Anas’s Blog

This article demonstrates why it’s important we keep making the connections with what came before — and why divide and conquer is still the favourite tool of the coloniser.

From The Sunday Herald:

Brown needs to ’stop glorifying the Empire’
By Senay Boztas

LEADING HISTORIANS have criticised Gordon Brown for “glorification” of the British Empire, and claim the government repeated in Iraq mistakes made with India.

At a lecture in Edinburgh tonight, the award-winning Scottish author William Dalrymple will caution that exulting the old empire is a thin veil for justifying “contemporary imperial projects such as Iraq and Afghanistan”.

Meanwhile, Maria Misra, lecturer in modern history at Oxford University and a speaker at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, criticised Brown for refusing to apologise for the British Empire when empires “by definition often damage societies”.

…

Brown said, on a trip to Africa in 2005, that the “days of Britain having to apologise for its colonial history are over”. He explained: “We should celebrate much of our past rather than apologise for it. And we should talk, and rightly so, about British values that are enduring, because they stand for some of the greatest ideas in history: tolerance, liberty, civic duty, that grew in Britain and influenced the rest of the world. Our strong traditions of fair play, of openness, of internationalism, these are great British values.”

However, some historians believe that this celebratory attitude might gloss over particular ongoing problems of former colonies, when governments could learn from past mistakes.

Misra - whose modern history of India, Vishnu’s Crowded Temple, will be published in August - said she thought Brown’s rhetoric was worrying. “I am surprised to have a revival of imperial ideas coming from Brown as he is an intelligent person and a historian,” she said. “I think it is partly because Brown wants to unify Britain that he focuses on the empire. The problem with that is where it leaves people like me, the descendants of black immigrants. They are going to be left thinking: were we only civilized because these helpful Scots went out and took us in hand?”

She said that there might be other motives for praising empires. “Britain’s international reputation has been damaged by being involved in the Iraq imbroglio, so Britain might have a reason for some soft-pedalling on the imperial theme.”

Her book suggests that the British Empire increased division, religious tension and oppression rather than creating stable societies and democracies.

“Empires almost by definition - not because they are evil or badly intended - often damage societies quite badly. They team up with what they think of as the dominant groups when they take over, such as religious leaders and people with a lot of wealth. Rather than trying to spread the benefits of development and education, they concentrate on governing through these inter- mediaries - developing ideas of cultural and ethnic difference which justified the rule.”

Misra said the British Empire helped establish sharia law and the caste system. “An odd combination of British and Islamic scholarship developed a hardened idea of sharia law. There is no such thing as a single set of Muslim laws in 1808, but there sure is in 1930 because it has been propagated by a colonial estate desperate to understand a state over which it has quite thin powers.

“The same thing happens with the idea of the caste system - it doesn’t have anything like what we think of as the rigid system, from the brahmin to the untouchables. If it exists at all, it is in a small part of India and probably disappearing.”

The lessons were there to be learned for Iraq, she said. “The book is trying to get people to think about the complexity of colonial legacies and to be less susceptible to what seem like easy solutions.

“What has happened in Iraq is a kind of capsulised version and much worse, than what happened in India. One can see Iraq heading towards partition, just as India was in 1947, because the leading groups of Muslim and Hindu society had begun to feel they couldn’t live with each other. It wasn’t necessarily going to have to be that way, but empires work to exacerbate those feelings of difference.”

William Dalrymple, who this year published the award-winning The Last Mughal, said that the Tudors going to India were like Poles coming to Britain today - it was wealthy, rich, self-confident and in the midst of an artistic renaissance. But, he said, the Moghal empire was destroyed by the British, in a period that proves the negative effects of imperialism.

“I think from our contemporary perspective, it is clearly wrong for one country to impose its will on another,” he said. “The great danger when people glorify empire is that it provides legitimacy to contemporary imperial projects such as Iraq and Afghanistan.”

…

A spokeswoman for 10 Downing Street said that Brown’s position on the British Empire remains the same as the comments he made, in their proper context, in 2005, and in a subsequent interview with The Voice.

Surely some mistake?

UK Muslims ‘more loyal than most’

Eight in 10 Muslims said they respected other religions
Muslims in the UK are more likely to identify strongly with Britain and have confidence in its institutions than the population as a whole, a poll suggests.

Definitely not on message.

Yes, I’ve decided to write about it here, because I think it’s raised a number of extremely interesting issues and because it gives us some measure of where we’re at in terms of multiculturalism and race relations in this country: the signs are good, the public have shown they cannot tolerate this kind of racist bullying — at least when it is in full public view. For me the most interstesing aspect of the whole furore has been the level of hysteria and almost visceral anger within the Asian community.

The thing is that the seemingly inordinate response amongst many young Brits of Asian origin to the whole Shilpa Shetty/CBB racism row becomes far more understandable when you realise the extent to which the events in the program have brought back recollections of past insecurities and instances of racist bullying.

In contemporary Britain we seem to have reached a point where young Asians as a whole feel much more confident about identifying themselves as both Asian and British, without having to compromise on their Asian identities in order to better “fit in” – something that was undeniably not the case in the recent past. There’s been a sea change in the last few years: Asian music, fashion, cinema, and culture in general has started to become fashionable and therefore to gain more recognition within the wider mainstream — which I suppose might be perceived as a sort of belated vindication and cultural validation by many Asians given the intolerant attitudes of just a few years ago.

Indeed there was a time when a sizeable percentage of the wider British community resented the presence of Asians in this country, and weren’t afraid to manifest their hostility openly and overtly through racism, poisonous name calling and acts of discrimination. In that kind of antagonistic climate, at a time when the sense that many Asians now have of a shared-dual identity that encompasses two cultures was still in the process of being forged, it was obviously much harder to visibly assert those things that made you different within the wider cultural context — especially when that difference was constantly being used as the basis for racial abuse. The reaction of many first generation immigrants was just to keep their heads down and react passively to the abuse they received: they probably felt they had more to lose than the generations to come would. Understandably though this passivity fuelled a sense of resentment amongst the second and third generations, at what was often seen as a subservient and deferential attitude.

At the same time in playgrounds across the land, differences of skin colour, accent, general appearance and cultural background of young Asian kids were being incessantly exploited and set upon by schoolyard bullies — major visible differences were and probably still are perceived as points of vulnerability that bullies use as opportunities to humiliate their victims — something which obviously affected the Asian sense of identity in this country, especially when we were told to “go home”. In this context “Paki” also became a particularly vicious though common term of abuse. Used to signify backwardness and the supposedly uncivilised and primitive nature of life on the subcontinent, it was also often a prelude to threats or actual physical violence, which is why a lot of Asians wince when they hear it.

Predictably, many second and third generation kids themselves started to poke fun at some of the newly arrived immigrants from the sub-continent, at their accents, clothing, etc.

To put a personal slant on this, I remember being the only brown kid in my primary school in the 1980s, and, although I wasn’t physically bullied — though there was racist taunting — I was left out of every group of kids and purposefully not included because of the colour of my skin. I don’t have very happy memories of that time, and feel extremely ashamed at all the attempts I tried to make to ingratiate myself with others in the face of all their resistance. My mum told me later that many of the parents of the kids in the small town where I went to school resented the fact that my dad owned a shop in that town. God knows the kinds of things they were telling their children about our family.

At secondary school things were different, the school I went to was near the centre of Glasgow for a start — and not located in a godforsaken forlorn small town that had been rendered completely desolate by the loss of the Clyde shipping industry like my Primary school was — and so there were a lot of Pakistani/Indian kids attending. But I remember one instance that has stuck with me from those days. There had been a TV program on the night before called Karachi Cops, and I recall one of the white kids in my year expressing his amazement at the fact that people in Pakistan lived in cities with apartment blocks; whereas he’d thought they’d all be living in mud huts. (Of course I discovered about the Indus Valley civilisation and Harrapa a few years later, which would have meant that while all of Scotland was living in caves and wearing Ox-skins and possibly getting raped by marauding Vikings, there were actual cities with irrigation and many of the accoutrements that we associate with civilisation in what is now Pakistan).

So now here we are, it’s 2007, and this major Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty – who I’d never heard of but then I only know of Amitabh, Shah Rukh and Aishwarya to look at — arrives in Britain to take part in a reality TV show, moreover one that specialises in making capital out of its participants humiliating themselves and in using psychological manipulation as a catalyst to provoke ratings boosting conflict – now, that should have raised a flag right there. Shetty is impossibly glamorous, indeed possessed of an amazing beauty, has a black belt in karate, and is able to speak 6 languages, so by rights she shouldn’t be on this show alongside the usual array of no-talent, non-entities, wannabes and second cousins to wannabes, that populate these so called reality shows.

But she is on the show, and since it is (for the UK) fairly high profile, she becomes, potentially, a symbol of great pride for many young British Asians, representing as she does the prestige and glamour of Indian and South Asian culture and exemplifying an ideal of Indian beauty and grace. So what happens? This great Indian star is subject to a program of bullying by three of her fellow housemates — and to accentuate this great humiliation, these three happen to indeed be the customary reality TV shower. One of them, the ring leader, is incredibly ugly, porcine in her appearance, comes from a resolutely deprived background and a broken home (something which many commentators are fond of flagging up) and is almost absurdly thick. Like the other three she has no talent to speak of whatever and her fame seems to derive from her canny ability to win the public’s favour and sympathy.

Shetty, whose English is impeccable, has her accent made fun of by people whose command of the English language verges on the pitiful, she’s called a dog, and her “Indian” habits are constantly the subject of mockery as her tormentors huddle up into groups and whisper things about her and generally exclude her.

Now obviously the associations for a lot of young Asians watching that are going to be very painful: once again certain aspects of Asian culture are being used as points of vulnerability. It almost doesn’t matter if Shetty herself feels the abuse she’s receiving is racist or not, to many Asians who will be referencing their previous (and in some cases continuing) experiences when trying to relate to the situation it seems unmistakeably so.

What we in the UK have to realise is that — at least in a free, secular, liberal democracy – integration is a two way process, and that for it to be a successful process, it has to be largely organic. Any official attempts to impose it from above can only have a limited success (if any) if there is little willingness on the part of those to be integrated. In short, as much as the tabloids and government officials may want it, the message to British Muslims emphatically cannot be the threat that they must integrate, or else!

At the end of the day, integration is not something that can be enforced or dictated.

And as obvious as it may seem, a general climate of hostility directed towards Muslims, in which every instance of Islamic reticence towards integration, or each alleged failing of the Muslim community is endlessly hyped up, magnified and often misrepresented in the media, and in which an extremist and atypical minority of Muslims is regularly given the opportunity to set the agenda for all Muslims (hello Abu Izzadeen! hello Anjum Choudhary!) isn’t exactly going to encourage them to want to integrate.

It’s strange, given that only 1% of Muslim women wear the veil (according to Dr Haifaa Jawad of Birmingham University), that the ‘defiance’ of this tiny percentage in the face of calls (no pun intended) to remove these physical obstacles to assimilation has become the rallying cry for white-integrationists; indeed has become a sort of overall symbol for the entire Muslim community’s refusal to integrate. Surely, by giving these women and their unconventional lifestyle decisions — along with several other potentially divisive issues — an undue and unwarranted prominence in the media, in the midst of a cultural climate in which Muslims (rightfully) feel intimidated and demonised, we’re in serious risk of alienating the majority of Muslims who do accept that they need to reach out into the wider community, and who feel themselves unrecognised?

It’s not hard to understand that the motivations of government officials and media tabloids in spawning this recent spate of ugly stories are less about facilitating greater integration than pandering to the irrational prejudices and hatreds (and facist tendencies) of large segments of the white non-Muslim population. It is after all an exceptionally quick and easy way to sell papers and in the case of government ministers to win political support and direct attention away from a murderous and inept British foreign policy — especially morally perverse at a time when the biggest moral scandal should be the extreme likelihood that 650, 000 Iraqis have died since the onset of the Invasion of Iraq, many hundreds of thousands of these at the hands of allied forces.

Indeed as if to demonstrate that the stress on integration is at least partially spurious, we’re never told by the permanently hysterical gutter media why the existence, and modest success, of the BNP doesn’t show just as great an unwillingness to integrate on the part of the white population as the Muslim, or why well-documented concerns about insitutional racism in the police force and other bodies don’t similarly present a monumental barrier to integration. Or even why it’s acceptable for blacks and asians (especially anyone who looks like a Muslim) to suffer disproportionately more racial abuse and discrimination than the white inhabitants of these isles — and why this isn’t far more of a hinderance towards integration than a facial veil worn by a tiny percentage of Muslim women.

This last instance of media double standards is commonly evidenced by the frenzied reception accorded to racism against whites, or discrimination against Christianity compared with the far more virulent form directed against ethnic minorities, or against Islam in particular. Why did the recent proposals for extra screening and security checks for ‘Muslim-looking’ plane passengers provoke little more than sagely nodding heads and murmurs of assent from the very same commentators now given to frothing at the mouth at the idea that BA (partially for they say reasons of safety) would dare to proscribe a Christian member of staff from wearing a crucifix necklace, while allowing the hijab, or turban?

One example suffices to indicate how worrying things have got. Last Friday at 6pm, an imam was physically assaulted by a white male who’d entered a Glaswegian Mosque, the Dawal-ul-Islam centre. The imam was taken to a nearby hospital but was later discharged. Two things concern me about this story. Firstly, the muted reception it was given is especially unsettling when you consider the thunderous wrath and fury that would inevitably accompany the story of a Christian priest’s being assaulted in a church by someone who looked like a Muslim — not taking into account the reprisals that would take place aganist Muslims — and the serious questions it would raise about the separatist attitude of Muslims in this country. Secondly, this kind of incident is an entirely predictable corollary of the current scapgoating of the Muslim community, and these attacks are likely to become more common the more it progresses.

Then there’s the ideological attack on multiculturalism, not just in terms of a series of specific wrongheaded policy initiatives (something which would be eminently justified) but as a philosophy in itself, on the idea that other cultural traditions in this country might just deserve a modicum of respect or understanding. Multiculturalism’s various alleged excesses have apparently deprived it of any legitimacy and it is commonly argued that multiculturalism is antithetical to a policy of intergration in the country. It’s not understood how an underlying cultural basis of mutual respect and mutual recognition between Muslims and non-Muslims might not be a precondition of successful integration — since this would suggest that calls towards integration shouldn’t just focus on the Muslim community. .