Tangled in Terror: Uprooting Islamophobia (Outspoken by Pluto) by Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan

Author:Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan [Manzoor-Khan, Suhaiymah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pluto Press
Published: 2022-03-20T11:00:00+00:00

British values

In 2014, six years after the CCTV surveillance of Birmingham, national newspapers claimed the city was facing a ‘separatist plot’ by ‘conservative and hard-line men’ of Pakistani heritage to ‘Islamicise’ schools.10 The council had received a photocopy of what appeared to be correspondence between Muslims conspiring to take over schools, titled Operation Trojan Horse. When the letter was leaked to media, it was quickly discredited as a hoax, but journalists still scrambled for racist headlines and it prompted government enquiries, school inspections and court hearings because the notion of ‘Islamising’ was linked directly to concerns of radicalisation.11

Though eventually the court case claiming that students were being radicalised was entirely dropped, by that time the media narrative was established. Teachers and parents caught in the affair never got a chance to clear their names even though the spectacle turned one of the most improving schools in England, serving one of the most disadvantaged constituencies, into a ‘failing’ school that lost its leading teachers. The pupils whose futures were sacrificed to the appetite of racist journalists and politicians were nobody’s concern. Instead, despite never existing, the ‘Trojan Horse Affair’ was used to reinforce the trope of fanatic Muslim Pakistani men. Further, it prompted another bout of concern over the so-called failure of integration, prompting another government review.

The new review into social integration was conducted by Dame Louise Casey who identified that the central barrier to an integrated Britain was ‘cultural and religious practices in communities that are not only holding some of our citizens back but run contrary to British values and sometimes our laws’.12 This regurgitated Cantle’s thesis, but Casey drew a more explicit connection between cultural and religious Others’ segregation, ‘lack’ of Britishness, and criminality. For instance, she highlighted Blackburn, Birmingham, Burnley and Bradford as areas of high ‘Pakistani and Bangladeshi’ residential ‘segregation’ (meaning Muslim by conflation, and to the erasure of other Muslim communities) which she deemed a problem because ‘areas with ethnic concentration . . . lead to lower identification with Britain’.13 No comparable concern was raised about areas with concentrations of white people having lower identification with Britain. So presumably white people are born with Britishness already inside them.

Indeed, British values had been defined that year as ‘democracy, rule of law, individual liberty, equality, freedom of speech, and tolerance’.14 As the next chapter explores, the government define Extremism as ‘opposition to’ British values, therefore racial Others arguably pose a criminal threat until we learn them. But since the values themselves are racialised as white, we are suspended in a state of eternal suspicion because most of us cannot learn our way out of being racialised without paying a high cost. This exposes Britain’s myth of integration. Despite the rhetoric, racial Others cannot be absorbed or accepted into Britishness without destabilising the colonial idea of civilisational superiority that Britain is born from. Therefore, while being commanded to integrate on the one hand, racialised people are deliberately excluded from the nation on the other.

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