cross-posted from MLW.
July was a bad month for racial harmony in Britain. Police figures indicate. that "Religious hate crimes, particularly against Muslims, have increased 600 percent since the London bombings on July 7."
An op-ed article by Jonathan Freedland in today's Guardian, explores the other side of the coin: why so many British Muslims do not feel loyalty to Britain, 16% according to a recent public opinion poll.
Freedland contrasts the situation in Britain unfavorably with that in America. Why, he asks, were the July 7 bombings the work of British-born Muslims, whereas 9/11 was the work of non-U.S. Muslims?
What Freedland discovered gives us reason to pause and remember some of the good things about our country.
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Freedland believes the best answer may be "the one provided by Aatish Taseer, who recently interviewed a series of second-generation Pakistanis in the north of England for Prospect magazine."
Taseer, who describes himself "as a half-Indian, half-Pakistani with a strong connection to this country [Britain]," knows " the gulf between what it means to be British Pakistani and British Indian."
To be Indian is to come from a safe, ancient country and, more recently, from an emerging power. In contrast, to be Pakistani is to begin with a depleted idea of nationhood. In the 55 years that Pakistan has been a country, it has been a dangerous, violent place, defined by hatred of the other--India.
But "for young British Muslims," Taseer found, "if Pakistan was not the place to look for an identity, being second-generation British was still less inspiring." The result is that "Britishness is the most nominal aspect of identity to many young British Pakistanis."
Taseer explains (emphasis added):
The thinking in Britain's political class has at last begun to move on this front, but when our tube bombers were growing up, any notion that an idea of Britishness should be imposed on minorities was seen as offensive. Britons themselves were having a hard time believing in Britishness. If you denigrate your own culture you face the risk of your newer arrivals looking for one elsewhere. So far afield in this case, that for many second-generation British Pakistanis, the desert culture of the Arabs held more appeal than either British or subcontinental culture. Three times removed from a durable sense of identity, the energised extra-national worldview of radical Islam became one available identity for second-generation Pakistanis. The few who took it did so with the convert's zeal: plus Arabe que les Arabes.
Freedland suggests that the American experience suggests that Taseer may be right. "The United States has not - yet - had a brush with home-grown Islamist terrorism; 9/11 was the work of Egyptian and Saudi outsiders. Why might that be?"
"Surely the chief reason," Freedland argues, "is the way America approaches newcomers."
It does not allow a vacuum where national identity should be, but fills the void with Americanness. Loyalty is instilled constantly - not only at one-off ceremonies - whether it be saluting the flag at school or singing the national anthem at a ballgame.
The absence in Britain of these kinds of identity-instilling rituals surprised Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesperson for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, with whom Freedland discussed the matter.
"What, you don't do all that in Britain?" asks Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on American-Islamic Relations when I put the contrast to him yesterday. His members have "a definite sense of being American", he told me, and clear loyalty. Yes, they feel "concern" over events in Iraq or the Middle East, but not "anger or rage" - and it's voiced by lobbying a congressman or writing a letter to the editor. Of course, there is an identification with Muslims around the world, but that sits alongside loyalty to America. Which exerts the greater hold? "It's like asking me who I love more, my mother or my father?" The answer is, he loves them both. (Emphasis added.)
Freedland compares "two ways to fill the identity vacuum."
The French model of citizenship, which asks people to shed their differences to become French. Or the American, which allows people to keep their differences - and become American. Hooper points out that while the French government banned the wearing of Muslim headscarves in school, the US justice department recently backed an Oklahoma girl's fight for the right to wear one in class.
Freedland believes the American model "works because it emphasises not only diversity but the ties that bind, too."
It encourages a hyphenated identity - think Italian-American - but insists on both sides of the hyphen. In Britain, liberals especially have striven so hard to accept that people are Scottish or Jewish or Asian, they may have forgotten that they are also British. For bothness to work, you have to have both.
In other words, we let the Britishness part of the equation lapse. We were frightened of it, fearing that it reeked of compulsion or white-only exclusivity. But Britishness, like Americanness, need not be like that. It should, by its nature, be open to all. And yet it does entail some common glue: rule of law and tolerance, for a start.
Even if Hooper and Freedland may have a somewhat rosy vision of American society, I think they are essentially correct. In place of the former ideal of a melting-pot dissolving all foreign identifies into a single "American" identity, for some time we have tried, and mostly succeeded, in accommodating hyphenated identities.
So let's take this opportunity to feel good about our country.
