Muslims and scholars have been working the last few years to understand just what it means to be British and Muslim.
In a series of five symposia they met to tackle specific issues affecting the various Muslim communities today in the United Kingdom — issues of gender and sexuality and securality as well as others.
The meetings were part of the “Contextualising Islam in Britian” project. It was organized by Cambridge University.
Professor Yasir Suleiman, His Majesty Sultan Qaboos Bin Sa’id Professor of Modern Arabic Studies and fellow of King’s College, took the lead on the project. He says one of the first things he did, when he knew the project would actually happen, was to begin inviting people to take part.
“We wanted the rainbow colors of Islam to come to this project,” he says.
Suleiman spoke about the project during a recent visit to Indiana University.
Suleiman says including the “rainbow colros of Islam” in the project was important for several reasons — the group who examined Muslim experience in Britain needed to represent the broad spectrum of Muslim life in the UK, Suleiman says.
And he says he felt it was necessary to invite people who weren’t necessarily going to see “eye to eye” on every subject.
“As a linguist I am most concerned with gaps,” Suleiman says. “When faced with a gap we can have a good conversation.”
And there were gaps among the participants, gaps that helped create engaging and important debate. He says those gaps began to disappear the more they worked together.
But bringing those attendees together was a bit of a Herculean task.
“Contextualising Islam in Britain” is funded by the British government and is part of the Prevent program. Prevent is designed to combat Muslim extremism and radicalization.
This, Suleiman says, made it suspect in the eyes of many.
“You need to be careful,” he says of working on any project with government funding.
In the case of this particular project that was especially so because of the linkage to Prevent.
“We were seen to be a threat to the secularity of society,” Suleiman says of the way Muslims have been viewed in the UK. He adds, “Muslims resent being treated as a security threat.”
With that framing as a threat — to both security and secularity — in mind, the “Contextualising Islam” group began working to understand Muslim experience in the UK. The group explored what Muslims could do to become more a part of British society as well as what the government could do to make Muslims feel more at home.
The group decided the government needed to create an “equidistant” relationship with all religions in the UK — a kind of “pragmatic” or “procedural secularism” that creates a neutral field for all religions to engage upon.
“We should not do what the French do,” Suleiman says of secularism. Instead, British society needs to find a middle path that allows for religious difference and that does not exclude some religions while including others.
Suleiman adds that Muslims, and members of other faiths, should have the freedom to politically organize around their religion and should feel free to be vocal in their disagreement with government policies.
That disagreement, the group decided, should never lead to violence. Muslims who want to participate in violent acts against their government should renounce their citizenship and leave the UK.
Suleiman says the group also looked at Muslims’ relationship to shari’a. The group hopes to encourage Muslims to focus more fully on the objectives of shari’a as opposed to the letter of the law.
“Shari’a is meant to provide you with a guide to a moral path of living,” Suleiman says. The group hoped to encourage Muslims to examine more closely the universal values within the shari’a — the values that cut across religions, cultures and societies.
When the British government changed hands, and funding cuts were being made, there were worries over whether “Contextualising Islam” would continue.
But Suleiman made his case and kept his funding. So, the project continues.
When he first began recruiting people to take part only 12 people said yes. By the end of the first round of the project 24 people were on board. Suleiman says when he began putting together symposia participant lists this time around he had to turn people away.
That’s not to say the opposition to the project has gone away.
“Some call it a soft sale of Islam to Muslims in a way that is agreeable to the British government,” Suleiman says.
Others, he says, still have issues with the project being government funded.
“These people sold their soul to the Devil,” Suleiman says is sometimes how project participants are characterized.
But “Contextualising Islam” is building more credibility as it becomes better known.
Suleiman says they’ll be publishing several reports based upon this second round of the project: Reports for government, for the Muslim community as well as reports to use as outreach tools.