The Matter of Muslim Britain: A Crisis of Liberal Pluralism
A powerful exposé of bigotry leaves untouched a deeper question of national cohesion
Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, Muslims Don’t Matter (The Bridge Street Press, 3 October 2024)
Jacob Williams is the Head of Domestic Policy at Pickthall House
British Muslims are the subject of near-constant media attention and scrutiny—attention which seems to force the community into the simplistic molds of either villainy or victimhood. One section of the commentariat thinks Muslims are a dangerous fifth column whose acceptance of liberal democratic ground rules is provisional at best; the other retorts that most Muslims are patriotic, law-abiding citizens who simply wish to be left alone. Sayeeda Warsi’s book makes a compelling case for the greater accuracy of the second narrative, but in doing so, raises a far deeper question about belonging and loyalty in a way that prevents us from portraying the anti-Muslim narrative as mere knuckle-dragging bigotry.
Warsi’s book charts a two-decade narrative of deepening hostility and dysfunction in the relationship of the British state and mainstream culture to the nation’s Muslim communities. After 9/11, she argues, successive governments of both parties embraced a disastrous policy of “disengagement” with the country’s major Muslim civil society organisations like the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB). Governments substituted their own preferred Muslim interlocutors like the Quilliam Foundation, but these organisations lacked legitimacy among Muslims because they were chosen for their a priori agreement with whatever the government had already decided to do (p. 29-30). Whatever might have been the faults of groups like the MCB, the policy of creating artificial community organisations only alienated Muslims from the government by making its attempts to engage with the community appear patronising at best and sinisterly manipulative at worst.
At the same time, counter-terrorism policy veered from tailored measures to prevent violence to the suspension of civil liberties and the demonisation of Muslims who criticised this approach—Muslims who, tragically, seemed to think their opposition was aimed at defending basic British values like the rule of law. After its 2015 statutory entrenchment, mis-application of the anti-radicalisation Prevent programme led to Muslims being monitored by authorities for personal eccentricities (like adopting Arab dress) or for holding conservative, but entirely non-violent, religious beliefs. This, too, has had predictable and disastrous effects on Muslim attitudes towards the British state (p. 91-2).
All this took place, as Warsi shows, amid a backdrop of growing media hostility to the Muslim community and a climate of delay and denial in responding to concerns about anti-Muslim prejudice (Warsi uses the term ‘Islamophobia’). Through a wealth of stories and anecdotes, many of them drawing on her own experience of twenty years in Conservative politics and seven years in senior ministerial positions, she demonstrates that allegations of anti-Muslim bias face a systematic pattern of disinterest, dismissal, and delayed and perfunctory responses. The volume of evidence is such that, even if Warsi’s interpretation of individual incidents were challenged, the overall pattern would remain.
The personal element to Warsi’s reflections lends a touch of pathos to the narrative that is sometimes deeply touching, especially when we learn of members of her own family, who have lived in Britain for multiple generations, fearing they will have to adopt a “Plan B” (p. 76) and leave the country which her “family have a long and proud tradition of protecting”, including in the armed forces (p. 11). Warsi, who entered politics out of her belief in “a small state… family and personal responsibility and individual liberty” (p. 28), ultimately felt forced to leave the Conservative Party whose values she had fought for in September 2024. At the end of all this, a reader sympathetic to British Muslims is left feeling shell-shocked. Yet there is a risk that Warsi’s narrative ends up preaching to the choir (or to the jam’aat).
Many readers will, of course, take issue with her use of the term Islamophobia and her advocacy for the government to adopt an official definition of the concept.The concerns that this concept may be used to restrict open debate are often legitimate. Yet it is worth noting that the definition she promotes, drawing on research by the sociologist Tariq Modood, explicitly avoids labelling any opinion about Islam or Muslims as inherently Islamophobic. Rather, Modood’s definition focuses on the manner in which discourse is conducted, such as whether it refuses to listen to Muslim concerns or uses uncivil language. This does not mean incivility should be a crime—the purpose of defining Islamophobia is not to criminalise speech but to provide guidelines for non-coercive government policies that aim to fight prejudice.
The bigger issue, however, concerns the underlying cause of the remarkable rise in anti-Muslim sentiment that Warsi charts. One is left, after reading Muslims Don’t Matter, feeling like Orwell’s Winston Smith, who after reading an analysis of 1984’s nightmarish regime, laments, “I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY”.
We must try to understand why. We cannot just assume that millions of our fellow citizens are vicious, atavistic racists acting out of random and inexplicable malice.
Insofar as Warsi analyses the cause, she seems to attribute it to the same causes that produced other kinds of prejudice, like anti-Semitism, homophobia, and anti-black racism. “Islamophobia”, she writes, “is simply the latest in a long line of prejudices that Britain is having to come to terms with…” (p. 11). This language appears to buy into an account of bigotry that has become standard (though usually implicit) among progressive commentators, namely that Islamophobia is just a particular manifestation of a widespread human disposition to identify and persecute Others in order to shore up one’s own psychological identification with an in-group.
The problem with this account is that it doesn’t really explain anything that needs explaining. It doesn’t tell us why, at a time when the best available data consistently shows that other forms of racial and religious prejudice are declining, Islamophobia specifically should be on the rise. Warsi might appeal here to her political narrative: Islamophobia is not in the DNA of ordinary British people, but has been spread by malevolent actors in politics and the media. She describes how a growing pushback against the neoconservative-inflected policies of the Blair era produced a feeling of hope in the “optimistic early Cameron years”, before a renewed downward spiral of bigotry set in during the mid-2010s (p. 46-7). One is left with the impression that Warsi thinks that if only a few contingent political mistakes had been avoided—if Michael Gove had been less influential, for instance—the situation today would be essentially benign. This would be a strange judgement to make, given the concurrent rise of anti-Muslim sentiment across the Western world and indeed beyond it. At another point, Warsi appears to agree with Edward Said’s claim that Western culture has been saturated by Islamophobia since its inception (p. 66), before approvingly citing how “the responsibilities of Empire” tempered bigotry with a “need to acknowledge the religious sensibilities” of Muslim colonial subjects (p. 72). This curious mix of postcolonial theory and relative optimism about actual colonialism is not particularly helpful as a prescription for the present—should Britain find a way forward by re-learning the lessons of the Raj?
To understand the deep causes of contemporary animus against Muslims, we need to consider the common denominator in society’s most widespread anti-Muslim tropes. Muslims are typically accused of sympathising with terrorism, seeking to criminalise blasphemy and apostasy, denigrating the equal status of women and sexual minorities, of loyalty to the global ummah over and above the nation, and of pushing for the coercive imposition of religious law on people (both Muslim and non-Muslim) who disagree with it. All of these accusations speak to a deep anxiety about British Muslims’ loyalty to the values of liberal pluralism.
Warsi may retort by pointing out that the far-right are a far bigger threat to liberal democracy than Muslims. Yet even if she is correct, this argument misses the point that the rise of the far-right is in many ways a response—an disproportionate, bigoted, and often-pathological response, but a response nevertheless—to concerns about Muslim illiberalism and disloyalty. Reading Warsi’s book, one might get the impression that she thinks there is no legitimate basis for such concerns, that they are merely fabricated excuses for bigotry; but the data does not back up this claim.
For instance, when (rightly) criticising Nigel Farage for relying on a flawed study of Muslim attitudes by the Henry Jackson Society, Warsi draws attention to a superior study by IPSOS Mori which found Muslims actually identify more strongly with Britishness than do the general public. Yet the best evidence we have of Muslim attitudes does not paint an entirely rosy picture. It should be emphasised that Muslims are overwhelmingly likely (on some question wordings, even more likely than the general public) to condemn terrorism and political violence. Most Muslims also want to “fully integrate” with non-Muslims (p. 42).
At the same time, just under 30% of British Muslims claim (p. 46) they would “prefer to live in Britain under sharia law rather than British law”. Admittedly, this is based on survey data from the 2000s; a more recent study (p. 43), which used a more softly-worded question referring to civil law and financial disputes, found 43% of Muslims supporting the introduction of sharia. Whatever the precise level of support for ‘harder’ forms of sharia, beyond marital resolution or financial disputes, it is clearly not insignificant: research (p. 47) from the 2000s found 31% of British Muslims endorsing sharia rulings on execution for apostasy and 61% endorsing those on the criminalisation of homosexual acts.
It should be stressed that hardly any of these Muslims are actively agitating for laws to imprison gay people or kill converts from Islam in Britain. The questions prompt respondents to think about hypothetical ideals. The more recent study (from the late 2010s) did not ask about specific controversial sharia rulings, but did not identify any general decline in support for sharia. Of course, active homosexuality was criminalised in Britain until the late 1960s and attitudes towards LGBT people in the general public have changed significantly since the 2000s. Moreover, some respondents might have intended to affirm their belief that execution for apostasy is part of sharia without endorsing its implementation in Britain (the survey did not ask specifically those Muslims preferring to live under sharia whether they interpreted this to include executions for apostasy).
Nevertheless, it is fair to estimate that a significant minority of British Muslims (perhaps somewhere between 20 and 40%) do not regard a regime of liberal pluralism as the best regime to live under, even in Britain itself. These Muslims do, of course, overwhelmingly condemn violent or illegal means of changing the regime, but their support for liberal pluralism is in some sense conditional and pragmatic. An even larger percentage of British Muslims show a disturbing openness to conspiratorial thinking. Around 40% (p. 75) of British Muslims claim that the 9/11 attacks were the work of the American government or the ‘Jews’, with most of the rest claiming not to know who the perpetrators were (only 4% correctly blamed al-Qaeda). While non-Muslims are hardly immune to conspiracy theories, 71% of the control survey of the general public identified al-Qaeda as the 9/11 culprits. This conspiracy theory does not translate into sympathy for al-Qaeda, which is extremely unpopular (only around 7% (p. 5) of Muslims claim to admire them). Its popularity does, however, speak to a profound alienation among an apparent majority of British Muslims from prevailing attitudes towards the Western world and its perceived enemies.
Claiming, as some progressive commentators do, that these illiberal attitudes have nothing to do with ‘real’ Islam, or are a mere byproduct of state repression and neocolonialism, will not suffice. As is the case with the Bible and other religious canons, proof-texts from the Qur’an and the hadith literature (sayings of the Prophet Muhammad) can be found that appear to bolster whatever view one wishes to promote. Warsi is quite correct that distinguishing between ‘Islamist’ and non-Islamist interpretations of Islam is theologically illiterate and often a bad faith means of blaming Islam for a phenomenon without technically implicating all Muslims (p. 23), but this does not mean a better strategy is unavailable. More helpful is to analyse the positions of trained Islamic scholars who have studied the methodological principles for deriving conclusions from the tradition’s religious texts.
Here, we should reject the notion that ‘salafi’ interpretations of Islam, which are indeed relatively modern and theologically non-mainstream, are the sole source of illiberal attitudes. Sophisticated academic analyses recognise a ‘traditionalist’ current of Sunni thought that views itself as continuous with medieval scholarship. This position rejects Scriptural literalism (and for some scholars, embraces philosophical ‘rationalism’), but affirms the need for Muslims to rely on the majority positions of the four major Sunni schools of law, most of which were formulated many centuries ago, for ethical and political guidance. The majority positions are often strikingly anti-liberal. For instance, three of the four schools historically endorsed the execution of apostates, with one demurring slightly by exempting females from this punishment in favour of imprisonment.
No serious analyst can deny the pull of this ‘traditionalism’ over large parts of Britain’s Muslim community. Studies have shown that most mosques and Islamic schools are linked to one or other of a variety of Islamic movements rooted in the Indian Subcontinent, whose scholars adopt broadly traditionalist positions. Obviously, other religious attitudes are available. Beyond traditionalism are a wide spectrum of ‘reformist’ positions which range from calls for cautious revision of specific legal rulings to wholesale reconstruction of theological assumptions. Islamic scholars like Mohammad Fadel and Muslim academics working on ‘secular’ political theory like Gozde Hussain have argued that some version of liberal pluralism can be reached with only modest deviations from traditionalism. Still, the line that Muslim illiberalism has nothing to do with Islam will not work. Illiberal positions are deeply rooted in the religious tradition, and endorsed by authorities that many politically engaged Muslims regard as normative.
Another progressive objection to this line of argument is to accuse its proponents of hypocrisy. A state based on liberal pluralism, it is argued, cannot legitimately concern itself with the non-liberal political views of its citizens as long as they do not use violent or undemocratic means of advancing their views. To do so violates liberalism itself and entails self-contradiction, implicating so-called liberal societies in aggressively illiberal neocolonial policing of the ethnic and religious Other.
This view, however, is ultimately just as unsustainable as the view that the Islamic tradition has no authentic links to anti-liberalism. Any political theory worth taking seriously must have some means to secure its own survival. As John Rawls, the chief theorist of modern liberalism, pointed out, a liberal state must be able to practice the ‘containment’ of illiberal views. It is not illiberal or hypocritical to endorse targeted, proportionate measures to prevent the spread of anti-liberal ideas among the citizenry. This is not to say that the policies adopted by Britain since 2001 have been in any way well-targeted or proportionate. As Warsi shows, they have not been even minimally effective, and have produced the precise opposite of their intended effects. But the principle remains sound: a liberal state does not become authoritarian just because it tries to contain illiberalism.
The disturbing conclusion we are forced to reach, then, is this: Islamophobia is not mere random animus, but the pathological expression of ultimately legitimate concerns about Muslim illiberalism and alienation. It is reasonable for the British state to be worried about the large minority of its second-largest religious community who appear to think, on the basis of reasons deeply rooted in their faith tradition, that the basic assumptions on which the state is founded would (in an ideal world) be substituted for profoundly different and deeply illiberal ones. We can simultaneously condemn the bigoted, irrational, and often hysterically disproportionate way in which this concern is expressed in Islamophobic discourse without condemning the legitimacy of the concern itself. What, then, is to be done?
Here, it will be instructive to look for historical parallels from Britain’s past. Warsi compares contemporary Islamophobia to 19th-century anti-Semitism in France (p. 119), but she doesn’t appear to draw any specific lessons that go beyond opposition to an allegedly atavistic and groundless animus. A more helpful, and perhaps, more hopeful parallel can be found in the English-speaking world’s long history of anti-Catholic prejudice, which came to an end only in the late 20th-century.
Hostility to Catholicism was bound up with the very origins of the Anglo-Saxon version of liberal pluralism. John Locke, one of the earliest theorists of liberalism, deliberately excluded Catholics from religious toleration on grounds of their perceived loyalty to a foreign power. Waves of anti-Catholic bigotry afflicted Britain throughout the 18th and 19th centuries (Catholics were not given even formally equal civil rights until 1829); in America, John F. Kennedy’s Catholic faith posed serious problems for his Presidential campaign well within living memory. Anti-Catholic prejudice was sometimes racialised, associated with swarthy Latin or Eastern European migrants.
The biggest parallel to contemporary Islamophobia, however, is that anti-Catholic bigotry was in large part a pathological response to legitimate concerns about illiberal religious teachings. Locke was not motivated by mere animus: as Joseph Loconte argues, he saw no threat to the liberal order from “Catholic theology”, only from the Church’s political interventions. At the time, concern about such teachings was hardly groundless. Successive Popes supported Catholic ‘pretenders’ to the British throne for decades after the first liberal revolution of 1688. In 1864, Pius IX issued a notorious ‘Syllabus of Errors’ which denied that the “Pontiff can… reconcile himself” with “progress, liberalism and modern civilisation”, and rejected the “civil liberty of every form of worship”. As recently as 1954, John Courtney Murray, a prominent Catholic supporter of liberal democracy, was banned by the Vatican from publishing articles in favour of religious freedom. Right up until the 1960s, the Church hierarchy held a deeply ambivalent view of liberal pluralism, tending to pragmatically endorse it where Catholics were a minority while defending authoritarian confessional states where they seemed viable.
The triumph of Murray’s view at the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II), and the Church’s official endorsement of liberal pluralism as an ideal (not just a pragmatic compromise) in 1965, played a major part in the disintegration of anti-Catholic bigotry in the following decades. By the 1980s, many American Catholics had emerged as prominent leaders on the conservative side of the country’s ‘culture wars’ over social and moral change. (Whatever one thinks of these cultural battles, the alignment of many Catholics with the religious right showed how completely they had come to identify with the country’s hitherto-dominant cultural mainstream). Catholic intellectuals like Michael Novak and George Weigl have argued that Vatican II laid the foundation for their community’s full participation in mainstream American civic and political life. Robert P. George goes further (see 36:21), and argues that the volte-face of Vatican II on religious liberty was informed by Catholic reflection on the Anglo-American experience of relatively benign and tolerant treatment under liberalism (despite periodic eruptions of bigotry), in stark contrast to the Continental varieties of liberalism, which often nakedly persecuted the Church, to which Pius IX was reacting.
To avoid any confusion, I don’t make this comparison in order to argue that the Muslim response to liberalism should imitate the Catholic one. Religious traditions are not interchangeable. Moreover, I am not an Islamic scholar and I am not qualified to tell Muslims what they should think the ideal political regime is. However, we can draw important lessons from the structural similarity of historical anti-Catholic prejudice to contemporary Islamophobia.
One is that the liberal state is likely to be most successful in containing anti-liberalism if it exercises self-restraint. It was precisely the then-novel discovery by Catholics that they could live flourishing religious lives (both individually and communally) outside the framework of a confessional state that motivated thinkers like Murray to examine the resources in their tradition for rethinking political ideals. Policies that make it hard for British Muslim communities to flourish (or that give the appearance, even the false appearance, of being driven by animus) are likely to discourage Muslim thinkers from sympathy with liberal pluralism, or to confirm suspicions that it is merely a mask for a disguised form of authoritarianism. Another lesson is the need for nuance. Most anti-liberal Catholics in Britain or America in the early twentieth century would never have dreamed of actively plotting to replace the regime under which they enjoyed relative dignity with the dysfunctionality of the confessional Catholic states that then existed. Commitment to a theoretical anti-liberal ideal does not make a citizen a clear and present danger, but neither is it illegitimate for the state to express its concerns.
I am not the first to identify this parallel. In a dialogue with Robert George, the traditionally-trained Islamic scholar Hamza Yusuf has agreed that the experience of the Anglo-Saxon model of religious freedom will, and should, prompt Muslims to rethink “the conflation of state and religion” (see 36:21 to 39:12). This is not the place to judge whether Yusuf is theologically correct. But the crucial point is that, if British Muslims are to be prompted to rethink political ideals in this way, they must actually experience the blessings of liberty first. Experiencing liberalism as a repressive, intrusive regime of police surveillance and arbitrary denigration will provoke only a hostile reaction.
To return, then, to Warsi, most of her recommendations are reasonable and constructive—and will, despite her side-stepping of the problem, likely have an ameliorative effect on Muslim anti-liberalism too. She is right that official disengagement with Muslim organisations has been a disaster (p. 128). She is right that Prevent needs to be scaled back to focus on actual threats of violence, not “policing thoughts and opinions”. She is right that stripping British subjects of citizenship, however abhorrent their crimes may be, is a disgraceful and profoundly unBritish violation of the rule of law, and she is right that secret trials and closed proceedings in terrorism cases can only be justified in “exceptional circumstances”. She is also right that a “non-legally binding” definition of Islamophobia will help “encourage acceptance through cultural change rather than criminalisation” (p. 127), a position for which Pickthall has previously advocated. She is also right, and in agreement with Pickthall, that calls for blasphemy laws are not the answer (p. 14). However, Pickthall has reservations about Warsi’s call for “a workable process for press regulation” (p. 128). A commitment to a free press is as central to Britain’s liberal traditions as our commitment to the rule of law and the right to a fair trial. There is a serious risk that further regulation of the press will be perceived as an attempt to censor critics of Islam, and end up stoking division, undermining the goal of taming Islamophobic discourse by driving it into forums that are harder to regulate while fueling perceptions of special treatment. Here too, we believe that cultural change will prove more effective than criminalisation.
Warsi is also right, however, in her bigger-picture central claim that Muslims should not be held to “standards we do not demand of others” (p. 124). One can easily take out-of-context quotes from any religious text to make a tradition appear irredeemably intolerant. Yet a mature analysis of the state of Muslim attitudes to liberal pluralism, and their relationship to Islamic theological traditions, does not justify delegitimizing all of the concerns that other citizens have about Muslim communities. We must learn to distinguish between legitimate worries and their bigoted and pathological expressions.
Britain has been here before: Muslims are not the first unpopular religious minority to belong to a tradition with a prominent strain of anti-liberalism. Today, Britain successfully exemplifies, with respect to its Catholic community, what political scientist Alfred Stepan calls the “twin tolerations” between religion and state. We did not get here overnight, nor can we expect or demand immediate and uncritical embrace of the same model from Muslims, who have their own distinctive set of grievances and religious commitments. The emergence of the twin tolerations took years of mutual learning and negotiation. But today, few Britons perceive a conflict between being a theologically conservative Catholic and accepting the basic ground rules of liberal pluralism.
Tariq Modood suggests we ask of public discourse whether it is “about Muslims or a dialogue with Muslims, which they would wish to join in”. The current Labour government has an opportunity to correct the mistakes made by previous governments of all three major parties. They could do much worse than to start by turning one-sided conversations about Muslims into meaningful dialogues with Muslims (rather than with fake interlocutors hand-picked for their compliance).
Warsi’s book has exposed a deeply disturbing pattern of bigotry that is disfiguring Britain’s public life. By doing this, she has done the country a great service. Any book of this character will have significant gaps; it is impossible to address every issue at once. But Pickthall believes we must make clear that condemning Islamophobia is only the beginning. Warsi’s book should not be treated as the last word on the subject, but as the beginning of a long conversation about what liberal pluralism means in our unprecedentedly diverse religious landscape.
