Segregated Britain. Farhaan Wali
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majority and Muslim community. In many ways, these explosive events seem to fuel Muslim dislocation and thus impede their political and socio-economic integration.
The above issues do bring some important contextual debates to the surface. A recurring theme amongst Muslim experiences in Britain appears to revolve around discrimination and stigmatisation. The European Monitoring Centre further strengthened this on racism and xenophobia (2006, p. 110), which stated: ‘it is evident that Muslims often experience various levels of discrimination and marginalisation in employment, education and housing, and are also victims of negative stereotyping and prejudicial attitudes’. The sense of exclusion brought about by social discrimination may reinforce a perception that the white majority does not entirely accept Muslims. As Wiktorowicz (2004) suggests, the experience of racism and Islamophobia has impelled some young Muslims to re-evaluate their identity and how it relates to the broader society. Therefore, some young Muslims interpret their negative social experiences in a seemingly positive light (Wali, 2013). In other words, segregation from British society provides young Muslims with an idealised sense of community, while ←21 | 22→explaining that their problem is the consequence of British society and its unequal power structures.
Muslim Enclaves, Segregation and Belongingness
The word Muslim enclave conjures many adverse social reactions and stereotypes. From the outside, a Muslim enclave is a distinct social space standing apart from the wider society. This begs the question, what aspect ‘stands apart’? Some have suggested Muslim enclaves reflect economic and structural disparities; inevitably, triggering social isolation (McRoy, 2006). In a broader sense, many politicians and media commentators often single out particular items of clothing, like the burka, as an example of segregation. In 2006, Jack Straw’s comments about Muslim women who wear the veil trigged mass debate and controversy. He insisted the burka, concealing the face, was a ‘visible statement of separation and of difference’ (The Guardian, 6 November 2006). Unfortunately, his comments greatly simplify the complexity of segregation within the United Kingdom. This implies that segregation occurs at an individual level. Therefore, a person decides to separate from the dominant culture to preserve and safeguard his or her own cultural identity. There is one slight limitation to this paradigm. Identity is often bound to collective life and social experience (Hockey and James, 2017).
In the East End of London, for instance, I discovered that people used the social space as a means to construct different modes of identity. There are many variations among the residents of the East End. Some have lived there for over sixty years, while others have just newly arrived. Most of the residents I spoke to in the East End described themselves as British nationals. In theory, this should be a positive sign, as an individual’s nationality should have some form of impact on how they think and act. As Turner (1987) surmised, an individual is trigged to think, feel and act in accordance with his personal, family or national ‘level of self’. In the East End, there are multiple-ethnic groups visible, with each group and ←22 | 23→individual belonging to different nationalities. In the national context of the UK, a lack of national belonging has supposedly stimulated Muslim segregation. Some members of the East End seemingly sought out separation, promoting Muslim homogeneity to build a distinct faith community.
As a result, the debate concerning Muslim national belonging has gained considerable coverage in recent years, especially after the 2001 race riots in the north of England. According to Bhabha (1994), legal citizenship does not entail acceptance or inclusion in the dominant culture. This view asserts that social ties dictate the levels of belongingness individual’s experience, especially within the national context. This means geographic space, like enclaves, can play a role in exacerbating exclusion. Ultimately, from a minority perspective, the notion of ‘Britishness’, and national belonging, are extremely vague and ill- defined notions. Therefore, constructing a sense of belonging is not a homogenous process; rather, individuals may construct belonging in different and diverse ways. There are multiple modes of belonging, which means one should not ignore different ethnic backgrounds, because these reflect different social contexts. Thus, a white English Christian may construct ‘Britishness’ centred on formulations of whiteness and Christianity. These identity-types will make it extremely difficult for ethnic minorities to identify with this discursive criterion of national belongingness. If these attributes are associated with Britishness, then it is not surprising that the vast majority of the Muslims I spoke to felt the ‘native’ population were not their people. Unfortunately, the inability to frame national belongingness has fostered segregation within some Muslim communities, because those who seemingly fall outside of the racial and religious boundaries of Britishness are deemed ‘foreign’ (non-native).
Is there a model of national belonging that can work? Some academics have advocated the notion of ‘differentiated’ belonging, which in simple terms recognises communal difference (Taylor, 1992). The outdated ‘affirmative’ belonging model had a tendency to impose a homogenous approach to national belonging, shaped around vague ideas and values (e.g. British values). In contrast, differentiated belonging seeks to redefine the relationship between the modern state and ethnonational groups. This type of model gives individuals and groups the opportunity to select multiple forms of belonging to the nation-state. This is designed to accommodate ←23 | 24→what Taylor (1992) describes as ‘deep diversity’. In the British context, this does not necessarily translate into granting special group rights to minority groups; instead, it is about constructing different notions of ethnicity and citizenship (e.g. British Muslim, British Pakistani and so on). As I discovered during my fieldwork, enclave residents tried to engage with their national belongingness by using different local and national identity-types, which were often rooted in ethnicity, culture and religion. The lack of identity homogeneity within enclaves created difficulties relating to the state. In simple terms, when the residents I spoke to encountered host discrimination, it stimulated a weakening of national belongingness and encouraged segregation.
Unfortunately, differentiated-based models of belonging struggle to accommodate social conflict. This model asserts that even if minority groups are perceived as non-native by the wider society, they can still feel a sense of belonging if they maintain social ties with the host population. Carrillo-Rowe (2005, p. 33) defines this as ‘reverse-interpellation’. This formulation can be problematic as it creates belongingness through conceptions of space. Thus, 71.3 per cent of East End Muslims that I interviewed preferred being described as Londoners; yet, struggled with notions of Englishness and Britishness (0.9 per cent and 27.8). As a result, according to Peucker (2016), the Muslim community is not willing to give up its ethno-religious group status when engaging with the state. A possible explanation for this is provided by Anderson (2006) in his book imagined communities. He suggests, in the pre-modern period, the social structure of the state was divided into different groups (e.g. castes, tribes and so on). With the advent of the modern nation-state, the individual is no longer connected to the state through social group membership but instead represent free and equal individual citizens. This is where British Muslims seemingly struggle to construct a connection with the state. Some Muslim communities are not willing to transcend their ethno-religious communal bonds, which they supposedly must give up in order to function as individual citizens. As Parekh (2000, p. 181) explains, to be ‘a citizen is to transcend one’s ethnic, religious and other particularities, and to think and act as a member of a political community’. This makes it somewhat inherently difficult for some ←24 | 25→minority groups to dissolve their community associations and merge with the state’s national identity.
As mentioned, most East End Muslims happily classify themselves as Londoners. They share a geographic context with fellow non-Muslims residing within the city of London. However, this bond does not transcend the local, limiting the sense of belonging to the broader national context. As a result, the vast majority of Muslims I spoke to in the East End of London constructed national belonging as a legal entitlement, giving them membership and rights as a UK citizen. This negates belonging, which is stripped away when seeking only legal recognition and membership. This is why Muslim belongingness has been strongly questioned, as it seems they may lack attachment to national identity. However, as I have already discussed, modern Britain is not homogenous, and thus national identity has to be framed in a way that intersects different communities. In the Muslim enclaves I encountered, belongingness started with the immediate family and community connections,