Almost immediately after the London bombings of July 7 last year, a relative of mine was attacked in London. He had his throat cut by a gang of youths. Our fear, on learning that the bombers were fellow British Muslims, was such that all of us in his extended family presumed he had been attacked because he was Muslim.
Weeks later, two of my aunts, wearing Islamic dress, went to visit him in hospital. Several people on the bus with them were suspicious about what they could have been concealing beneath their large shawls, which they were wearing on a warm summer’s day. My aunts got off the bus and were met by police vans screeching toward them. Officers screamed at them to stand still as they were searched. It turned out that one of my aunts raised suspicions that she was carrying a rucksack under her Islamic dress — she wasn’t, but she was slightly overweight.
It has been a very different story since those appalling days in the aftermath of the London bombings. Over the past few months I have traveled to different and varied communities in Britain debating and explaining the issues at the heart of my book about my family and the community of Somali refugees who came to Britain over the last decade, fleeing the civil war and collapse of their country, and who have remade their lives as British Muslims, finding no contradiction in the dual identity.
I have attended events ranging from gatherings at bookshops to large literary festivals. I have taken part in debates in Forest Gate in London — not far from the recent botched police raid — as well as in Bristol, home to one of the largest and oldest Somali communities in the UK. Since the book concerns the human stories of people I have grown up with and describes their identities as British Muslims, I expected the bulk of the audiences to be Muslim, and I had presumed that it would be fellow Somalis who would be most interested in discussing my book and their experiences.
It has been one of the most welcome surprises that almost half of the people in the audiences at such events, including the one at Forest Gate, have been white, non-Muslim fellow Britons of every age and background. Their attendance has had nothing to do with wanting to see a TV reporter they recognize so they could ask superficial questions about my personal experiences as a BBC correspondent and tell them stories from Iraq. That has been completely absent.
The relatively few questions about Iraq have been in relation to their worries about the impact of such a disastrous conflict on relations between Britain and the Arab and Islamic world. Such debates have taught me an invaluable lesson, both as a journalist and as a British Muslim: that there is a huge number of fellow Britons who are hungry for authentic and accessible voices describing the multitude of issues facing British Muslims — our hopes, our fears, a description of who we feel ourselves to be, and a description of our failures as well.
However, when it came to the views of British Muslims, they spoke of shifting complexities and dilemmas facing them as they grapple with the raw issues of identity and belonging in the post-7/7 world.
Their comments also opened my eyes to the poor fit between what British Muslims actually think and how their beliefs are represented in the media and political debate. I was reminded of this Saturday when I read the coverage of a report on the attitudes of Muslims and non-Muslims to each other in 13 countries. Although most non-Muslim Britons looked favorably on us, the poll found that 63 percent of all Britons had a favorable opinion of Muslims (down from 67 percent in 2004), suggesting that the London bombings did not trigger a significant rise in prejudice. Despite this, it concluded that British Muslims “are among the most embittered in the Western world ... with far more negative views of Westerners than Islamic minorities elsewhere on the (European) continent.”
It went on to say that “across the board, Muslim attitudes in Britain more resembled public opinion in Islamic countries in the Middle East and Asia than elsewhere in Europe” and were “more pessimistic ... about the feasibility of living in a modern society while remaining devout.”
I simply do not recognize this description in the views of any member of my extended family or other Somalis I know living in Britain. The vast majority of Muslims abhor the government’s policy on the war in Iraq. Is this the same as despising Britain? Many Muslims who are socially and religiously conservative believe that there are aspects of life in modern Britain that are immoral. Does it follow that they therefore support violent opposition to British society?
There are so few British Muslim voices in national life that it is inevitable that such knee-jerk conclusions are drawn. Many non-Muslim Britons are eager to see British Muslims beyond the caricatures. In this regard the public are ahead of the media. My experiences have shown me that, contrary to their anti-Western stereotype, British Muslims believe themselves to be fortunate to live in a Western country that is more at ease with them than any other. However, there is too much presumption and not enough authentic description of who we are and what we believe about our identity as British Muslims.
— Rageh Omaar is a presenter for Al-Jazeera TV. His new book, Only Half of Me: Being a Muslim in Britain, is published by Viking.
