Global political and economic forces, migration and social change, make living with difference an everyday challenge for millions. Diversity in Question, a joint conference with the UKs Open University and openDemocracy examined why the old ideas for tackling diversity wont work, and how to fix them. Reena Bhavnani warned that a one-size-fits-all solution is a pipedream. Judith Squires retrieved diversity from human resources, to return it to humans. And responding to reverberations of the 7 July 2005 bombings in London, Sami Zubaida and Max Farrar illuminated why multiculturalism will not help us combat or understand suicide terrorism, and what might.
Read on for a summary of key ideas, and links to webcasts of the conference sessions, or skip straight to the webcast here.
Difference and violence
For Sami Zubaida, multiculturalism cannot sooth frictions between Islam and modernity. Modern versions of Islam associated with fundamentalism and terrorism are not cultural imports or artefacts they tend to reject ethnic cultures and their colouring of religion, in favour of a pure Islam derived from scriptures and Prophetic sources. They are culture-free, detached from inherited Islams. The danger of multiculturalism in this context is that, in protecting the notion of cultural integrity, it gives currency to those who would fix cultures and resist the contestation that culture usually embodies, and that modernity requires.
Fundamentalism, whether Christian or Muslim, is a strategy to retrieve lost religious authority, and thus arises in a secularising world and targets the liberated individual of modernity. It is far from an alien experience for Europe: many Europeans are worried about Islam in their midst precisely because it parallels elements in their past which they thought had been combated and overcome. European Muslims do not represent a unique threat. Most surveys carried out in Europe show that a majority of nominal Muslims (60-70%) are non-observant, and of those who are, many are private believers, not involved in political or cultural advocacy. Of those who are active, many are reformists and modernists, while some are indeed salafist and jihadist.
Max Farrar locates the problem in the emergence in British society of young men so far, only non-white young men, but [he expects] soon to be joined by whites who will commit suicide in pursuit, they say, of an Islamic umma. He focuses on nihilistic Islam, as distinct from fundamentalist, radical, militant or political Islam, Islamism, or the salafi phenomenon. For him, liberal multiculturalism can be stretched to accommodate non-violent salafi-ites but it is inadequate to respond to the nihilists.
In search of a shared future
Looking for a response to nihilist Islam, Max Farrar traces the 20th century Islamic revivals critique of capitalism. While Islam is in fact quite comfortable with trade and exchange within a market system, he observes, the alienation that capitalism produces in individuals is real: it cleaves the soul of anyone who, for one reason or another, is dissatisfied with tawdry pleasures, and who experiences the divisions [capitalism engenders] between us and them, self and other as a painful process which depletes our human-ness.
Judith Squires is also concerned with how economic experience and neo-liberal discourse tend to undermine the human, co-opting diversity to tap difference for economic gain. She wishes to salvage understanding of cultural embeddedness and situated knowledge, from an isolating liberal individualism that can offer little redress for structural inequality. Social justice and equality have been written out of our understanding of diversity, though prejudice and exclusion remain.
Sami Zubaida and Judith Squires present their ideas here.
If liberal individualism is not adequate for addressing diversity any more than multiculturalism is, since the 1980s viable alternatives to the existing political order have been hard to come by. Max observes that Saudi money and Salafi influence have filled a vacuum for those alienated from society. Stripped of historical, social and cultural context, the Quran and sunna can indeed be read as incitements to violent imposition of Islam across the world. Fuel to Islamophobes, this fact also does the necessary work of providing divine sanction for murder, just as international law is required to do the secular work of justifying war. A small, dangerous group is open to this doctrine, through a mutation of alienation into nihilism. Their ideological incoherence, totalitarianism, rootlessness, and undercurrent of violence and death counteract their claim to a commitment to God, and betray a nihilistic reaction to dislocation and post-modernity.
We should cease celebration of diversity and turn to negotiating diversity, Max suggests. Reena Bhavnanis policy experience of lived experiment reveals how negotiated approaches offer escape routes from embedded ideologies and conflict around difference. They are necessary, she suggests, since fear of difference does not have uniform causes. Maxs model of progressive cosmopolitanism offers an alternative vision to those susceptible to nihilistic Islam, and those more generally disillusioned. It suggests to them another direction to look to the future, rather than the past. A future which acknowledges and values transcultural migration, and which, like the salafiyyah, postulates a global citizenship, but which, unlike the salafiyyah, offers cultural, economic and social equality, and full participatory rights in shaping society.
Reena and Max deliver their papers here.