Baroness Warsi, first Muslim woman to serve in a British cabinet, outside Downing Street. Photo: AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis. All rights reserved.Each year, the pilgrimage to the Islamic holy city of Mecca takes place – millions of people from various nationalities descend, and perform the Hajj, the Islamic pilgrimage. As usual, thousands of Muslim Britons joined their co-religionists, and the UK Foreign Office has a consular office in Mecca that assists them. This year, the UK’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia accompanied them – as a pilgrim himself. Her Majesty’s representative, Simon Collis, happens to be a Muslim – an English one, which seemed to take the media thoroughly by surprise. But is it actually as unusual as it seems?
Britain has British Muslims, and Muslims are integrated into British society. Their loyalty might be contested by parts of the right (and the left), regrettably – but generally, it’s now longer controversial to make the argument that Britishness and Islam can be strongly related. After all, there is an established history in the UK around speaking of Britishness as a modern, civic, and less essentialised nationalism – and, as such, can easily incorporate a variety of identities under the rubric of multiculturalism, which often relates identity to institutions and language. In that regard, Britishness is far similar to an American style of civic nationalism – and it’s relatively easy for Muslim identity to exist in that kind of universe.
But, there’s another kind of relationship to explore, which was raised inadvertently by our ambassador’s pilgrimage, as well as two recent conferences held by ‘British Futures’ (‘A Very English Islam’) and in Cambridge, by Cambridge Muslim College. That is the relationship between Englishness and Islam – which, according to people such as the former chair of the Conservative Party, Sayeeda Warsi, and Cambridge University theologian, Dr Timothy Winter, is a very strong relationship indeed. Claiming a positive relationship between Englishness and Islam, rather than simply Britishness and Islam, is a far bolder statement – because traditionally speaking, Englishness hasn’t been conceived as a kind of civic citizen-based nationalism at all. It’s been interpreted far more as an essentialized identity – one that relates to race, and also religion. And in England post-Brexit referendum, particularly with the noticeable rise in anti-Muslim sentiment via right-wing nativist populists, suggesting that Muslims of England could not only be considered British, but English, could be ever more intriguing.
