The conservative case for integrating British Muslims | Dan Mikhaylov
Social conservatives lack an indisputable founding father, compared to their liberal and socialist counterparts. They might disagree on policy, which varies significantly from country to country to reflect local particularities. And yet, their ideology captivates with its comprehensive system of principles. Unwavering commitment to compassion and self-discipline as well as to tradition and duty customarily helps us stand out and adduce intelligent responses to fields as diverse as housing, education, and human rights. The extant balance between localism and social harmony has similarly spared us from compromising to the extent that either distorts our doctrine or turns a blind eye to political necessity.
However, grey areas persist. Addressing them necessitates pragmatism and attention to nuance, since the preferred means to realise our objectives might not necessarily be available. Variation in circumstances cannot prevent us from confronting these problems, if we want to depict social conservatism as a truly sensible choice for the British public and for the younger generations in particular.
To become a viable alternative, it must be relevant to the diverse experiences of those who inhabit the United Kingdom. Only by providing answers to pertinent social issues can our ideology showcase its ideational potency and successfully persuade.
One such moot point is the envisaged position and participation of the 3.5 million UK Muslims in our society, founded on Classical virtues and Christian ethics for continuity between tradition and Britain’s contemporary image and standing and often thought incompatible with Islam and its moral standards.
On the one hand, conservatives avoid campaigning in Muslim neighbourhoods. The former are frequently Labour bastions, with fewer than 10% of Muslims backing the Conservatives in the 2017 general election. Even the Boris Johnson factor accomplished little in those areas two years later. Party politics aside, social conservatism’s exponents object to brokering a truce with Islam for several reasons.
Some confide in the notion of Judaeo-Christian civilisation, others highlight deep-seated cultural differences, as seen in the controversy surrounding Prophet Muhammad’s marriage to Aisha, and the remainder cite the widespread, even if sometimes apocryphal, links to domestic and international terrorism.
On the other hand, ignoring this question is politically insalubrious and potentially suicidal. As Islam constitutes the nation’s fastest-growing religion, its believers are bound to wield influence in British politics of the future. Side-lining them in our socially conservative project resultantly risks hampering the percolation of our ideas into their communities, while also pressuring them to support our ideological rivals or excoriate the system at large.
In short, imagining a national future without formulating some sort of arrangement for UK Muslims is detached from reality. They will not disappear by themselves, and are now part of the national social fabric.
Evidently, an equilibrium must be struck. Although we need not commence indulging Muslims, it behoves us to devise a blueprint to incorporate them into our by and large culturally Christian society. This presupposes concessions: we should demand that they pledge exclusive allegiance to Britain and correspondingly heed our customs and our legal framework, irrespective of their Christian origins.
On our part, we must not succumb to moral relativism and mirror the political left in excusing the wrongdoing occurring in Muslim-heavy areas through differences in norms and perceptions. Rather, our solution must focus on the commonality between fundamental Christian and Islamic tenets. It must convince Muslims that by internalising our commonplace practices, participating in our political and cultural life, and being patriotic towards Britain, they would not fully forego their original identity.
This arrangement has worked in Russia, where numerous Muslim groups have reconciled their Russian and religious loyalties.
This compromise beckons government action. Our domestic Muslim population is predicted to reach 13 million by 2050, whence its electoral significance will only augment. Neglecting them altogether will reduce the likelihood that our policymakers, Muslim themselves or representing areas with many Muslim voters, promulgate socially conservative policies, which align with our Christian weltanschauung.
Integration is needed to counterpoise the radicalisation observed up and down the country, and minimise the chasm between our communities and the Islamic diaspora. Our prisons are already accommodating disproportionately many Muslims, whose percentage in the inmate population is four times their proportion within the civilian population. Our terrorists are mostly domestic as well: the 2017 Westminster attack author, Khalid Masood, the perpetrator of the Manchester bombing, Salman Ramadan Abedi, and three of the four men behind the 7/7 attack were all born in the UK. Once we add this to the growing ghettoisation of Muslim urban areas and consistently low voter turnout, the situation becomes clear– many distrust our system and may evolve into a violent fifth column movement that could subvert our plans for a harmonious society.
Likewise, this stance reflects the prevalent conservative opinion. We are not watering down the definition of what we cherish or our society’s entry requirements, but we acknowledge the value of order and peace. Certainly, we do not condone what is reprehensible in Islam or its civilisation and will not dismiss Wahhabism and intolerance towards minorities; Britishness is incompatible with these phenomena and the sentiments that inspire them.
However, we argue that being a Muslim does not preclude an individual from patriotism, though reconciling these identities inevitably renders British Muslims different to their fellow believers in other countries. The former, we maintain, should share the British culture and recognise that neither Sharia courts, 85 of which operate in the UK illegally, nor such external practices could have any local jurisdiction.
Furthermore, we must keep such increasingly marginal opinions as militant jihad (which metamorphosed into the mainstream Islamic dogma during the Crusades) and any disgusting cultural practices that predated Islam but had come to coexist with it isolated and incapable of taking hold in our society.
Demarcating the rules of cross-religious and cross-communal engagement, we should similarly understand how best to connect with British Muslims. At the educational level, we could foster appreciation for the artistic marvels and life-changing discoveries of early Islamic artisans and scientists, albeit not at the expense of teaching our own culture and heritage.
Likewise, Christian scholars expanded their ecumenical knowledge through cross-cultural exchanges. For instance, Thomas Aquinas’ outlook was influenced by the arguments made by the renowned Persian Sufi scholar, Al-Ghazali, in his The Revival of the Religious Sciences.
This approach has dual significance: it can better educate our non-Muslim children and teenagers about mankind’s history and the role of cross-cultural interaction in driving innovation, whereas their Muslim peers would obtain additional role models and grow more confident in their ability to contribute to Western technological progress and cultural development.
Even more important is reaching out to British Muslims as individuals. As worshippers hardly constitute a uniform, monolithic collective, but rather interpret their faith differently and attach different value to different teachings, accounting for variation makes more sense than reducing the target group to a Weberian ideal-type. Therefore, we should emphasise the foundations that Christians with Muslims and that continue to determine much of our quotidian behaviour. Both demographics champion compassion and charity: the former legitimate it on the basis of loving their neighbours, while the latter are instructed to commit 2.5% of their wealth to aid vulnerable co-religionists in accordance with one of the five Islamic pillars, zakat.
Similarly, they coincide in advocating for modest living and self-discipline: the Quran accords a whole month to spiritual rejuvenation through ceremonial fasting (sawm) at the same time as Christians mirror Jesus during Lent and invoke his statement that “Man shall not live by bread alone” (Matthew 4:4). The Quran stipulates, “Allah will change the condition of a people until they change what is in themselves” (13:11), and believers “persevere and endure” for spiritual self-actualisation (3:200), much like the Parable of the Sower showcases the benefit of retaining loyalty to God in times of hardships and suffering.
For every difference, there exist concrete simulacra in what ideal Christians and Muslims ought to practise, and we must appeal to them. Putting this idea into practice might prima facie appear deliberately ambiguous and irrationally ambitious, and critics would have reasons to argue this.
After all, the Islamic comity of nations is home to traditions, incompatible with our way of life: female genital mutilation and child marriage, to name a few. British conservatives should not indulge those partaking in or condoning these activities.
That said, we are concerned exclusively with British Muslims. At least theoretically, they attend the same schools, visit the same cultural and historical sites, speak the same language, play the same sports, and recognise the same authorities as us.
Conversely, practitioners of the mentioned vile customs live in foreign land and entertain a definition of right and wrong that diverges with ours, whereas UK Muslims could be expected to operate in the same normative background as us willingly and are resultantly capable of smooth assimilation into it.
Our approach consists of presenting a conservative alternative to anti-Western fundamentalism and the Labour Party’s corrosive progressivism. This strategy works, as evidenced by Russia’s experience of integrating its diverse Muslim communities. Currently, 25 million Russians view themselves as Muslims, and are mostly concentrated around the Caucasus and the banks of the river Volga.
Moscow has engendered a versatile and multi-layered plan to integrate its Muslims throughout many centuries of co-existence between them and the Russian majority. Firstly, Russia skilfully converted crises into opportunities to bind its nationalities together by alimenting their patriotic zeal and exploiting this public sentiment for political purposes. Russian colonisation of Siberia resulted in the recruitment of Tatars and Bashkirs into the Cossack regiments sent eastwards to explore and subdue the local territories. During the Napoleonic Wars, these ethnicities reinforced the Russian army with irregulars, whereas Dagestani and Ingush populations staffed the Savage Division, one of Russia’s most notorious regiments of the First World War.
While Britain is fortunate not to wage war with anyone, the coronavirus pandemic may provide the ersatz catalyst for national unity. British Muslim communities have contributed doctors to counter the crisis and in turn benefitted from the NHS and the furlough scheme. At a time when all Britons, no matter their ethnic and religious background, carry the same burden and resist a common enemy, the government should ride the tide and proceed to cultivate amity as well as to laud sacrifice for the nation.
Secondly, Russia has acknowledged the importance of dealing with each community separately and fathoming the particularities. In Tatarstan, it pursued peaceful Russification. By bestowing parity with other aristocrats in the empire to the local nobility, Russia earned a valuable ally to help impose the Russian language and the Western norms on the locals and ultimately engineer what the historian Rafael Khakimov calls a “Euro-Islamic society”. Tatarstan has subsequently trademarked this idiosyncratic combination of Western values and belief in Allah by portraying itself as a cultural bridge between Christian Europe and Islam, thereby securing the right to host such events as the 2013 Universiade and the 2018 FIFA World Cup.
Meanwhile, dealing with the more reactionary groups in the Northern Caucasus, Moscow adjusted its tactics accordingly and focused on divide and rule. Recalling the difficulties of its nineteenth-century colonisation, coupled with the fiasco of the First Chechen War (1991-98), the Putin administration pioneered a strategy of striking deals with certain local powerholders and prompting them to combat rival claimants.
One of these erstwhile warlords is the current governor of Chechnya and now a self-proclaimed custodian of Russian sovereignty, Ramzan Kadyrov, who switched sides following lucrative offers of power consolidation and federal investment in his native region.
According to the Pew Research Center, 76% of Russians perceive Islam favourably, rather than with askance, which strongly suggests that Russia has accomplished far more in this field than the UK, where the highest approval rating recorded by this organisation was a meagre 64%. Of course, the whole situation requires contextualisation, and blind imitation of Russia’s blueprint will disregard the specificities of our case.
Thus, we are not suggesting that Westminster should dump a disproportionate amount of taxpayers’ money to bribe off domestic extremists and their sympathisers, as this is unsustainable and undeniably unpopular praxis. The government would nonetheless benefit from paying more heed to communal leaders up and down the country and soliciting partnerships with moderate authority figures against such malevolent preachers as the Islamist Anjem Choudhary, sentenced for anti-Western propaganda and recruiting men for ISIL in 2016.
More generally, social conservatives could learn from the Russian example to address the issue with a nuanced understanding and adaptability, since a one-size-fits-all approach only threatens to alienate potential allies and sink the ship of an orderly, internally united state, which we seek to construct in this country.
Although Russia’s record is not without blemishes, as demonstrated by the Chechen insurgency and the proliferation of extremist groups in both reaction and counter-reaction to said approach, this further underscores the importance of demarcating a healthy equilibrium between religious heterogeneity and social cohesion. The Soviet Union’s contempt for the indigenous populations of the Northern Caucasus sought to take religion out of the equation, but, unexpectedly for the Kremlin, backfired.
Local discontent materialised in the Nazis successfully mustering as many as eight battalions for the so-called Caucasian-Mohammedan Legion of the SS to fight the Red Army, and recrudesced following the Communist regime’s dissolution in 1991, taking the form of the radical Caucasian Emirate movement. This story is equally educative: our government’s policy will struggle to succeed by ignoring the factor of religion altogether.
When we contemplate solutions to this complex issue, we must stay true to our core principles: to enhance social harmony and order in Britain and to make social conservatism a sensible and accessible choice for the British youth. This is our constitution, one might argue. This mission, therefore, should override our secondary reservations and doubts and inform us of what society must achieve to realise the aforementioned vision of Britain.
Despite profound cultural differences between Christianity, which has shaped Britain’s history, morals, and weltanschauung, and Islam, whose adherents have immigrated from lands that are culturally and geographically distant to the UK, devising a socio-political arrangement for those Muslim communities that call this country their home is an unavoidable precondition for social harmony.
Their integration is desirable: it could stave off domestic extremism, it could enhance their sense of belonging and prompt them to participate more in our social, political, economic, and cultural processes, and it could increase Britain’s social capital. Francis Fukuyama defined social capital in his book, Social Capital and Civil Society, as the norms that enable cooperation between individuals and different societal groups and consequently enable greater productivity, economic growth, and cohesion.
Helping British Muslims discover this common ground, to us, represents a way to strengthen our norms by diffusing them and facilitate positive developments in Britain by encouraging cooperation and reciprocity.
Conservatives have often abstained from this discussion, as carrying out this integration implies pragmatism and compromise, which might not necessarily resonate with their audiences to the extent that would justify them. The ill-founded custom of political teetotalism and our politicos’ predisposition to conniving at domestic radicalism and profuse integrational nihilism, observed in many Muslim communities in Britain, is turning many young Britons towards the wrong sort of orthodoxy– one that renounces patriotism and calls for violent action against the West.
From this premise, our role in this brewing crisis is crystal clear: we must provide these disenchanted youths with a socially conservative alternative, in which they can strike a balance between their British and Muslim identities.
Herein, this alternative should mitigate the social phenomena and dynamics that cause disorder, exacerbate internal divisions, or breed instability. Engaging the Muslim diaspora, and doing so pre-emptively, is in the interest of every social conservative for multiple reasons, and we could examine Russia’s experience of seeking allies within its Muslim communities and customising solutions to maximise the efficacy of its assimilation drive to improve our chances of success, as well.
Between the Scylla of insensitivity to political pressures and the Charybdis of pandering to British Muslims akin to our left-wing counterparts, this solution is by far the most reasonable and balanced attempt at overcoming obstacles on the way to make our country more united and resultantly more prosperous. After all, it presupposes mutual, rather than unilateral compromise and build on what we already have– shared educational establishments, shared cities, and even similarities in religious doctrine.
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