomes in Rotherham and Rochdale.
If we really want to create a society in which Muslims and non-Muslims share the burdens and benefits of our democracy, we have a lot of work to do. And that work has to begin by listening to, and hearing, what British Muslims really think, working out how to support them where possible - and deciding how to confront their thinking where it collides with our fundamental values.