There goes that strange sound again, “what is that?” I said to myself as the mysterious noise bellows throughout the house. Little did I know, as a nine year old boy, this noise was my first experience involving Islam. Only years later did I learn that this noise I often used to hear when I stayed at my British born Sudanese Muslim friend’s house was the Adhan, the call to prayer for Muslims worldwide to prostrate in worship to God.
While my childhood friend never seemed to take his Islamic faith very seriously, many British born Muslims certainly do. In fact, second and third generation Muslim immigrants often identify more with Islam and traditional Islamic values than their foreign born parents/grandparents who were born and grew up in Muslim countries (who are largely simply cultural Muslims). It’s an odd phenomenon that the generations following Muslim immigrants identify more with Islam and being Muslim than the values and society that they were born and grew up in, identifying even more with Isam than the Muslims who did not grow up in western society. Why has the Muslim population in the west gone in a different direction to other ethnic minorities who have largely adopted the norms, values and practices of the western world? In the wake of ISIS, growing Islamic extremism and thousands of western Muslims turning against their homeland, it’s more pertinent than ever that this topic is highlighted and understood.
It’s important to note that this has not always been the case with Muslims in the west. During my teenage years, I had a Muslim friend a few decades older than me that one day decided to open up to me about his faith and life journey. Originally from Pakistan, he moved to the UK with his parents as a baby during the early sixties. His parents were not overly religious, and when he was old enough to tell them he no longer wanted to go to the mosque anymore he gave up his religious identity altogether and indulged in the typical lifestyle of a young Briton during the seventies. At the age of around thirty, he rediscovered the religion of his background in his own ‘Islamic awakening’. He discovered the ‘scientific miracles’ of the Quran narrative that had become popular with the release of the book ‘The Bible, the Quran, and Science’ by the French doctor Maurice Bucaille and he gave up his life of Music, drugs and casual sex to follow what he believed to be God’s guidance.
What I didn’t realise at the time was that this is a very common story. My friend’s conversion coincided with a general ‘Islamic awakening’ of Muslims in the west and to some extent around the globe. I imagine most people reading this are familiar with one of the media’s favorite British Muslims, Anjem Choudary, what you may not know however is that he has not always been the pious political Muslim activist calling for the sharia that we see today. During his college days as a young man, he was known to his friends as Andy and had a reputation for being quite a party animal. That was before he had his own religious conversion and gave up his sinful ways to become the controversial Muslim figure we are now familiar with. Many such stories can be found up and down the country and following Muslim generations have followed suit.
It’s impossible to pinpoint one specific reason for this change as there were many factors that were, and are, at play in shaping peoples mentality. The first was a lack of identity, a lack of belonging, a sense of not feeling secure in themselves that Muslims in the west were feeling. As mentioned earlier, Muslims who were born or raised here in the west often never learnt much about their Islamic background from their immigrant parents and so naturally tried to identify with the only thing they were familiar with, Western society. However, with the institutionalized racism from authorities and racism from society at large they quickly found out that they were not completely accepted by the westerners around them. People scoffed at their unusual names, were suspicious of them because of the colour of their skin and treated them with contempt.
This lack of identity, purpose and belonging creates a fertile breeding ground for foreign, often extreme beliefs. After all, if we look at extreme Islamic groups in the UK today, many of their members don’t even come from Islamic backgrounds, many of them are white brits who come from broken families, a former life of petty crime and abuse. They found the brotherhood and cause of these extreme groups enticing and have fallen under their spell.
Other crucial factors were, firstly, the political events taking place in the world and the influence of Arab money. The Iranian revolution, Israel – Palestine conflict, rise of Islamist groups such as Hizb ut-Tahrir, conversion of famous figures such as Cat Stevens (Yusuf Islam) to Islam suddenly made western Muslims, and everyone else, well aware of Islam. I remember having a discussion with my father who grew up in London and was involved in the music scene at the time told me that nobody even really knew what Islam was when Cat Stevens converted, it just shows how Islam’s presence in the west and the world has changed, I doubt you could find anyone in London anymore that is not aware of what Islam is and who are Muslims. On top of that, the Saudis spent a lot of money pumping out books, mosques and preachers that spread their ideas in the west, they also offered funding to any Islamic organization or individual that was willing to adopt their ultra-conservative literalist interpretation.
While Muslims felt insecure in themselves and rejected by the society they grew up in, they found purpose and belonging in discovering their Islamic background, became politically active and began the trend that we still see today.
Many of these influences are still applicable today. We still have far-right groups in the west insisting that one cannot be British/French/Dutch and Muslim, trying to force Muslims, and everyone else for that matter, to pick sides. We still have insecure, impressionable young men and women joining extreme Islamic groups. We still have well funded Salafists (and their splinter groups) with their extreme, selective, literal interpretations, trying to spread their views and dominate the debate among Muslims. Now in the twenty-first century, we also have the media spreading hate and making Muslims feel demonized.
If we are going to buck the trend then we all need to come together, both Muslim and non-Muslim and communicate. Get rid of this tribal ‘us v them’, petty identity politics, the hate-mongering and suspicion. Behind all the labels we are all simply Human beings after all.
Pienso 