New Racial Landscapes

Contemporary Britain and the Neoliberal Conjuncture

Malcolm James, Helen Kim, Victoria Redclift

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317629160
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The chapters in this volume examine the racial and ethnic landscape of Britain in a contemporary era of neoliberalism and financial crisis. A key aspect of neoliberal thought is the belief that we live in a 'post-racial' in which the problems of racism and xenophobia have been overcome. However, cultural retrenchment and coded xenophobia have been sweeping the political terrain, accompanied by 'new racisms' and 'new racial subjects' that only close contextual analysis can unpick. The scholarship contained in this collection challenges those who suggest that we live in a post-racial time. By focusing on particular locations in Britain at a particular moment, the volume explores local stories of 'race' and racism across changing sociopolitical ground. This book is essential reading for scholars and students of race, racism, diaspora, multiculturalism, post-colonialism, transnationalism and post-race.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

Giving the silent majority a stronger voice? Initiatives to empower Muslim women as part of the UK’s ‘War on Terror’

Naaz Rashid

Abstract

This article provides a gendered analysis of the ‘War on Terror’ in the UK context. Specifically it looks at initiatives to empower Muslim women, which were part of New Labour’s Preventing Violent Extremism (PVE) agenda, the impetus for which stemmed from the idea that, as ‘the silent majority’, women need to be given a ‘stronger voice’. Based on analysis of qualitative interviews, this article situates these initiatives within a broader policy landscape of debates on multiculturalism, community cohesion and Britishness. It explores interviewees’ understandings of Muslim women’s silence in relation to those suggested by policy discourse, considering the ways in which the state’s attempt to ‘give voice’ worked in practice. I argue that the operation of such initiatives continued to constrain Muslim women’s voices, restricting ‘voice’ to a narrow range of speakers speaking about a narrow range of issues.

Introduction

… women are currently being disempowered through the very discourses of empowerment they are being offered as substitutes for feminism. (McRobbie 2009, p. 49)

The UK’s counter-terrorism agenda has had a profound effect on the country’s policy landscape. The 2005 London bombings prompted a broad range of policy responses from the New Labour government in its ‘War on Terror’. One of these was the Preventing Violent Extremism (PVE or Prevent) agenda. Prevent’s specific focus was on ‘stopping people becoming or supporting terrorists and violent extremists’ (HM Government 2008, p. 5). Local authorities and the police were granted funding to work with local communities in order to ‘build resilience’ against extremism. In particular, they were encouraged to give ‘the silent majority a stronger voice in their communities’ (Winnett 2008, p. 1). The ‘silent majority’ referred to women and young people, and two government advisory boards were established: the National Muslim Women’s Advisory Group (NMWAG) and the Young Muslims Advisory group (YMAG).

The Prevent agenda was criticized in various ways: for demonizing the Muslim population as a whole and creating and perpetuating anti-Muslim racist stereotypes; for securitizing the race-equality agenda; for funding extremists; and for ‘rewarding bad behaviour’ at the expense of ‘good communities’ (McGhee 2008; Kundnani 2009; Cohen 2012). Although the UK’s counter-terrorism agenda overall has been described as gender-blind (Brown 2011, 2013), there were nonetheless specific initiatives to ‘empower Muslim women’. Through consideration of these, I examine how ‘the Muslim woman’ is constructed in the policy imaginary, building on previous and parallel constructions throughout history and contemporaneously across the globe.

The Muslim woman emerges from social policy discourses as a ‘neat cultural icon[s]… over messy historical and political dynamics’ (Abu-Lughod 2002, p. 783). She is seen only in relation to patriarchy in Muslim ‘communities’. There is little recognition of intersectional modalities of power that might also influence the Muslim woman’s position in society. Factors such as class, ethnicity, citizenship status, region, patriarchy and racism in wider society are ignored. Arguably, therefore, social policy discourses about the Muslim woman represent a form of neo-colonization, implying ‘a structural domination and suppression – often violent – of the heterogeneity of the subject(s) in question’ (Mohanty 2003, p. 18).

Framing social problems with reference to religion alone and perpetuating dehumanizing stereotypes of the ‘oppressed Muslim woman’ could have negative effects on the very women that such initiatives purport to assist. This may be through increasing incidents of racial violence, as evidenced in Europe and the USA, or through increasing discrimination in employment. Butler (2012), for example, has found that women wearing the hijab experience discrimination in recruitment. Moreover, it could be argued that racism towards Muslims in general is likely to strengthen patriarchal currents in ‘communities under siege’ (Razack 2008, p. 109), as Afshar (1994) described in relation to the impact of the Rushdie affair on women’s experiences in Bradford.

In discussing the trope of the ‘oppressed Muslim woman’ I am keen to highlight the continuities and discontinuities with earlier and concurrent gendered racisms (Carby 1982; Brah 1992). The initiatives to empower Muslim women were discontinued with the end of New Labour’s term of office in 2010, when Prevent had been all but dismantled. This study is therefore a historically located consideration of the intersectionality of ‘the Muslim woman’ in the context of the political landscape of Prevent. Despite changes in the political and policy landscape, the themes remain salient.

In this article I consider how initiatives to empower Muslim women worked in practice. One of the government’s stated objectives was ‘to ensure that … [Muslim women]… find their voice more easily’ (DCLG 2008, p. 5). I examine the extent to which Muslim women’s assumed historic silence arose from ‘within their communities’ as opposed to those outside. I show that there are complex, nuanced and differing views regarding Muslim women’s apparent lack of voice from the political and policy sphere. Furthermore, I question the idea that Muslim women were indeed silent. I consider how this stated exercise in ‘giving the silent majority a stronger voice’ worked in practice, that is, how the government’s stated objectives were experienced by respondents.

Methods

This article draws on wider research into the ways in which New Labour’s social policy discourses around community cohesion and Britishness were gendered and discursively produced cultural racism. Qualitative methods were used: textual analysis, interviews and participant observation. The textual analysis considered relevant policy documentation, parliamentary debates and political speeches. There were twenty-five interviews with policy actors involved in these or related initiatives. In addition, I attended a Prevent conference in Birmingham, one of the quarterly NMWAG meetings and three of the six role model roadshows for Muslim girls overseen by NMWAG, which took place in early 2010. The interviews and observations took place between 2009 and 2010 in London (Newham, Brent, Ealing and Westminster), Bristol, Cardiff, Birmingham, Bradford and Manchester. This research seeks to disrupt the social deviancy paradigm within which much research on Muslims is located, offering an alternative stand point to much of the existing literature in this field by examining the way in which pathologized communities are themselves ‘products’ of social policy (Ladner 1987, p. 76). Despite this, however, the research is embedded in the social policy arena and can therefore itself only ‘give voice’ to those involved at this level, therefore unavoidably mirroring the sidelining of non-South Asian Muslims and reflecting the association of Muslim women with forced marriage and the veil.

‘Muslim women: your country needs you!’

The initiative to empower Muslim women was announced in January 2008. At the level of central government, it included establishing NMWAG. The role of NMWAG was to advise the government on issues deemed to be relevant to Muslim women. For many of the NMWAG members, in practice their role largely involved overseeing three initiatives: a role model roadshow; a campaign to improve the civic participation of Muslim women; and a project looking at theological interpretation. At the level of local government, local authorities were encouraged to use Prevent funding to support projects specifically focused on empowering Muslim women. This article reflects more broadly on the idea of giving the silent majority a stronger voice.

The association between initiatives to empower Muslim women and Prevent is only intelligible through an understanding of a wider policy trajectory in which an imagined, essentialized Muslim community is pathologized. This pathologization can be observed in the conflation of different policy concerns associated with Muslim communities. For example, policy texts on Prevent also refer to forced marriage, female genital cutting, gendered violence and homophobia (Blears 2009). Moreover, such issues are frequently problematically described as ‘cultural practices’. As Volpp (2001, p. 1190) has suggested, there is an ‘asymmetrical ascription of culture’ when it comes to Other women. Whereas gendered violence against non-minority women is rarely explicitly attributed to their ‘culture’ in mainstream discourses, by contrast, gendered violence is presented as part of Muslim ‘culture’. Consequently, all Muslim women are seen as potential victims of their ‘culture’. Likewise, Muslim women’s perceived absence from the political sphere is reduced to a simplistic notion of ‘cultural difference’.

Such pathologizing discourses are imbued with a powerful host/guest metaphor that has historically characterized UK immigration and ‘race relations’ policy. The moral panic about Muslims, following urban unrest in northern towns in 2001, the events of 9/11 and the London bombings of 7/7, has resulted in Muslims being constructed as the internal Other. The Prevent agenda is heavily inflected with broader national debates on Britishness and the alleged failures of multiculturalism. The 7/7 attacks were deemed to be particularly shocking since the perpetrators were ‘home-grown’ and clear links have been made between those attacks and the presence of religious and ethnic diversity in Britain (Husband and Alam 2011). In a speech on ‘The Future of Britishness’, Gordon Brown (2006, p. 411) made clear that he believed that ‘terrorism in our midst means that debates … about Britishness and our model of integration clearly now have a new urgency.’ He went on to say that ‘this must lead us to ask how successful we have been in balancing the need for diversity with the obvious requirements of integration in our society.’

Processes of nation building are both racialized and gendered (Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1992). Muslim women and men are both portrayed as threats. While Muslim men are explicitly regarded as dangerous for their radical ideologies and their potential for political violence arising from disaffection, the Muslim woman, by contrast, has implicitly come to symbolize the dangerous consequences of ‘too much multiculturalism’. Muslim women’s empowerment therefore acts as a proxy for attempting to integrate and educate what is assumed to be a culturally homogeneous yet currently inassimilable community. The argument goes that once civilized or educated to the ways of the West, patriarchy will disappear and terrorism will no longer be a threat.

Following the urban unrest of 2001, community cohesion emerged as the dominant paradigm of race relations governmental policy and practice (Kundnani 2002, 2007; Solomos 2003). Multiculturalism had been strongly critiqued for allegedly leading to communities living ‘parallel lives’ (Cantle 2001) and a society ‘sleep-walking to segregation’ (Phillips 2005). However, although community cohesion policies are ostensibly directed at all ‘communities’, there has been an overt focus on Muslim communities¹ and the policies are guided more by a desire to manage the risk of terrorism rather than a desire to address racial inequality (McGhee 2005)...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• New racisms, new racial subjects? The neo-liberal moment and the racial landscape of contemporary Britain
• 1. Giving the silent majority a stronger voice? Initiatives to empower Muslim women as part of the UK’s ‘War on Terror’
• 2. ‘The best borough in the country for cohesion!’: managing place and multiculture in local government
• 3. Transgressing community: the case of Muslims in a twenty-first-century British city
• 4. ‘No caps, no coconuts, no all-male groups’ … the regulation of Asians in London clubs
• 5. Whiteness and loss in outer East London: tracing the collective memories of diaspora space
• 6. ‘It’s not how it was’: the Chilean diaspora’s changing landscape of belonging
• 7. ‘Structure liberates?’: mixing for mobility and the cultural transformation of ‘urban children’ in a London academy
• 8. Post-racial futures: imagining post-racialist anti-racism(s)
• Index