The challenges that Blunkett and Muslims must face

The Muslim community should adopt "British norms of acceptability", says David Blunkett. We shouldn't "tolerate the intolerable in the guise of cultural difference," he says. I couldn't agree with him more. But it would help if the Home Secretary practised what he preached.

The British Muslim community is, as we shall see, far from perfect but it is because of their "cultural difference" that Muslims suffer so much racial harassment and are so unfairly treated in Britain. The Muslim community, particularly the Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, is at the bottom of every league. The Muslims experience the most severe problems of social exclusion in terms of income, housing, education and health. The Home Secretary has yet to show that he will not continue to tolerate this state of affairs.

The ethnic communities should learn to speak English, says Mr Blunkett. If he cares to meet the young Muslims who were rioting in Oldham and Bradford he will discover that they speak fluent English. The problem is no one listens to what they have to say. It is high unemployment amongst Muslim youth, combined with deprivation and the deep-seated prejudice they encounter at every corner, that has brought out the worst in them.

The Home Secretary is only partially correct in suggesting that Muslims exist in self-imposed ghettos. It is hard to integrate when fear of racial attacks is uppermost on your mind. No body deliberately chooses to live in a ghetto if other options are available. A minority community like the Muslims has to close ranks for selfdefence because that is how we have survived to get this far. To see this only as a fault of the ethnic minority communities is to victimise the victims.

Mr Blunkett is right in arguing that practices such as forced marriages of girls as young as 16 and female circumcision cannot be tolerated. That such practices should not be tolerated is a live and much debated issue in the Muslim community. Young people who have set up radio stations during Ramadan across the length and breadth of Britain are discussing ways and means of combating such evils.

Both by listening and participating in these radio discussions, I get the feeling that the Muslim community is ready to tackle such issues head on.

The young people are also urging the elders to rise above their petty squabbles and internal strife. It is now widely realised that prejudice and intolerance can be defeated only through engagement and there is an urgent need for the community to move beyond the culture of complaining perpetually from the margins.

However, to move from being simply reactive to a proactive community, to lift itself both from physical and mental ghettoes, Muslims need to pay urgent attention to three issues. First, as the Home Office report into the summer riots in Oldham and Bradford shows, there is a serious crisis of leadership in the Muslim community. We are still beleaguered by community organisations with un-elected life presidents, semi-literate and selfstyled leaders, and warring mosque committees. Even the Muslim Council of Britain, now widely recognised as the voice of Muslim community, is plagued by demagogues and career leaders. The obscurantist, unelected individuals who are pulling its strings from behind the scenes should be sent packing. It is time the first generations of Muslims simply stepped down and passed the mantle to a more articulate young leadership.

Second, it is also necessary for Muslims to stop importing ignorant and obscurantist Imams from the Indian subcontinent. Our mosques are full of Imams who cannot speak English, know nothing about Britain, and who promote an obnoxious, Taliban variety of Islam. These Imams also bring age old religious feuds from India and Pakistan to Britain. For example, the battles of the Deobandis and Bralvis, two warring sects from the subcontinent, are now spread through numerous mosques in Britain. We urgently need to replace the imported Imams with homegrown varieties - such as those trained at Muslim College in London, for example.

Third, the Muslims need to work towards creating a genuine British Muslim identity. This involves addressing a series of crucial questions. What is there within the wider community with which Muslims can integrate without losing their distinctiveness? How do we identify the common roots, between Britain and Islam, of a shared identity? How can we develop a distinctively British Islamic culture rooted in Britain? These questions cannot be answered without serious attempts to interact with and becoming an active part of the British scene.

Here, it is worth noting that the British Muslims are totally out of sync with much of Islamic history. Muslims have never really entertained the idea of preserving some purist notion of "culture". Wherever Muslims went, throughout their history, from Azerbaijan to Zanzibar, they inter-married, raised joint and extended families, and synthesised new cultures and identities. In contrast, British Muslim history of the last five decades is a history of irrational fears of "cultural contamination" and phobia of inter-marriages. It is high time the Muslim community was true to its own global history.

But it is difficult to have a sense of belonging when inclusiveness is an unending struggle fraught most often with disappointment. Racism, prejudice and discrimination are facts of life for Muslims in Britain. Every time they feel they have taken a step forward, a new loyalty test is thrust upon them.

Frankly, Muslims are not interested in jumping through loyalty hoops, whether it is Tebbit's "cricket test" or Blunkett's "British test". The very fact that they have to defend their position so earnestly is an indication that Britain, in the ringing phrase of the Muslim Council of Britain, has yet to become "a country that looks and sounds like all its people". That is the norm that the Home Secretary should be working towards.

Ziauddin Sardar's Introducing Islam is published by Icon Books, £9.99