Commemorating Muslims in the First World War Centenary

Making Melancholia

Meghan Tinsley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000471731
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

Commemorating Muslims in the First World War Centenary engages with the explosion of public commemorations in Britain and France in the wake of the First World War centenary, alongside the hyper-visibility of British and French Muslims in political and popular discourse. Bringing these two phenomena together, it draws on national commemorations of the First World War centenary in Britain and France, alongside eleven local field sites that foregrounded Muslims, to make sense of how national memory changes when it seeks to include a previously excluded group. Through an identification of three distinct narratives, which correspond to three ways of situating Muslims in relation to the nation—mourning, mobilisation, and melancholia—it intervenes in debates surrounding memory, nationhood, and belonging to make sense of the centenary as an extended exercise in nation-building at a moment when the borders of British and French national identity were openly, and violently, contested. With particular attention to sites of melancholia, the author shows how certain sites disrupt national memory and refrain from producing any cohesive narrative to repair that which has been fractured. An exploration of the ways in which commemoration pushes nations to grapple with their past and present, without prescribing any tidy solution, this book will appeal to scholars of sociology and anthropology with interests in memory studies, nationalismandpostcolonial studies.

1“I have no respect for the silence”Situating memories of the First World War

DOI: 10.4324/9781003092322-2

Introduction

Silence is heavy with the weight of the unspoken. A two-minute silence on Remembrance Day conjures the 888,246 soldiers killed in the First World War under the auspices of the British Empire and the millions killed in subsequent wars. It invokes wreaths of red poppies, military processions, stoic government officials, and members of the royal family. It may invoke white and black and purple poppies, unnamed civilian dead, deserters shot at dawn, honours denied, rallies denouncing war, proclamations of “never again”. Silence is also power-laden. When politicians and royals lead the nation in the two-minute silence, they proclaim their status as the bearers of national memory, and the heirs of leaders who led the nation into war and peace a century earlier. When ordinary citizens watch the ceremony at the Cenotaph unfold on the BBC, or join commemorations at their local war memorials, their silence proclaims their own endorsement of national memory. Breaking the silence disrupts this implicit consensus about the meaning of the past and the responsibility of the present.

On 11 November 2010, the two-minute silence erupted into a violent clash between two groups of extremists outside of the Royal Albert Hall in London. On one side of the police barricades, thirty-five members of an organisation called Muslims Against Crusades (MAC) set two large plastic poppies ablaze and chanted “British soldiers, burn in hell”. A few meters away, fifty members of the far-right English Defence League (EDL) waved the St George's cross and oversized poppies alongside posters with the caption, “Try burning this one!” For the next hour, the two groups traded insults with increasing fervour, until the EDL's notorious leader, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (alias Tommy Robinson), broke through the metal barricade and charged towards the Muslim group, knocking a police officer to the ground. In the aftermath of the duelling protests, eight men were arrested. Yaxley-Lennon was charged with assaulting a police officer, five other members of the EDL were held for affray and possession of Class A drugs, and two members of MAC were charged with public order offenses (Right-Winger 2010).

The violence between the EDL and MAC reverberated beyond their brief encounter, in the media, courts, and Houses of Parliament. Asad Ullah, a spokesperson for MAC, gave defiant interviews to the tabloid media outlets that splashed images of the MAC across their front pages. “The British soldiers you remember on this day”, he stated, “are soldiers who have taken innocent lives in illegal occupations and unjust wars” (Bloxham 2010). He continued, “I have no respect for the silence as it represents the murder of millions of Muslims. By burning the poppy we wanted to upset people and we wanted them to hurt. If you hurt for two minutes you can understand the hurt we feel every day for our murdered Muslim brothers and sisters” (Chapman 2010).

The extensive media coverage in the days following the clash juxtaposed Ullah's interview with those of survivors and descendants of British soldiers. In one Daily Express article with the outraged headline, “Muslim Fanatics Burn Poppy”, Tony Philipson, the father of a British soldier killed in the Helmand province, defended the silence as a fitting memorial for his son, who had been “fighting for Muslims to get rid of a tyrant so they could have some freedom” (Chapman 2010). Others claimed that the MAC protest defamed family members who had died decades earlier, in the First and Second World Wars. Sylvia Black, who had been wearing a poppy in memory of her uncle when she crossed paths with members of MAC on a Tube platform, told a reporter, “They shouldn’t be doing it and they shouldn’t be allowed to do it” (Bloxham 2010). Members of Parliament across the political spectrum condemned MAC in strong terms, with media outlets widely quoting Labour MP Khalid Mahmood's statement that “They have no regard or respect for the people who are prepared to give their lives for this country. If they don’t like it they can hop it and leave.” Conservative MP Philip Davies echoed Mahmood's sentiment: “These protesters should be ashamed of themselves. People will be sickened. The lack of respect for people who have given up their lives for freedom is appalling” (Chapman 2010). Condemnation focused squarely on MAC, emphasising the nature of the protest rather than the physical violence that had unfolded afterwards (Muslim Protesters 2010).

Ullah and other members of MAC linked Remembrance Day to contemporary wars, and rejected it on that basis. Anjem Choudary, a cleric associated with MAC, claimed, “It's one thing to remember the dead from the First World War … but it's quite another when they say we need to remember the dead from Afghanistan and Iraq. It's become a political football and if they are going to use Remembrance Day for that purpose it's only right that we have a counter-protest” (Poppy-burning Muslims 2011). Certainly, it was this condemnation of Britain's recent wars—and of the soldiers who had waged them—that offended many of the group's detractors. Yet the target of the group's protest was not an army base, nor even a soldier's funeral, but the poppy and the two-minute silence—a ritual of memory dating from the First World War. Media coverage of the event referred to it as a “poppy burning”, describing MAC members as “thugs” who “lashed out against anyone wearing a poppy” (Mugle 2010). Continued coverage of the event went further: tabloids accused Muslims, collectively, of trying to ban poppies, and claimed that people who wore poppies faced harassment in Muslim neighbourhoods. Throughout the controversy, attention remained focused on the poppy itself.

Four months after the clash, Emdadur Choudhury, of MAC, was convicted of disturbing public order and fined fifty pounds. District Judge Howard Riddle, handing down the fine, stated that Choudhury had engaged in a “calculated and deliberate insult to the dead and those who mourn them” (Cameron condemns 2011). “No doubt the event means more to some people than others”, he continued, “and no doubt it symbolises different things to different people. However, it is undoubtedly the case that, for a large section of the population, remembering those who have died in the service of their country is of genuine significance”. Choudhury's actions, in other words, constituted an affront to collective memory.

In October 2011, MAC announced plans to repeat the poppy burning, and the tabloid press rehashed their narrative that the action would disrespect the dead. Facing mounting outrage from veterans’ groups and the media, then-Home Secretary Theresa May banned the organisation on the day before Remembrance Day. The planned poppy burning was cancelled. Yet since 2010, the trope of British Muslims disrespecting the poppy—and, by extension, the memory of soldiers—has festered. More recent incarnations of the story have claimed that ISIS was ordering British Muslims to shun the poppy (Gutteridge 2015), and that the Royal British Legion was not selling poppies in “certain areas” where they were considered “offensive” (Cooksey 2016). These have been countered by self-conscious stories of British Muslims enthusiastically participating in rituals of national memory: in 2014, a London fashion student, Tabinda Kauser Ishaq, designed and marketed a poppy-patterned hijab with the support of the Islamic Society of Britain and British Future (Sanghani 2015); and in 2015, Muslim schoolchildren volunteered to sell poppies in their neighbourhoods, with the support of the Ahmadiyya Trust (Ali 2015).

For the members of MAC—alongside many members of the public—the memory of the First World War was inextricable from Britain's contemporary wars. Britain's wars, in turn, were a proxy for the British nation at large. Consequently, the events at the Royal Albert Hall and their aftermath—duelling protests, media outrage, and official condemnation—encapsulate, in a single site, the problem that became visible, and often violent, during the 2014–2018 First World War centenary: in a post-imperial, multicultural nation, the memory of a century-old conflict widely perceived as a European civil war remains a catalyst for constructing national identity.

This book traces the multiple, malleable memories of Muslims in the First World War over the course of the centenary. It is fundamentally a story about the present: the people and organisations who make sense of the past draw from their own experiences, ideologies, and goals to create a narrative of the nation that collectively remembers. Yet it is also interwoven with the past, as commemorations actively or passively forget, selectively draw from, creatively rewrite, or disconcertingly discover the past. And it extends into the future, since the lessons from the past for the present hold implications for the nation that those who remember aspire to build.

National memory

In both Britain and France, remembering the First World War was a means of constructing the nation, unifying its members, and drawing its symbolic borders. Yet this was not a singular or uncontested process: throughout the centenary, commemorations were actively and publicly planned by the state, debated by the opposition, interpreted and critiqued by the press, and embraced or rejected by the public. Some members of the public went further: they identified omissions or misrepresentations in mainstream commemorations and constructed their own sites and events, which variously complemented or contradicted the dominant narrative of the war. By extension, these counternarratives imagined the nation in new ways. This process was not unique to the First World War centenary; constructing national memory is always a multivocal, contested process that amplifies some voices while muting others. Previous research on collective memory provides insight into this process.

Collective memory and national memory

When people make sense of the past collectively, and in organised ways, they construct a collective memory—that is, “the distribution throughout society of beliefs, feelings, moral judgments, and knowledge about the past” (Schwartz 2007; see also Nora 1989; Olick and Robbins 1998; Warner 1975[1959]). While collective memory is abstracted and generalised at the national level, it is enacted at the local level through sites of memory—the material traces of a past that is no longer remembered organically (Nora 1989). Rituals are central to collective memory, though theories differ as to why they matter: for functionalists, observing rituals produces social integration (Parsons 1937; Shils 1966; Warner 1975[1959]). Others foreground the form of rituals, arguing that by taking place at specified dates, and in specified places, rituals imagine a special link to the event being commemorated (Durkheim 1912). A ritual is set apart by its aesthetics (Alexander 2004a) and by the behaviour of participants (Cossu 2010; Tambiah 1985). By sharing a common orientation to the past, people establish and share in the “moral unity” of a group in the present (Durkheim 1912).

This approach provides a useful framework for understanding the importance of rituals at large. It errs, however, by presenting collective memory as top-down and singular. In the process, it also fails to acknowledge the fluid character of groups and the rituals they enact. Group membership is nebulous, and borders are constantly shifting. Individuals hold memberships in multiple groups, and may ascribe different—even contradictory—meanings to a single group. Rituals, likewise, hold many different meanings for participants, each of whom plays a role in shaping its substance and significance (Erll 2008). Yet fluidity has a limit: participants interact in patterned ways that reflect the distribution of power within a particular group. Power also shapes the way that rituals are recognised and read by people outside of a group.

Throughout this book, I refer to national memory rather than collective memory. This semantic choice holds three implications: first, it presents the state as the framer of, and primary stakeholder in, the dominant narrative. Second, it presents citizens as full participants in rituals of remembrance, such that remembrance affirms their status, and their relationship to other citizens (Gillis 1994; Hobsbawm 1992; Nora 1989; Spillman 1997). Third, and by extension, national memory constructs the nation—with its symbolic borders, its values, and its collective meaning. Thus, for example, the dominant idea of Britain (particularly England) as a nation with a continuous, uncontested past stands in stark contrast to the idea of France as a revolutionary nation that celebrates its ruptures with the past (Kumar 2006). By constructing a clear narrative of its own national memory, each nation constructed itself in opposition to the other, establishing clear borders in the process (Colley 2005). Each also defines the qualities of citizens, and polices categories of insider and outsider. Like collective memory at large, however, national memory is contested interna...