According to YouGov, more than half of people do not believe Islam to be compatible with British values. I’m often dispirited by these polls, as much by the timbre of the questions as by the responses (how many times do we need to ask one another whether we can afford to avert a climate catastrophe, for instance?) But I can’t remember the last time I was stunned.
This latest poll found that 41% of the British public believe that Muslim immigrants have had a negative impact on the UK. Nearly half (49%) think that Muslim women are pressured into wearing the hijab. And almost a third (31%) think that Islam promotes violence. Farhad Ahmad, a spokesperson for the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, which commissioned the poll, was surprised that I was so surprised. Things had been really bad for ages, he said, directing me to not dissimilar numbers in 2016 and 2019.
This is the first year the community has included the question about the hijab, which strikes its own particularly depressing note. The hijab was a hot talking point in the early to mid-2000s, when military support for the US in its interventions in Afghanistan was often rhetorically justified by the toxic misogyny of the Taliban. Veils of all kinds came to represent the subjugation of women, to the dismay of many at the time.
But 20 years have passed, during which time we’ve seen Boris Johnson use the burqa in what was condemned as a racist callout to Telegraph readers, and the French experiment with banning full face veils – such as a niqab or burqa – in any public place, a chilling curtailment of, if not technically a human right, then what instinctively feels like any woman’s birthright to wear whatever the hell she pleases. Understanding has deepened, in other words – of the racism that anti-veil rhetoric often disguises, and the fact that to make a judgment about who’s controlling a woman and the extent of her autonomy, you have to know her pretty well. Or at the very least, have met her.
If the figures aren’t striking to those who have been paying attention, they remain shocking, particularly when you compare the numbers with those who have a negative view of other religions: 7% have a bad opinion of Christians, 13% think poorly of Jewish people, 14% of Sikhs and 15% of Hindus. This has been a 25-year slide, from the idea that “Muslim extremists have views incompatible with British life” to “all Muslims”; and if people were making that elision already, it was not previously sayable. Sayeeda Warsi said in 2011 that Islamophobia was becoming socially acceptable – at the Conservative party conference she said it had “passed the dinner-table test”. The can’t be right, I remember thinking then – she must just be meeting too many Conservatives. Now we’re at the point where it’s not only socially acceptable, but socially dominant.
In 2015, the US thinktank Center for American Progress published Fear, Inc 2.0: The Islamophobia Network’s Efforts to Manufacture Hate in America, a revision of an earlier report by the author Wajahat Ali. It presented a forensic account of how post-9/11 feelings of grief and threat had been weaponised to produce a prejudice that had barely previously registered, and it made for depressing reading for several reasons.
First, it revealed the amount of money pouring in to the creation of this narrative and from what sources (most of it was quite easily traceable back to billionaires and banking interests, which were simultaneously hosing cash at climate crisis counter-narratives among other conservative agendas). Second, it showed how coordinated and organised so many incredibly well-financed thinktanks were, amplifying one another’s messages and keeping a stable of ready commenters for broadcasters hungry for a hot-button issue. Third, the report laid bare how incredibly effective this network was in turning what were once “fringe, extremist views” (in Ali’s words) into mainstream talking points and wedge issues.
The UK, however, seemed to lack a few core components of this campaign. There weren’t any obvious funders with deep pockets; evangelical Christians weren’t a strong voice in politics; and it had stronger regulation of hate speech in broadcasting (though weaker regulation in print). As it turned out, it didn’t matter. The US lab created this virus, and we caught it.
Never have the effects of Islamophobia been so obvious, or so bleak. To read the domestic news, you would think that no grooming gang had ever contained a non-Muslim. In the rolling news cycle of even our public service broadcasting, Muslim lives are considered less valuable than non-Muslim ones, their loss less tragic. It would be functionally impossible to stand up in parliament and justify arms sales to Israel, small boats hysteria and inhumane treatment of asylum seekers, were it not for the groundwork that Islamophobia has laid.
In subtler ways, this casual demonisation puffs up a notion of “British values” that are nowhere in evidence, nowhere defended, except in the supposed dichotomy with a Muslim worldview. Truthfully, if anyone cared to pin down a Muslim value that’s incompatible with a British one, it would be unlikely to flatter in the way this framing assumes. Last spring, I met a young woman who had been caring for her autistic brother since she was tiny. She said, in passing, that her faith had helped a lot, because in Islam, people with disabilities were prized, as were their carers, and their treatment as equals was a prerequisite for faithful Muslims. I hadn’t heard anything less like a modern British value in my life.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
