The perils of oversight, Kanishk Tharoor

KVB Tharoor — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 11:04:28 +0000

As an unfortunately-named Sudanese teddy bear hogs the headlines, you'd be forgiven for missing another controversial - but decidedly less tidy - story recently. Last week, with the blessings of the huggable, teddy bear-like "Communities" Secretary Hazel Blears, the Mosques and Imams National Advisory Board (MINAB) came into being.

MINAB, a self-described pool of "moderate" Muslim leaders, seeks to promote a culture of "civic responsibility" in Muslim communities by reforming British mosques and madrassas. Central to its agenda is a ten-point "code of conduct" that asks the country's 1,500-plus mosques to submit to regular inspection, to hire well-educated English-speaking teachers and clergy, to become more financially-transparent and to promote the participation of women, amongst other recommendations.

This piece was first published on OurKingdom, openDemocracy's blogging conversation on the future of Britain.

The plan has already met with predictable criticism. Conservative Muslims doubt any mosque will wilfully countenance such heavy-handed state-backed intervention, while the Telegraph doesn't think "moderate Muslims" are capable of pushing reform far enough.

Those are flimsy reasons to bash MINAB. Mosques - unlike many other places of worship - can be fairly insular in character and practice. To push for practical reform - especially in terms of fiscal transparency and more space for women - seems to me a no-brainer. And it must be Muslims who push for these changes, since only Muslims can, with any success, force reform in their own institutions.

There remain, however, plenty of reasons to be sceptical, three of which I think are most important:

(1) The proposed reforms, though well-intentioned, are as much targeted at the general public as at minority communities. They strive to produce an image of a government with its sleeves rolled up, informed and engaged. But even if mosques that sign up to MINAB's code of conduct become more credible in the eyes of the wider public, they may very well lose credibility within their respective communities. For all intents and purposes, MINAB is an arm of the state. Radical material and radical voices are readily available outside mosques. The disillusioned could be driven away from mosques, to channels of radicalisation even less available to scrutiny, even more invisible to mainstream civil society.

(2) Tackling radicalisation requires more than a focus on cultural sites like mosques. MINAB's efforts will produce little if nothing is done to address other factors like high unemployment in Muslim communities, poor urban planning that encourages ghettofication, the rise of the anti-immigrant right, and, dare-I-say-it, the sense of "grievance" that grows from British foreign policy (I'm not necessarily calling for changes in foreign policy, but just the serious recognition that what Britain does abroad affects what Britons do at home).

(3) Lastly, and I think most tragically, initiatives like MINAB are part of the reason why state-backed multiculturalism in the UK is so beleaguered and maligned. MINAB continues the unfortunate British tradition of making religious establishments the arbiters of its minority communities, thereby re-enforcing religious separatism. I agree with Ayaan Hirsi Ali (not something I would often do) when she speaks out against the northern European habit of creating "Muslim and non-Muslim citizens" (of course, you don't go about undermining that binary by engaging in a whole-scale attack on normative Islam, as Hirsi Ali would have us do). There is a wide gulf between the deeply-flawed monocultural laicité of France and the patronising kow-towing to religious "community leaders" here in the UK. But that gulf needs to be filled by serious investigation, debate and lastly - and gingerly - policy.

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The perils of oversight, Kanishk Tharoor