Current dangers to British multiculturalism

Guardian News Service, London

They are stories which cannot fail to set the mind racing. All this week, the news has been full of the tales of British-born Muslims going to fight for the Taliban in Afghanistan; three of them, our fellow citizens, are reported to have died there. The unmistakably British accents of men filmed in Pakistan talking of their desire to fight with the Taliban provide dramatic television; most arresting of all is the declaration that their duty to Islam overrides their duty to Britain. Not surprisingly, such images prompt demands that these men be prosecuted for treason or stripped of British nationality.

But this tale of national betrayal is far less straightforward than it appears. First, there are very few facts to support the story put out by al-Muhajiroun, a tiny organization with a long history of distorting the truth to promote itself. Yes, one man did die -- but in Pakistan and there is no evidence he had been to Afghanistan.

The real truth may be that a tiny but noisy handful of British-born Muslims may have traveled to Pakistan, but the indications are that the Taliban do not want their help. Second, as a result, it is not easy to say what should be done to punish this errant group; to try to prosecute them for treason -- which still carries the death penalty in the UK -- raises a host of legal and political problems, from the difficulty of collecting reliable evidence to the undesirability of giving such a group a platform in court.

So why does a story which involves a tiny number of the more than 2 million Muslims living in the UK generate such interest? It is inevitable, in a time of conflict and anxiety, that societies develop heightened sensitivity towards the potential for fifth columns. Emotions can be whipped up, as numerous historical antecedents show -- for example, the internment of Japanese-Americans in the U.S. in the second world war.

Since Sept. 11, the strain on relations between Muslim minorities and non-Muslims in the west has been very evident -- from airline passengers of Arab appearance being removed from flights in the U.S. to the spitting and name-calling which many British Muslims have had to endure. These latest stories will only exacerbate the tensions further.

The fabric of British multiculturalism is facing what is likely to prove the biggest challenge since the Satanic Verses. In contrast to the rest of the British population, there is near- unanimous opposition within the Muslim community to the bombing of Afghanistan. How vocal, and more, could such opposition become? And, in turn, how might that fuel the hostility of some sections of white Britain towards Muslims? These are questions on which community leaders in towns such as Bradford, Burnley and Oldham are trying to keep the lid, hoping that a short war will ease the pressure.

What is unarguable is that the international crisis is making much more difficult the hard grist of developing an integrated (though not assimilated) multicultural society through education, employment and housing policies. It is also underlining the importance of inculcating a concept of British citizenship which underpins ethnic and religious affiliation, as proposed by David Blunkett last week.

We need to stay alert to the fact that the interests of the Muslim fringe dovetail with a rightwing opposition to multiculturalism. This may perturb the majority of enlightened opinion, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, which recognizes that multiculturalism is not a choice, but a fact of life and a source of mutual enrichment in 21st-century Britain, but it is not yet a cause for national panic.