The Enemy Within by Sayeeda Warsi, Allen Lane, £20
This apologia pro vita sua by Britain’s most distinguished Muslim politician is a well-judged mixture of anecdote, fine-grained political analysis and prophetic jeremiad against the myopic mutual gaze of the British establishment and our Muslim minorities. The focus is narrowly directed on Whitehall’s travails with Islam and Muslims. Those hoping for a discussion of non-security related dimensions of British Muslim life should look elsewhere.
At the book’s heart lies a detailed account of the evolution of counter-terrorism policy under David Cameron, whose steady shift towards a punitive and inquisitorial approach she justly laments. “Speak the truth,” says the Koran, “even against your own people”, and Warsi, although a diehard Conservative, writes in obedience to this. One is braced and challenged, and ultimately impressed, by her evident anguish in denouncing the hostility of her own political colleagues not only to her views on British Muslim communities but also to her religion itself.
One recalls the Koranic tale of the Pharaoh of the Exodus and the minions of his unbelieving and xenophobic oligarchy: in his palace only one believer stood firm for decent principles, a woman. The prophet of Islam tells us that battered wives will earn a reward akin to that of the good woman downtrodden by Pharaoh, and Warsi clearly bears many scars, with more, probably, to come.
She documents the slide to a frankly anti-Muslim stance in many Conservative inner circles, and the growth in influence of right-wing think tanks. She laments the reluctance of Conservative conferences to allow Muslims to exhibit or hold fringe meetings. She reports with dismay Conservative efforts to brand Sadiq Khan as an extremist sympathiser during the 2016 London mayoral race.
Warsi deftly quarries the enormous literature on terrorism to demonstrate that terrorism is not a distinctively Islamic problem. The religious leadership uniformly denounces it. British Muslim recruits to radical causes are typically misfits, drug abusers and serial fornicators. But while the “Islam equals terrorism” equation is comprehensively squashed, this is no elaborate exculpation. Warsi points to significant problems in her community, and devotes particular attention to the failures of its sectarian and poorly educated leadership.
Perhaps the strongest chapters deal with the controversial “Prevent” legislation. The author points out that Irish Republican terror never called forth so drastic a curtailment of civil liberties. Lawyers, human rights experts and Muslim leaders have been appalled at the policy’s tendency to stigmatise Muslims and drive them away from a sense of full membership in wider British society.
Reluctance to listen to Muslim communities was a feature of the later Cameron years. “Rather than doing counter-terrorism with British Muslims to defeat the menace of terrorism collectively, we have chosen to do counter-terrorism to Muslim communities,” she writes. Cameron’s flagship Educate Against Hate website was built in consultation with 29 organisations, none of them representing a Muslim community. Overall, she says, “policy-making which should have targeted the harm of ‘terrorism’ is increasingly simply targeting ‘the Muslims’”.
Warsi lays some of the blame on the multiculturalism debate. Naturally, multiple cultures are, in fact, welcome in Britain. However, the term has begun to denote something rather narrow, referring to governmental and municipal indulgence of any persistent Muslim distinctiveness. Muslims are urged to comply with “British values”, which prove frustratingly difficult to define. Compliance, therefore, is to liberalism, not to Britishness, and official failure to state this leads to accusations of double standards.
Warsi, in fact, supports this requirement, and in this regard she is in lockstep with the late 20th-century Tory march away from conservative social values. She approvingly quotes Cameron advocating “equal rights regardless of race, sex or sexuality … to belong here is to believe in these things.” By implication, not to believe in “equal marriage” is not to belong in Britain.
Her remedy is less acute than her diagnosis. Despite her Tory credentials she hopes for a heavy raft of new legislation to curtail certain freedoms. “Brits” should no longer be allowed to participate in foreign wars, whatever the cause. And Muslim religious marriages that are not accompanied by civil marriages should be criminalised. This drastic new turn presumably would only apply to Muslims: the thousands of humanist and pagan marriages that occur in Britain every year without any official registration would likely be exempted.
Strangely, too, she is reluctant to accept that “ideology” could play a significant role in radicalisation. Of course, social exclusion and anger at foreign policy are major drivers, but the specific terroristic theology of ISIS and other extreme groups is surely worthy of mention, and indeed of careful explication and refutation.
Despite these flaws, one is invigorated by this book. In our age of careerists and widespread cynicism, here is a politician so passionate and idealistic that she denounces her own party and colleagues, in the service of what she takes to be the truth.
Abdal Hakim Murad is dean of the Cambridge Muslim College
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