Dilemma of the moderates

Jeevan Vasagar Guardian News Service London

A week before the bombardment of Afghanistan began last October, Tony Blair invited a selection of Muslim leaders to Downing Street to win their support.

His guests knew they were in a no-win situation: Accept the invitation and risk being labeled a sell-out for supporting the war; turn it down and lose any influence they might wield with the government.

"It looks like we're all lined up here to be shot," quipped Labour member of the House of Lords Pola Uddin as she stood alongside the prime minister for the photocall.

Among those outside Downing Street were representatives of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), launched in November 1997 in the biggest attempt to date to give moderate Muslims a national voice.

Drawing on support from a network of mosques and community groups, its leaders aim to combat the exaggerated media profile of the fundamentalists while lobbying the government on subjects like faith schools. But they have been criticized for not condemning the war more strongly, and, some say, for failing to represent the sheer variety of a community that embraces dozens of ethnic groups.

In an editorial timed to coincide with the MCB's annual meeting in April, the Muslim magazine Q-News dismissed "the government's favorite Muslim umbrella organization" as unrepresentative and irrelevant. Its editor, Fuad Nahdi, said: "In Britain we have 56 nationalities of Muslims, who speak over 100 languages - it's not fair for anybody to consider anybody to be representative. Why does the government expect to have one Muslim body?

Lady Uddin believes the council's leadership is too male and too narrow to reflect what is going on in the Muslim community: "You see very few people who are British Muslims in public roles, very few people who are MPs, in the Lords, heading large organizations ... (so) the government has been forced to take on board the MCB as a representative body. I don't think that it is representative."

Meanwhile, since the eruption of the latest Middle East crisis, Jewish leaders have accused the Muslim group of supporting terrorism. The MCB rejects the charge, but the accusation illustrates how an emotive subject like the intifada puts moderate Muslims on the rack. Caught between the demands of Muslim radicals and the need to appease mainstream British opinion, every action and every word must be weighed with care.

Iqbal Sacranie, the council's secretary general, is uncomfortable when pressed on the subject of suicide bombings. Though condemning attacks on civilians, he said: "There's a war going on between Israel and Palestine. These people have no tanks, no fighter planes, the only things they are left with is stones and their lives."

Central to Muslim thought is the idea of the "ummah"; the global community of believers who owe loyalty to each other cutting against the notion of loyalty to a nation state. This conflict of loyalties was most painfully felt by British Muslims when explosives started to drop on Afghanistan last year, some of them missiles fired from British submarines. "People were saying we shouldn't talk to the government at all," Sacranie said. "They were saying that Muslims should take some sort of action, go out on strike."

In the end, the MCB expressed measured condemnation of the military action, and urging peaceful protest.

Whether on the brink of war or in calmer times, speaking for the majority of British Muslims entails bringing together a community that has never before been united. Previous attempts, such as the Muslim Parliament, have stalled amid splits and factionalism.

The catalyst for the creation of an umbrella group was the Rushdie affair, a moment without precedent which drew together the leaders of the various Muslim groups. The row over the Satanic Verses gave Muslims a clear sense of themselves as a faith community. Incidents of Islamaphobia strengthened that.

In one notorious case, a Rotherham employer said he did not want Muslims in his factory because he saw them as extremists. This spurred demands for legislation covering religious prejudice after a tribunal ruled that discrimination against Muslims was not covered by the Race Relations Act.

Another longstanding aim is the granting of state funding to faith schools, and the MCB cites a proposed increase in the number of such schools as evidence of its success at canvassing government.

"The more radical element say there is no point working in the system, they won't listen to you," said Inayat Bunglawala, the MCB's media director. "The fact is that the government does listen."

Re sponding to criticism that the council does not cast its net widely enough, he admitted: "We need to involve the Turkish community, and the Kurdish community. Women's representation has always been an issue, not just for us, but all political parties. Stereotype

"Very often the stereotype of Islam is of a patriarchal society. (But) some of our most articulate spokespeople are women." Sarah Joseph, an Islamic affairs consultant and MCB supporter, says male domination reflects the prejudices of the mosque committees which make up the council's power base.

"It's an issue that goes right to the roots of our community," she said. "And it's not going to change overnight. I do feel that this leadership have always tried very hard to get women involved, going against the grain of many of the mosque organizations which it represents.

"If you look at the mosque organizations, they are all male dominated, when they send their representatives, they send male representatives. The MCB has done its utmost to try to attach itself to many of the women's organizations."

That the MCB has steered through choppy waters to survive the past five years is an achievement in itself. But if it fails to spread its wings and draw wider support from grassroots opinion, this latest attempt to give Muslims a collective voice will wither away. Ultimately, the leadership says, this goal will always be closer to their hearts than keeping Blair sweet.

Their balancing act over the war did not just leave the radicals unsatisfied; it was unlikely to have pleased a government which sought accommodation with the Muslim leadership.

Bunglawala, the media director, said: "September 11 showed that the MCB could not be manipulated, it would always be true to the Muslim community, otherwise we're nothing. We didn't come into this to betray our own people."