Tag: Identity

The Times, amongst other newspapers, reported recently on some research conducted to gauge the public mood towards feeling 'British':

Research to be published this week argues that as the white population fragments into English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish identities, Asians and blacks are more likely to see themselves as British first.

The study, by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), a think tank close to Labour, quotes research finding that 51% of ethnic minority Britons describe themselves as British, compared with 29% of whites.

By contrast, 52% of whites describe themselves as primarily belonging to one of the United Kingdom’s four constituent nations, compared with just 11% of blacks and Asians.

The report suggests that, while Englishness and Scottishness are seen by minority groups as primarily ethnic terms, Britain, its flag and institutions are perceived as more neutral.

The IPPR argues that the contrast is greatest in England and points to “a growing divide between those who prefer English or British national identity”.

In the West, Islamic Religiosity believes that it must offer a political vision. This is an idea perpetuated not just by the politicos but also traditionalists like Abdal Hakim Murad. This explains why even sophisticated DC Muslims are waiting for the "third way." (Beyond Democrat and Republican; Beyond Labor and Tory). Keep waiting, guys. Need I remind you Nader lost? Need I remind you Galloway is, and always will be, just an MP?

This phenomenon occurs in the Muslim world as well, in a slightly different form, as pointed out by Sami Zubeidah in this article:

Islamic religiosity, under current conditions, almost invariably entails an ideological vision.

He's saying that in the Muslim world people think that Islam is a political force as well.

Note, please note, that my observation has to do with Muslims in the West. Zubeidah's observation has to do with Muslims in the Muslim world. We need to be more emphatic in making this distinction; not because the West and Muslim world are in a clash, but because Muslim people in the West live in pluralist and democratic societies; while Muslim people in the Muslim world live in homogenous and non-democratic societies. Those Muslim nations which are pluralist and democratic, do not have Muslims who try to assert Islam as a political force (Malaysia).

You know, when this site started out, we aimed to cover Islam globally. We still plan on doing that. However, this should not mean that I believe (I certainly don't), that how I think Muslims should organize themselves in America and UK is going to be in any way similar to how Muslims should organize themselves in dictatorial countries which 99% of the people are Muslim. More importantly, Muslims in the West need to realize that we are not going to be able to organize ourselves here the way Muslims in Muslim majority parts of the world do. Muslim in Muslim majority parts of the world can afford to sit there and try and fashion a "Muslim" political theory. We in the West need not do the same, and then try to convince DC think tanks to buy into the "Islamic vision of social justice." All we need to do is "social justice" and the only time we should assert its Islamic basis is when we're at the mosque.

This doesn't mean you shouldn't be proud of being a Muslim. One should take pride in having ethics. However, next time you want to chest thump about introducing "Islamic concepts" into "the politics of the de-spiritualized West", ask if you see any Christians doing the same. They don't. And the ones that do: everyone calls them nutjobs, hicks, or Christofascists. Ultimately, in a pluralist society, trying to get people to give a shout out to your religion just because it happens to share a vision of a just society with the mainstream discourse, does nothing more than affirm your identity. It is not an act of sovereignty. It is nothing more than empty pride. 

It is well known by now that the overall state of Islam as a world religion and the people who follow the religion, the Muslims, are often misunderstood, misappropriated and/or misrepresented in the Media. This occurs as a result of many factors not just bigotry and journalistic incompetence but a genuine lack of knowledge. Time and time again we see Muslims being lumped into one big homogeneous group and its rank of dissenters (i.e. terrorists), but are Muslims really a homogeneous group?

On the contrary Muslims are and have been a pluralist society rich with varying degrees of opinion and interests. And in order for there to be some success in the near future an overall understanding of Muslims as a global community must extend beyond religious and cultural superficiality. This is where the problem lies, in assumptions about superficiality (religion and culture) - superficial not to belittle the importance of religion or culture but to suggest that perhaps more than race, religion and a persons position on the war should be considered when defining Muslim identity - as if race, religion and politics were the extent of the Muslim community’s depth.

Promoted to the frontpage with emphatic eagerness by Ali Eteraz 

I don't usually walk around telling people I'm Muslim, not unless it comes up. 

In general, I blend in.  Generally, you will find me sporting a pair of jeans and a t-shirt.  My hair is usually up high in a pony tail and rarely do I wear make-up - well, I used to wear it often, but haven't been doing so lately.  Unless you have asked me what Santa is bringing me for Christmas, chances are you'd never know I was Muslim.

Unless of course you happened to be inside the mosque, where I would be wearing long sleaves and a scarf.  I'm a lilly chameleon.

In a recent piece for the Guardian's "Comment is Free", Brian Whitaker writes about Egypt's new tool to oppress religious minorities: idiot computers.

You heard that right--from now on, the computer database in which each citizen's religious affiliation is recorded (reporting this affiliation is mandatory and appears on one's national ID card) will only recognize the three Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. A suit lodged against the government in protest by a family of Egyptian Baha'is was recently denied. (For the full story, see The Arabist--which by the by is a great source of alternative news on Egyptian and Middle Eastern politics, spearheaded by some of my old colleagues from Cairo Magazine.) 

The Egyptian government's rather manic relationship with religious labeling is something that everyone living here has a story about; being mislabeled can have either comical or disasterous results. You cannot choose not to be labeled--religion is mandatory. I remember vividly the first time I put 'Muslim' next to my name on an official form; it was for work papers I had to fill out shortly after I moved to the country. The act brought relief and fear at once: there it was, the faith I had adopted, in print next to my name. There was no turning back.  Or so I thought.

To my shock, when the processed forms were given back to me, I had been labeled 'Christian'. When I pointed out the mistake, the clerk who had processed my forms laughed in a kindly but patronizing manner--I couldn't just choose my religion. If I wanted to become a real Muslim, I had to register my conversion with the state. Until then, I, like all European and American foreign residents, would be considered a Christian.

I decided the divine lesson involved was not to take myself too seriously. Eventually I did undergo a state-sanctioned conversion, taking an extended Shaheda--on account of my Christian beliefs--before an Azhari sheikh. (Converts from Christianity are required, in Egypt, to declare not only that there is no God but God and Muhammad is His Prophet, but that Jesus born of the Virgin Mary, though a prophet, was not the son of God, and did not die on the cross but ascended to Heaven, etc, etc, such that the Shaheda takes about two full minutes.) It was, all things considered, funny: but for the unlucky, the increasing religious pressure of the state can result in disinheritance, forcible divorce, and fractured families.

Deborah Orr reviews The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair, the latest offering which examines the concept of "Englishness":

As I was brought up in Scotland in the 1960s and 1970s, I think I can claim to have started out knowing with some certainty exactly what comprised the "English character". The English were, to use the vernacular, "bastards". They were smug, supercilious, hypocritical, bossy, colonising bullies and tricksters. When the oil came along, they were thieves, liars and cheats. When they voted for Thatcher, they cast Scotland into the seventh circle of hell. The English were the enemy.

This was a little confusing, since my mother hailed from Essex, and she appeared to be the finest of all living beings. But I went along with it, first because the price of not doing so was high in social-outcast terms, and second because my father assured me that while my mother was an exception, he'd found the rest of England to have been full of patronising idiots.

When I moved to England in the mid-1980s, I was surprised to find that the English seemed a lot more diverse and interesting than I'd been led to believe. Oddly, too, the ones I liked mostly carried with them an idea of an English person that was not dissimilar to the Scottish opinion. Unsurprisingly, they were keen to distance themselves from these unflattering descriptions. These days, they have succeeded admirably in achieving that distance. The English, endearingly, haven't on the whole got the smallest clue what sort of "character" defines their nationality, although they are clearer about what sort of character doesn't.

The charming thing about Peter Mandler's painstaking palimpsest, subtitled "The history of an idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair", is that it tends to confirm that it was ever thus. Mandler has marshalled together an impressive panoply of writings on the nature of "Englishness", many of them fabulously contradictory. His descriptions of centuries of philosophical squabbles over race vs culture, nature vs nurture and so on, take in everyone who is anyone - Montesquieu, Shakespeare, Mill, Jung, Darwin, Dickens, Hume, Emerson. But the overall impression is that the subject is eternally fascinating precisely because no soul has ever been able to come up with a useful definition.

Whilst the Pope is in Turkey, there a lot of stories about the country. Here's a piece in the The New York Times on the growing feeling of religious identity:

The pope’s visit, which begins Tuesday [...] highlights a slow but steady shift: Turkey is feeling its Muslim identity more and more. The trend worries secular Turkish politicians, who believe the state’s central tenet is under threat. In late October, a senior officer of Turkey’s army — which ousted a government it saw as overly Islamic in 1997 — issued a rare warning to that effect.

Others say the threat is overstated, but acknowledge that Turks do feel pushed eastward by pressures on their country from America and Europe. A poll by the Pew Foundation in June found that 53 percent of Turks have positive views of Iran, while public opinion of Europe and the United States has slipped sharply.

But at the same time:

[A] stronger Muslim identity does not mean that, as in Iraq, fundamentalism is on the rise, or even that more Turks want more religion in their government. Indeed, the number of Turks in favor of imposing Shariah law declined to 9 percent from 21 percent, according to the survey, which was released last week.

This sort of ties in what a piece in last month's Prospect Magazine on the growing economic and political ties between Turkey and Arab countries, overcoming the thawed relations they have had over the last few decades (the article is paywalled; let me know and I'll send you the piece).

I'm a mathematician--a logician--at heart.  Though I've become obsessed with the social sciences, I'm still just an extension of the little girl who spent weekends taking math and science tests for fun and excels in and loves the grammar-and-vocab aspects of learning foreign languages much more than reading in them.

So how could I avoid wanting to know more, more, more about one of the most-discussed aspects of male-female relations taking place outside my culture and one of the most-discussed aspects of Islam in my moderate-liberal subculture of the Midwestern USA?

If lots of people are talking about it, that means the chances are high that the discussion is full of axioms, theories, and principles!  Exciting.  Something I can figure out.