Remaking multiculturalism after 7/7 Tariq Modood – openDemocracy
On openDemocracy.net an article by Tariq Modood: Remaking multiculturalism after 7/7
In this article he makes a plea for re-inventing multiculturalism that includes a strong sense of ‘Britishness’ which includes the Muslims.
Britain’s multicultural model is held responsible for the London bombs of July 2005. Rather, says Tariq Modood, it needs to be extended to a “politics of equal respect”� that includes Britain’s Muslims in a new, shared sense of national belonging.
In spring 2005, I published a book Multicultural Politics: Racism, Ethnicity and Muslims in Britain which argued that by making progress towards the goal of multicultural equality and acceptance, and embracing plural ways of belonging to Britain, we in Britain were developing a ‘multicultural Britishness’�.
The flyer for the American edition claimed:
‘If an Islam-West divide is to be avoided in our time, Modood suggests, then Britain, with its relatively successful ethnic pluralism and its easygoing attitude toward religion, will provide a particularly revealing case and promising site for understanding.’
Such optimism would have struck some people as foolish at any time, but after the London bombings of 7 July and the abortive bombings of 21 July, it must strike many more as completely misguided. In particular, the fact that most of the individuals involved were born and/or brought up in Britain “a country that had given them or their parents a refuge from persecution, fear or poverty and a guarantee of freedom of worship ” has led many analysts, observers, intellectuals and opinion-formers to conclude that multiculturalism has failed; even worse, that it can be blamed for the bombings.
