(Credit: DIFID/flickr commons)
Nadine Osman
A comprehensive review of the government’s interactions with faith groups by the UK government’s faith adviser, Colin Bloom, has prompted mixed review from Britain’s largest Muslim umbrella group and academics.
Titled “Does government ‘do God?’ An independent review into how government engages with faith,” the report aimed at the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities concluded that Muslims are frequently made to feel they must renounce terrorist acts. Senior policymakers have been urged to stop stigmatising Muslims by making them feel responsible for “Islamist terrorism”.
The report also identifies several areas of British life in which Muslim communities are marginalised.
Bloom also urged ministers to develop sharia-compliant student loans to help more Muslims enter universities and to conduct an outreach programme to increase their representation in the armed forces.
The report’s other main recommendations include government crackdowns on forced marriage and unregistered religious schools.
Bloom warns in the report: “Islamist extremism, Islamist-inspired terrorism, and the support of terrorist and extremist organisations… are as repulsive to mainstream British Muslims as the acts of Anders Breivik are to mainstream British Christians. If no effort is undertaken to relieve this situation, sadly many British Muslims will struggle to feel fully accepted and integrated within society.”
He adds: “During this review’s stakeholder engagement, many Muslims described, often poignantly, how society has made them feel stigmatised and somehow responsible for or secretly supportive of acts of Islamist terrorism.
“This reviewer has reason to believe that this happens at all levels of society, including at the very top. Those in the political sphere are not immune from such stigmatisation, with baseless allegations of Islamist extremist sympathy and concerning anti-Muslim language not unheard of.”
However, the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) identified some omissions and “troubling focus on the problem areas of non-Christian faith minorities, and the anxieties that exist of such groups but paid ‘less attention to extremism in some faith communities over others.’”
It acknowledged that “there is a case for better safeguards” for faith-based supplementary school settings but did question “why the Review excludes Sunday schools for scrutiny compared to madrasahs. Any proposals should be non-discriminatory and ensure that there is a high-level of religious literacy among those setting safeguarding standards.”
MCB also said that although the Review calls on the government to “be bold and courageous” in upholding and protecting fundamental “British values” of freedom, democracy, justice, and tolerance, it has failed to mention that the same values are “weaponized to stigmatise minority communities and deployed arbitrarily and perniciously when engaging with Muslim communities.”
MCB called “for consistency: not only in the government’s own behaviour but also amongst its supporters in the media, think-tanks, and backbenches, sections of whom pursue regular discriminatory rhetoric that are certainly at odds with the British Values so cherished in the Bloom Review.”
The Council commends the Bloom Review for being more clear-eyed: “not treating Muslims as second-class citizens but part and parcel of British society.” However, it warned it was “at risk of uncritically adopting the framing set by these divisive voices.
The Review attempts to draw a distinction between Islam and ‘Islamism’, an ill-defined term widely used not only to describe the violent extremists that we all oppose but also to cast aspersions on those Muslims who are exercising their democratic right to disagree with the government of the day.”
Khadijah Elshayyal, academic and author on Muslim identity politics, was more scathing of the report. Writing for the Middle East Eye, Elshayyal said the report’s recommendations “fall short” of examining the government’s ongoing biases against “Muslim civic activism, and as such, it could serve to entrench the draconian reach of the state in regulating minority faiths and containing dissenting perspectives.”
The report is also accused of setting “a curiously simplistic typology of three different categories when it comes to faith or belief. Bloom’s ‘true believers’ and ‘non-believers’ are the good guys – ‘sincere, peaceful and decent’, and thus deserving to be taken seriously by government.”
She also accused the review of not delving into what it called “fair engagement.”
“It offers little by way of directly assessing who should be included and how this would be decided.”
She argued, “On the question of state engagement with Muslims, the huge and persistent elephant in the room remains how and why successive Conservative administrations have continued to shut out and actively demonise the MCB.”
She also accused the government of applying “double standards,” in its isolation of the country’s largest Muslim umbrella group. “A tired and lazy justification that has long been recycled relates to the Council’s allegedly inadequate condemnation of extremism – a double standard to which other religions are not held. It is laughable to think that such charges continue to be levelled without scrutiny, against a group that has gone to great lengths to chronicle its efforts to condemn terrorism.”
Lady Jane Scott, the Faith Minister, said in a statement, “I welcome this review and thank Colin for his work. We will carefully consider the recommendations, and I’ll make it my mission to continue to work closely with those of all faiths.”
Some religious activists also welcomed its findings. Yehudis Fletcher, who founded a thinktank to campaign against Jewish extremism, said, “We strongly support the Bloom review recommendations in relation to schools, coercion within marriage, and faith-based extremism and exploitation.”
On several occasions, Bloom highlights how Muslims are being marginalised by government policy, whether deliberately or not. He warns, for example, that 12,000 Muslims are being put off university every year because Islamic teaching says paying or receiving interest is a sin.
The report says: “Given the strength of the evidence, it is regrettable that little has been done recently to progress proposals for alternative student finance.”
Bloom also says the armed forces are failing to recruit enough people from Islamic backgrounds, pointing to data showing that Muslims make up 0.5% of the British forces as compared with 6.5 per cent of the general population.
The report highlights several other areas where Bloom argued that public servants have a poor understanding of religious communities. Police officers and NHS staff, for example, often mistake Sikhs for Muslims or serve halal meals to Hindus.
The government welcomed the report, though it did not commit to implementing any of its recommendations.
READ MORE
