We are pretty used to it here in the States. Whatever the reason, we accept labeling people as German-American, Japanese-American, Indian-American, etc. We are at once comfortable with the identity inherited from our ancestors as well as that acquired from our new home (even if it’s been are only home). Or perhaps, a hyphenated-identity is how it has always been and it’s too late to fight such convention. Not so in the UK where folks are raising a storm. MSNBC reports:
Inayat Bunglawala was born in northwest England, speaks English as his native language and only once visited his ancestral homeland, India.
That makes him bridle at a proposal being floated in the government to give members of minorities hyphenated identities — he would be Indian-British — to strengthen their bond to Britain.
The idea “simply makes no sense,” the 36-year-old said. “I am 100 percent British.”
The British government is discussing a variety of ways to improve community cohesion after last month’s bombing attacks, and it was not clear in what ways such a label might be used. But minority groups were angry at the very idea that they need a new identity label to tie them closer to a country that has been the only home many of them know.
Who the hell suggested such a thing in the first place?
A spokesman for the Home Office, who like all British civil servants is barred from being quoted by name, said that the idea of creating a new double-barreled identity label is not a government initiative at this stage and there are no clear outlines of how it would work.The spokesman said it had been raised by Muslims during meetings between the Home Office minister and senior Muslim leaders.
But on Monday, minority groups criticized the idea. “What is being proposed is divisive … it would create a lower strata of British,” said Manzoor Moghal, chairman of the Muslim Forum.
Of course, implementing such a change in British society in response to last months attacks is more than self-defeating. It would just serve to futher isolate people and fan the flames of division. It’s widely thought that this proposal will fail. Reaching back a bit into history we can see other stupid “identity tests”:
The former Conservative Party lawmaker Norman Tebbitt sparked wide criticism when he declared in 1990 that the “cricket test” — observing what teams Britons support in a game widely popular at home and in former British colonies — was a good way to determine where true loyalties lie.
Related thought:
There was a time when the Irish and Italians, were referred to as being of “questionable” race-their “whiteness”/equality in US was not settled. Somehow they all became “white”- a new book is coming out about this topic; the author points out how we lost the chance to become a race-less society. If all those “questionable” folks had stuck together, maybe US would be different now!
You mean in the sense that everybody could become ‘white’, even if they were brown? Or in the sense that colour/race would lose its meaning, therefore removing all impulses towards community/identity politics?
So what, like in their Passports, they are now going to stamp it as Inayat Bunglawala – Indian Britsh? And pray, why stop at that. Why not Indian-Muslim-born-in-Lahore(now Pakistan)-raised-in-Britain. Now, that would be more direct, ain’t it?
my ass is brown, but i bleed red, white and blue baby….
Pah! That’s nothing. I keep kangaroos and have a cricket pitch in my backyard, that’s how loyal an Aussie I am. See? No gobi or foreign values here, just meat pies and the separation of church and state, matey.
Actually, I object to the hyphenated identity thing, but I also get pretty peed with the “I’m 100% [insert name of country here]”. Why do people have to jump through these hoops and do these somersaults (I’m not suggesting, razib, that this is your position)? I’m kinda over it.
We don’t seem to do hyphens here, though. We just get weird constructions like “an Australian, of Vietnamese heritage”, or “the Lebanese-born Australian citizen”, etc.
Mr. Bunglawala’s views are, well, slightly more complicated than the MSNBC excerpt in the post indicates. FWIW, from the Independent:
Inayat Bunglawala, senior spokesman from the Muslim Council of Britain said “it makes no sense” to re-categorise British citizens in this way and that it could only be reductive. Mr Bunglawala said he would be more inclined to support a faith-based label, such as “British Muslim”.
I’m not quite sure why ‘British Muslim’ is any less ‘reductive’…I leave that as an exercise for the reader, as they say. In any case, here’s the link
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/article304647.ece
Kumar
Bunglawala speaks with forked tongue:
The reason Bunglawala does not want to be known as British-Indian and rejects his ethnic identity is because he is part of the Islamic political movement in Britain and rejects any association with Indian infidels that this would imply – the project of the Muslim Council of Britain and their associates has been, for the last twenty years, to privelige religion over race as the primary marker in identity politics. Put crudely, Bunglawala does not want to be associated with Hindus and Sikhs and assents to Ummah politics – he has no problem with the hyphenated identity of Muslim-British, as he states above.
So this is a lot of hypocrisy, false outrage and clumsy thinking – and lots of people dont recognise it. Ummah politics and the priveliging of the religious identity over all others is part of the reason for the problems we see know – Muslim-British Politics offers far more scope for victim politics, hypocrisy, division than a simple harmless description based on ethnic lines (which is secular and neutral in its essence) – but that would be a threat to the Ummah politics of Bunglawala and the Muslim politicians of Britain who are communalist in their outlook – hence the blustering spluttering hypocrisy of the response.
So British-Pakistani is divisive, but British-Muslim is not – it seems some hyphens are holy and some not – especially if they are talked about it terms of the sanctifying balm of religion – what a hypocrite!
I am glad I am here to put these things in their proper context for all you Americans – and it is largely bollocks because despite what the report and the soundbiters say – hyphenated identities are a spontaneous reality in Britain – Black British – British-Indian – people describe themselves like this all the time – no big deal.
I’m interested: should ‘race’ be “the primary marker in identity politics”?
halwa puri
What do you think? Tell us your thoughts.
Well, as an interested observer, I’ve got serious issues with ummah politics too. But as a new grand narrative of liberation, offering a utopian vision and a set of strategies for action (not all are violent), I can see its appeal.
‘Race’ as a primary identity just doesn’t grip my imagination, and I’m pretty convinced that ‘race’, as a construct, has been thoroughly destabilised. Basically I’m not sure, which is why I’m asking you, 😉 but the politics of being a Punjabi, or of being an Indian, just leave me cold. As one from a family which left before partition, even the question of Indianness is somewhat unresolved, and I end up being merely ‘Indian’ by default because the place they left is now in the Republic of India. Which leaves me with ‘South Asian’, but this debate’s been done, and I don’t want to repeat it. My gist is: I’m not sure of the practical utility of organising on the basis of racial identities, and it leaves a person having to make no-win choices, and surely it entrenches racial bargaining in the political process.
I don’t really see this as much of an alternative, to be honest.
halwa puri
I dont care about the nuances of what individuals call themselves at the end of the day – but I know that Bunglawala is a hypocrite and the Ummah politics which have been cultivated in the last twenty years has helped to take us to the level of suicide bombers born and raised in England – that is something none of the communalist Muslim leaders in Britain do not face up to, and that is my point – especially annoying when they diss one type of hyphenated identity but assert that religious hyphenated identity is a good thing – give me a break you hypocrites.
Are you being serious? Utopian vision? What utopian vision? Being ruled by a Caliphate where all infidels are opressed and homosexuals are stoned to death? Do you find that to be a type of Utopia that people should strive towards? I’m sorry mate but it sounds more like a DYSTOPIA to me and what it tells you about the attitudes of people who strive towards that should be enough to dissuade you from romanticising such a ‘utopian’ vision.
I love that RSS Hindutva vision of Ram Raj – I can see the wonders of its Utopian Vision yeah!
The British National Party has a nice Utopian vision for Britain too – put all the Jews in gas chambers make the black people work as slaves and imprison all the Asians too – yeah – great vision of Utopia that for marginalised working class white people to strive towards – can you see the future? Its so bright!
Well, to start with this:
Mate (since we’re doing the mate thing, why are we doing it?), obviously this is not how ummah politics wins anyone over, unless they are die-hard, loony moralists who get off on violent stoning fantasies. And of course I don’t hold it up as some kind of ideal, I’m not looking forward to dhimmi-hood. But loads of Islamists would say to you that under a new global caliphate, there’d be liberation from the excesses of market capitalism (yes, I’ve heard this, often), imperialism, inequality, etc. Islamism’s got a welfarist edge, interestingly, as well as it’s anti-imperialist resonances, and the harking back to early Medina in the rhetoric really seems to have some pull. Combine that with a purportedly perfect and revealed system of law, and that’s what I mean by utopia. Of course saying this doesn’t mean I support it, it means I can see the potential political appeal, which it obviously has, or kids wouldn’t strap bombs to themselves.
If that’s the case, how are people to organise? On what basis are they drawn together? This is the perennial problem with identity politics, isn’t it?
Yeah I know what the appeal of Islamist politics is to those who dream of Master Race fantasies – I can also see the appeal of Khalistan and the Pure Aryan Nation and Ram Raj – so what? There is no easy demarcation between those who propose essentially fascist solutions to societal problems – working ‘peacefully’ towards it is rhetorics and sophistry – the idea that Islamism is an ‘anti imperialist’ ideology is laughable – as are all words its proponents use to describe itself – such as ‘justice’ and ‘liberation’ – these words become meaningless when they are used in the defence of such ideology – they have no true meaning because they are twisted by the politics they are employed to serve.
The ‘so what’ is that these are the politics pulling Muslims away from ‘race’ in Britain (and elsewhere), as you argue yourself. In the face of this pull, what does ‘race’ have to offer? I can’t see much, and again, that’s why I’m asking you. By the way, I think there are parallels in Hinduism and Sikhism, just like you do. Every community seems to me to be out to better define its boundaries, and make them sharper and harder. I wish this wasn’t happening.
I don’t think that Islamists are fascists, but I’ve posted that elsewhere. But you would also deny them their basic human faculties in making political choices. I think that’s a mistake. But leaving that aside, my point is that there is nothing much out there competing with this narrative of liberation in the marketplace of political ideas. Don’t you think that’s a really important problem?
halwa puri
I cant be bothered – I have nothing more to say on this – everything is up there in my words – nothing to add – seriously – I love the way some people have true sympathy for communalism and make excuses for it – its funny more than anything else – but I really dont have anything more to say about it, nothing to add.
It’s not always the minority group taht pusghes for hyphenated identity. Sometimes the majoroty wants the minority to be hyphenated.
There’s a (not-so) old Canadian joke about sequential Canadian headlines when Ben Johnson won the 1988 100 meter Gold medal:
Headline one: Canadian wins Gold medal!
Headline two: Jamaican-Canadian under suspicion of steroids!
Headline three: Jamaican tests postive for steriod use!
Punjabi Boy, I know plenty of Indian Muslims in Britain. I have very close relatives there and I have stayed in UK long enough to know that Bunglawala does not speak for the majority.
PB, I see you have leapt to the conclusion that I’m supporting communalism. I actually have nothing but disdain for it. My point: I don’t share the a priori assumption that ‘race’ is a better organising principle than ummah. Race isn’t better, it’s just as bad, historically and potentially. And to top it all off, it’s totally unsexy, it has not much appeal. I don’t think it’s funny at all, in fact I wish there were better political alternatives on offer.
But then, I thought I made that pretty clear.
halwa puri
Congratulations!
PB: Why the hostility? You haven’t answered my question either. Why ‘race’? Fair question, I think.
HP
No hostility – just sarcasm – not the same thing.
I have answered your question – read through my posts and the answer is there.
PB: You mean this?
Secular and neutral is all I’m getting here. Secular I can appreciate (except in many contexts ethnicity and religion are conflated, this is a major problem), but neutral? Race is neutral now? I’m just not following this one. I’ve lived in two national contexts in which ‘race’ has not been neutral at all, but the cause of much angst, jockeying, bargaining, vilification and bloodletting. I didn’t think ‘race’ as a primary marker of identity was any less problematic in Britain?
for the record I am against any hyphenated identity of any type. If I consider myself Indian regardless of where I live, then that’s what I am. If another Indian considers himself American, than so be it. I think the hyphenation craze is a way for the majority in any nation to have some affirmation that those minorities aren’t out to get them and do indeed ‘belong’ or ‘fit’ into their culture.
Identity of oneself is very related to the environment you’re in at the time. In the US I consider myself Indian, bcuz my upbringing and my mindset is more Indianized however, I would hope that my American traits stand out as a given (I live here so you would assume I follow most cultural norms). But when I’m in India, obviously over there I’m more American than I am true “indian”….but I share enough indian values and cultural norms that I would assume and hope that they would be taken into acct.
We need a brit to weigh in here. I know that religion has long been an accepted label for different kinds of brits. We tend to forget how large a split there was between Catholics and Protestants, but this was a country that had a civil war. The Puritans came from somewhere, remember? Similarly, Catholics were largely excluded from power for a while.
My point is that now, people recognize that people of different religions are british. I think they might find it harder to recognize people of different races as British. Despite England’s long history of immigration, and the long periods in which domestic minorities were seen as others, now people have a very convenient notion of the UK has being monoracial. I don’t know how well hyphenation would work …
Hyphens are Band-Aids. Try expanding the definition of “British” rather than dividing through hyphenation.
I’ve seen several articles point out this superficial difference between Britain and the US (that in the US, minorities are hyphenated Americans but that in Britain, they are not “British” at all)– as if it means something obvious. Of course this is an issue but not about words.
I am an American. Though I am a “brown American of South Asian origin”, I expect others to perceive me to be an American. If misperceived, I feel I have a historical right to insist upon being accepted as an American. Semantics and stupidly phrased questions aside– people seem to get that for the most part. It seems like a far different battle for the browns in Britain, for one thing it is a battle. More than words.
seeing the exchange between PB and hp i tend to emotionally side with PB, though i can see the substantive points that hp is making. hp, i think the problem PB has that you seem to be willing to rationally extend the dignity of a thought experiment to the ummah-caliphal vision that you wouldn’t extend to, for example, a racialist nordic or hindutva hegemony. i also believe that one should conceive of and consider alternatives that one might personally consider abhorrent to explore the implications, but the relative sanguinity of some people, who would be hostile to hindu or white racist communalism, to islamic dominionism strikes some of us as a bit hypocritical. if those who argue that we should examine islamists in light of their own values in a detached fashion (i am not not saying this is you, i am projecting an abstract idealized individual here) made the same argument in the context of racialist underclass whites or hindu supremacists, to understand the “root causes,” i suspect the hypocrisy would be less rank in our perception.
also, you say that islam can be anti-imperialistic and that it has welfarist orientations. 1) the welfarist orientation is for muslims, i am pretty sure that the standard 4 schools of sunni shariat and the shia assume dhimmis would take care of their own. and many right-wing racialist parties also rail against deracinating capitalism (see the party in the coalition denmark, which has a lot of working class support), but i don’t see many praising their “good side.”
in the end, i thiink if people want to be rational and emotionlessly entertain ideas about the more pre-post-modern orientations of islam, i don’t see why they don’t extend the same ‘courtesy’ to reactionary racial nationalisms which hark back to the ‘good old days.’ many islamists argue that christianity and judaism would do better under dhimmititude than it is doing now, after all, egyptian christians are much more devout than most european christians. similarly, in the USA some neo-segregationists point out that the black illegitimacy rate has gone from 1/4 in the 1960s to 2/3 today.
re: hyphenated identities, everyone has them, even if they are unelucidated. i am american, but i tend to sympathize with fellow secular humanists, or people who are scientifically inclined. for example, the site internet infidels has been following cases like Dr. Younis Shaikh in pakistan for years. now, is a case of relgious persecution of a free thinker the most heinous human rights violations going on in pakistan? no, but you tend to empathize with people who are “like you.” so everyone’s “identity vector” can be decomposed into various components of different magnitudes.
the issues crop up when the government offers particular identities legitimacy. for example, in us browns lobbied for “asian american” status specifically so that we could be included in diversity contract awards given to that group. in some parts of the country at the county level chinese american business lobbies have tried to repeal this acceptance of browns as “asian americans” operationally because
1) they don’t want the pie being broken up into smaller pieces 2) they know there are some empirical-axiomatic grounds to reject an undifferentiated “asian american” identity cluster of east + south asians
now middle eastern people are also lobbying for their own group, because they feel it is unfair that the census and gov. classifies them as white even though they do bear some burden of discrimination (this is especially noticeable in the case of an egyptian who could pass as a black american but was converted to “white” when he put his ethnicity as egyptian). if one studies the history of caste in india one can see a process of “castogenesis” occurring in many parts of the subcontinent when the british starting tabulating detailed censuses in the 19th century. what were once implicit and fluid boundaries became sharply defined and idealized platonic categories. this makes sense, government is in the end a monopology, and the debate can only go so far.
Or in the sense that colour/race would lose its meaning, therefore removing all impulses towards community/identity politics?
HALWA PURI,
YES THIS IS THE POINT AUTHOR HAD!
I’m not quite sure why ‘British Muslim’ is any less ‘reductive’…I leave that as an exercise for the reader, as they say.
WTF?! British Muslim? Who goes around using this? I’ve never heard ppl refer to themselves as nationality + religion in the real world! Maybe this is only done in the media, but that tells you little about a person. I mean, I was born Muslim, but know VERY little about the Koran and don’t practice.
Emma plenty of people here (UK) say they’re British Muslims. To me, it makes no sense.
Yes, I think you’re absolutely right. I guess it’s only that we’re not talking about racist whites or hindu supremacists, the topic is about Muslims. I do think, however, that the appeal of any (abhorrent or otherwise) politics should be analysed in their own terms, otherwise that appeal would never be understood. I actually think that’s the duty of any rigorous and committed secularist, by the way, which I like to think I am. And that is exactly what’s wrong with the “security” discourse which is used to explain the increasing popularity of Islamism, violent or otherwise: it just doesn’t do this.
Yup, I know dhimmis are on their own. I was talking about the welfarist appeal of Islamism to many Muslims. Again, it’s not a matter of ‘praising their “good side”, but of working out what the appeal is. The anti-imperialist pull, by the way, is also important to Hindutva politics, although I’m much more sympathetic to a characterisation of the RSS, specifically, as ‘fascist’, than I am to applying it as a blanket label to all religion-based utopian/dystopian thought projects. Of course the BNP are Nazis, that’s for sure. But I’m not for applying equivalences where I don’t think they exist. All these people are not the same.
So hyphenation means the White indigenous population will be known as “Native-English” or “Indigenous” or perhaps “Aryan” ? Is that how Hazel Blears sees things developing ?
The Americans used to port their immigrants through Ellis Island but that does not seem to be the case here where Britain itself fulfills that role for Europe.
The simple fact is that Municipal Labour Politics has allowed Bantustans to be created at public expense and left tribal leaders to replicate village life in Mirpur in the heart of English (not British because Scotland, Ireland and Wales are marginal to this issue) cities…………
Just look at concentrations of these Bantustans cut off fromm mainstream England and see which Party managed to bag the votes…………….I bet in 97% cases it is Labour.
It is rotten borough territory. we now get Harriet Harman jokingly referred to as Solicitor-General claiming these seats are under-represented because many of the Muslims there are not listed as voters……………..somehow I think the opposite may be the case………..and that matching warm bodies to votes would be a saltuary experience.
The situation in England could not occur unless it had been politically willed to be so……………..trouble is the booby-bombers spoiled this charade and it was kind of hard for Labour to carry on as before when Tube trains explode……………..even Shahid Malik realised this when in the past he would be shooting his mouth off…………………..
These bombers are products of British Comprehensive Schools, of BBC TV, of the general British Sub-Culture…………..this is what you get when hotheads don’t like the way the country runs
Watch Let’s Face It on ARY DIGITAL TV this week at 13:00, the topic is “Are we British Muslims or Muslims in Britain”
• A Muslim charity In Swindon is bidding to run the first Multi-faith Muslim School for Muslim and non-Muslim children and have teachers from different faiths. An hour of the timetable each day would be dedicated to studying Arabic and the Holy Quran. Non-Muslims pupils would be able to be exempted from the lessons, but it is hoped that the majority would choose to stay in class to gain more “insight†into the Islamic faith.
• In my opinion, Multifaith school is not going to be successful because non-Muslim parents would not send their children. In the past, a plan for a Multi-faith secondary school in Westminster for 1000 pupils could not be materialised because faith groups could not come to any agreement. Now even Hindu community has set up state funded school in Harrow. Black community is also thinking of setting up its own school with Black teachers.
• According to David Lammy MP, there are still too many inequalities in the education system which prevents disadvantaged children from applying to study for a degree. British schooling is wholly responsible for the inequalities. A culture of low expectation and a lack of rigour holding these pupils back. Every child must reach his full potential regardless of his background. Justice Secretary Jack Straw MP said British society should be one which recognizes and celebrates differences. One in which we all have an opportunity to flourish, regardless of who we are or where we are from. British schooling has been trying to integrate and assimilate Muslim community through education in the name of integration. The Imams and Masajid have been playing their parts to keep Islamic faith alive, but that is not enough. British schooling does not promote global cohesion. It does not encourage dialogue and increases understanding.
• Bilingual Muslim children need state funded Muslim schools with bilingual Muslim teachers as role models during their developmental periods. They need to learn and be well versed in Standard English to follow the National Curriculum and go for higher studies and research to serve humanity. They need to learn and be well versed in Arabic to recite and understand the Holy Quran. They need to learn and be well versed in Urdu and other community languages to keep in touch with their cultural roots and enjoy the beauty of their literature and poetry. • Iftikhar Ahmad http://www.londonschoolofislamics.org.uk