from: The Guardian, Monday 17th October 2011

Half of all hospitals are failing to meet basic standards in care for the elderly. The Care Quality Commission’s recent findings are, shockingly, no shock to anyone. As a letter to the Guardian the following day pointed out, these were exactly the findings of a report commissioned by the secretary of state for health in 1998. Thirteen years later, nothing has changed. Outraged reports accumulate on the shelf, gathering dust.

Extraordinary advances in medical technology continue, but we make painfully little progress – even some signs of deterioration – in something much cheaper, and surely much easier in healthcare: the quality of relationships. As the commission’s chair ruefullycommented, “kindness and compassion cost nothing”.

Inevitably, the report prompted soul-searching in the days afterwards; many members of the public described very painful stories of the care their elderly parents received in their last years.

Joan Bakewell, interviewed on Radio 4′s Today programme, pondered the impact of the decline of religion, asking who now teaches kindness as she learned it in Sunday school.

It’s an interesting point, but sadly not one I suspect that stands up to scrutiny. Religious institutions have been revealed to have a patchy – and that is being charitable – record on kindness. No, I think there is something very important at stake here that is not about secularisation but about marketisation – how all our patterns of thought are now modelled on the transactions of the market.

“What do I get out of this relationship?” is now regarded as a perfectly legitimate question, as if relationships are simply a kind of investment portfolio. The language of trade, finance and commerce has infiltrated how we understand our lovers, our friends, our neighbours and those for whom we work. Social capital, social skills – this is using the language of the market to describe relationships and the values and the inspiration that sustain them.

Much of this marketisation has neatly reinforced individualism’s aspirations to freedom and autonomy. But there is a problem. It’s blindingly obvious and yet ignored: it doesn’t give a full account of human experience. There are large chunks of our lives when we are either being cared for or we are caring for others. Caring for others cannot be totted up according to a calculus of cost and returns.

Dependency – others on us or us on others – is a central part of life. It is not something to be ashamed of and avoided at all costs. Care cannot always be easily shoehorned into the gaps in a busy life of consuming and working. This is why ultimately this cultural pattern of marketisation is so cruel: it makes shameful what is an inescapable part of human experience. It denigrates and belittles the qualities needed to care, such as patience and gentleness. Worst of all, marketisation ensures that everyone arrives at the challenge of being a carer with an almighty shock, and often a sense of “Why did no one warn me?”.

That’s what having children felt like for me. I felt I had been ambushed by something for which I was totally unprepared emotionally: the 24/7 dependence of a child and how that compromised all my aspirations to independence and achievement.

Now, it feels my age group is being ambushed again; we are all wondering and worrying about how one cares for elderly parents, how one deals with their dying and deaths. Their needs are often far more unpredictable than, but just as emotionally fraught as, the first experience of parenthood.

All of this hits women particularly hard because their socialisation for centuries has been bound up with expectations to care; only in the past few decades have some of those assumptions been unpicked.

But in their place, marketisation’s model of care is to buy it at the lowest possible cost. It says everything about our culture that caring is paid so badly and requires minimal training.

Compare how the two forms of care have been treated over the past 20 years: there has been a gradual and grudging reluctance to make the adjustments necessary to care for children (increased leave and part-time working), while the care of the elderly in an ageing society has been doggedly postponed – we simply don’t want to think about it.

Care for children fits into a marketised understanding of relationship: we talk of “investing” in our children. The state sees children as important because of their future worth to the economy as labour. But in this marketised mindset, the elderly have no economic value; they are perceived as a burden. The only values ascribed to the elderly are found – as recently celebrated in some grey power list – in silver-haired celebrities still working such as David Attenborough.

That’s a harsh form of exceptionalism in a culture of implicit contempt for the elderly’s frailty, dependence and intense vulnerability. What we have lost is the perception of the value of human experience beyond the busyness of the peak years of life; something captured by Milton in the final line of On His Blindness, “they also serve who only stand and wait”.

As the numbers of elderly increase and their last years are dominated by chronic ill health, their care will become ever more demanding in terms of resources and time. But tackling the policy implications is dependent on challenging these deeply ingrained cultural attitudes.

There is another set of reasons why we don’t find it easy to talk about the care of the elderly: many of them are in the final years of their lives. They are living very intimately with death. And that is the one big taboo of our age. We are the opposite of the Victorians: we are very open about our fascination with sex and very closed about death.

So, many of the elderly end up in hospitals – many with conditions for which there is no cure – and face only a protracted decline. A health system fixated on cure and prevention struggles inadequately with the process of dying, with the needs for kindness and comfort rather than for complex medical intervention, and with dying’s enormous repercussions for relationships. A fifth of all NHS beds are taken up by end-of-life care at huge cost, yet surveys show that hospital is often the last place where the frail and dying want to be. It is also where people are often most dissatisfied: more than half of all complaints to the NHS are about end-of-life care.

What we have lost is any concept of honouring the elders, respect for their frailty, and recognition that supporting their final years before death is important for all of us – that death is a part of what makes all of our lives meaningful.

This is what Steve Jobs so bravely articulated in his remarkablespeech to Stanford graduates in 2005 when he put death centre-stage. First, he referred to death as “useful”, and then he went on to remind his audience about something that these young adults were probably reluctant to acknowledge on the day of graduation: that they would all age and die. It is the one universal human experience. And, finally, he claimed that death “is very likely the single best invention of life. It’s life’s change agent.” Coming from an inventor fascinated by change, there could be no higher praise. It’s the kind of insight which challenges the cultural blindness which is crippling our capacity for compassion.

The standard assumption is that women’s lives have dramatically improved over the last 50 years. They have considerably more personal freedom; and opportunities for education and employment have been transformed. As a result they have much greater financial independence, which has given them more power to shape their lives. So far, so easy.

But something odd is going on that no one can explain. These huge social changes are not making women happier, and, according to several significant studies, women’s happiness relative to men’s has declined in the last 25 years. This includes women of all age groups, and it is evident in many countries, particularly in the US and the UK.

Let’s start with the most alarming evidence. It comes from the West and Sweeting study of 15-year-olds conducted in exactly the same place in Scotland in 1987, 1999 and 2006. When the 1999 results were published, there was concern that the incidence of common mental disorders such as anxiety, depression, panic attacks and anhedonia(loss of capacity to experience pleasure) had significantly increased for girls from 19% to 32%. The increase for boys was much smaller, at only 2%. But the latest set of results are even more dramatic. There has been an increase for both sexes: boys are now on 21%, and girls are at a staggering rate of 44%.

The rate of increase is appalling. Over a third of girls agreed “they felt constantly under strain”; those who “felt they could not overcome their difficulties” had more than doubled to 26%. The number who agreed with “thinking of yourself as a worthless person” had trebled between 1987 and 2006. These findings could partly explain the recent reports of sharp rises in girls’ binge drinking and aggressive behaviour.

The first thought is that perhaps this gender gap is a teenage thing. Other studies showing a marked increase in mental ill-health of teenagers have prompted speculation that the transition to adulthood now is much more difficult and demanding. But the gap in mental ill-health between men and women is just as striking in other age groups; an NHS study published this year showed that between 1993 and 2007 common mental disorders had risen by a fifth for women aged between 45 and 64 (there had been no change in men), and among the over-75s, they were twice as likely in women as men.

Various explanations are put forward. Women’s levels of serotonin are more vulnerable, it has been suggested, but that doesn’t explain the change over time. Women are struggling with work and family, looking after their elderly parents, or coping with empty nest after children have left. Two American academics checked all the data from the US and the European Union to try to hunt down the explanation.

Stevenson and Wolfers found that American women – of all social classes, ages and whether they worked, stayed home, had kids or did not – had seen a decline in happiness since the early 70s. Thirty years ago, women reported higher rates of subjective wellbeing than men in the US. This advantage has been entirely eroded, and in many instances it is now men who are happier than women. So how did women manage to end up, after a generation of advances in gender equality, less happy typically than their mothers at their age?

There are no easy answers, conclude Stevenson and Wolfers. They pose the extraordinary question: “Did men garner a disproportionate share of the benefits of the women’s movement?” They suggest “perhaps the wellbeing data point to differential impacts of social changes on men and women, with women being particularly hurt by declines in family life, rises in inequality or reductions in social cohesion”. One finding they highlight is that women’s satisfaction with their financial situation has declined while men’s has remained stable – one possibility is that there has been a change “in the reference group” or expectations for women so that their lives are more likely to come up short.

This latter is key to the work of another American psychologist, Jean Twenge, whose most recent work has been to analyse what she describes as a “narcissism epidemic” in the US that is disproportionately affecting women. Her meta-analysis covered 37,000 college students. It found that in 1982, 15% got high scores on a narcissism personality index; by 2006 it was 25% – and the largest share of this increase was women.

The narcissist has huge expectations of themselves and their lives. Typically, they make predictions about what they can achieve that are unrealistic, for example in terms of academic grades and employment. They seek fame and status, and the achievement of the latter leads to materialism – money enables the brand labels and lavish lifestyle that are status symbols. It is the Paris Hilton syndrome across millions of lives.

Twenge points to the fact that in the 1950s only 12% of college students agreed that “I am an important person”, but by the late 80s it was 80%. In 1967, only 45% agreed that “being well-off is an important life goal”, but by 2004 the figure was 74%.

The problem, Twenge believes, derives in part from a generation of indulgent parents who have told their children how special they are. An individualistic culture has, in turn, reinforced a preoccupation with the self and its promotion. The narcissist is often rewarded – they tend to be outgoing, good at selling themselves, and very competitive: they are the types who will end up as Sir Alan’s apprentice. But their success is shortlived; the downside is that they have a tendency to risky behaviour, addictive disorders, have difficulties sustaining intimate relationships, and are more prone to aggressive behaviour when rejected.

The narcissism of young women could just be a phase they will grow out of, admits Twenge, but she is concerned that the evidence of narcissism is present throughout highly consumerist, individualistic societies – and women suffer disproportionately from the depression and anxiety linked to it.

This is what alarms psychologist Oliver James. He is working on an updated version of his pioneering Britain on the Couch, which first argued that mental ill-health had increased despite more wealth. He worries that the Scottish teenage girls are the “canaries” down the mines, giving powerful indications of a set of social influences that are deeply damaging their wellbeing. He points to the pressures of a “consumerised, commercially driven version of femininity” that puts huge emphasis on girls’ appearance.

Girls are more compliant and eager to please – that is how they have always been socialised – but now the dominant social expectations of them are deeply destructive of their happiness. Breast augmentation quintupled in 2006 in the US, Twenge points out. The expectations of girls and women have multiplied and intensified – on every front, from passing exams to looking good and having more friends and better photos on Facebook. Technology proliferates the places in which one is required to self-promote.

One possibility is that women’s identity has always been framed around relationships – as mothers, daughters, wives, friends and sisters. “Relationality” is still central to how women see their lives, and yet it is entirely at odds with an individualistic, intensely competitive, narcissistic culture. Women, brought up to seek social approval, battle between competing frames of reference, and many end up feeling failure and inadequacy on multiple fronts.

This is Holy Week. It started yesterday with Palm Sunday and continues through Holy Thursday, Good Friday and culminates this Sunday with Easter Day. One can no longer assume most people will be aware of this, let alone the events these days mark; in a recent UK poll, only 22% could identify what Easter was celebrating. What other system of belief has collapsed at such spectacular speed as British Christianity? One can only presume that the New Atheists are organising a fabulous party to celebrate. Richard Dawkins could stump up for the crates of champagne out of his sumptuous royalties from The God Delusion.

But I’m curious as to how many of the country’s finest minds would join the celebrations. Increasingly, one hears a distaste for the polemics of the New Atheist debate and its foghorn volume, and how it has drowned out any other kind of conversation about religion: what it is, the loss of it, whether it matters, and what happens in a post-religious society? From sometimes surprising quarters there is an anxiety about the evangelical fervour and certainty of the New Atheists: they are so sure they are right, but there are plenty of people – and many of them would not count themselves as believers – who can’t share their contempt for religion.

Just this week, AN Wilson announces in a thoughtful cover article for the New Statesman that he has apostated, abandoning his fellow atheists. Or take another example: in the Third Way, a Christian magazine, the poet Andrew Motion reflects wistfully, “I don’t believe in God – though I wish I did, and I can’t stop thinking about it so who knows what might happen one day?” Wilson and Motion talk of uncertainty, doubt and faith in terms that are probably far more familiar to the vast majority of the British – many of whom still describe themselves as believing in God, whatever they mean by that – than the certitudes used by Dawkins. New Atheism may come to be regarded as winning a battle but losing the war.

What many argue is that the New Atheist debate has ended up down an intellectual dead end; there are only so many times you can argue that religion is a load of baloney. Ask a philosopher like John Gray or a historian of religion like Karen Armstrong and they are simply not interested in the debate; they bin the invitations to speak on platforms alongside New Atheists. Gray dismisses them as offering “intoxicating simplicity”; Armstrong is appalled by their “display of egotism and arrogance”. Both are deeply frustrated by a debate inflated by the media that generates heat but no light. They see the New Atheists mirroring a particular strain of fundamentalist Christianity with no knowledge of the vast variety of other forms of religious faith. In common with their Christian opponents, they share “the inner glow of complete certainty” – as Wilson describes his atheist conversion.

Armstrong and Gray converge again on where they pinpoint the key mistake. Belief came to be understood in western Christianity as a proposition at which you arrive intellectually, but Armstrong argues that this has been a profound misunderstanding that, in recent decades, has also infected other faiths. What “belief” used to mean, and still does in some traditions, is the idea of “love”, “commitment”, “loyalty”: saying you believe in Jesus or God or Allah is a statement of commitment. Faith is not supposed to be about signing up to a set of propositions but practising a set of principles. Faith is something you do, and you learn by practice not by studying a manual, argues Armstrong.

“We need to get away from the endless discussion about wretched beliefs; religion is about doing – and what every faith makes clear is that the doing is about compassion,” she argues. To try and shift the debate about faith into more fruitful territory, Armstrong came up with the idea of a global Charter on Compassion for all faiths (and none), which she is drafting and planning to launch later in the year.

From a different perspective, Alain de Botton, the philosopher and writer, has also been trying to broaden the conversation. He has founded a School of Life in London, which runs courses and events reflecting on how to live. He describes himself as “definitely an atheist”, but readily admits he borrows plenty from religions. His team have instituted the idea of Sunday sermons, and organise contemporary “pilgrimages”. “Even if you’re an atheist, there are a huge number of insights in religion,” he says. “We’re in danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.”

De Botton argues that the decline of religious faith has left behind a real and widespread need for wisdom and insight; the media offers only a “cruel sentimentality” and gives little space to the most difficult of our life experiences, such as failure, death or envy, nor does it offer ways to deal with them. The author Mark Vernon teaches on some School of Life courses. A former priest and atheist, he now advocates a principled agnosticism rooted in an understanding of the limits of human knowledge. He argues that the most interesting conversations about faith are among those just outside religious traditions and those just inside – along the borders of belief, if you like.

It’s a perspective that Gray shares. Describing himself as a sceptic, he looks to another border of belief for deeper insight into the nature of faith: the dialogue between the theistic and non-theistic. Intriguingly, where Gray, Armstrong and Vernon all end up is with the apophatic tradition of theology. Apophatic is a word no longer even in my dictionary, but it’s a major tradition of Christian thought, and central to the thinking of St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas: it is the idea that God is ineffable and beyond powers of description. S/he can be experienced by religious practice, but as Armstrong puts it: “In the past, people knew we could say nothing about God. Certain forms of knowledge only come with practice.” It makes the boundary between belief in God and agnosticism much more porous than commonly assumed.

But the modern distortion was to make God into a proposition in which you either did or did not believe. He was turned into an old man in the sky with a long white beard or promoted as a cuddly friend named Jesus. Arguing about the existence of such human creations is akin to the medieval pastime of calculating how many angels could fit on the head of a pin.

So the media has been promoting the wrong argument, while the bigger question of how, in a post-religious society, people find the myths they need to sustain meaning, purpose and goodness in their lives go unexplored. What worries Gray is that we forget at our peril that all systems of thought rely on myth. By junking the Christian myths, the danger is that the replacements are “cruder, less tested, less instructive”. At times of crisis – such as the economic recession – the brittleness of a value system built on wealth and a particular conception of autonomy becomes all too apparent, leaving people without the sustaining reserves of a faith to fall back on. The consequences of that will certainly not be cause for celebration, he warns.

The discussion had the younger generation of professional British-born Muslims grinding their teeth with frustration at the stubborn naivety of an older generation of leadership. Their elders had completely failed to grasp how the community had been swept up in a global political conflict that was interacting with a local crisis of identity and generational conflict.

Wind forward two years and the story has changed. On Friday, a campaign was launched with full-page newspaper adverts condemning the attempted bombings in London and Glasgow and pledging full support to avert future attacks. On Saturday, Muslim activists and imams from across the country gathered in London to consider what could be done to tackle extremism. Among the speakers were members of the Metropolitan police’s counter-terrorism operations. More advertising campaigns are planned this week. Britain’s Muslims have launched their most concerted attempt yet to win the hearts and minds of the public and distance themselves from the activities of violent extremists who claim to act in the name of their faith.
For a younger generation of community activists it’s been the breakthrough for which they’ve been waiting for years. They admit that there has been denial in the community, which has inspired fanciful conspiracy theories, but what has enabled them to challenge that has been the sheer volume of evidence in recent trials. Violent extremism cannot be dismissed as the responsibility of the odd loner. Last week saw a succession of appalling news stories. First it was the shocking cases of the attempted London and Glasgow bombings in which respected doctors and fathers were alleged to have been the ringleaders. Then there were two terrorism trials, in Manchester and Woolwich, which resulted in three convictions.

For an older generation who migrated from impoverished areas of the rural subcontinent to offer their families a better life in the UK, this crisis is utterly, and painfully, bewildering: where did they go wrong? Such is their confusion and the pressure they are under, it might force this generation out of community leadership. Meanwhile, among their offspring, the crisis is prompting a huge soul-searching into what in their faith, historical and cultural background could give space for extremism to flourish. Many Muslims are incensed by injustice and angry about British foreign policy, but they don’t plot to bomb innocent civilians – so what is it about these jihadis that draws them into such atrocities? And what do they use to license their outrage to commit such terrible crimes?

In answering such questions, a new honesty and self-criticism is striking. In the past few days, key Muslim community activists have admitted to me that what worries them is how certain theological issues have not been properly clarified, and can be used to justify extremism. The most important is the age-old distinction between dar al-Islam (the land of Islam) and dar al-harb (the land of the other, of unbelief – or of war, according to the literal translation from the Arabic). This demonisation of all that is not Muslim is the “paradigmatic, instinctive response that people fall back on in a moment of crisis”, I was told. Extremists such as Hizb ut-Tahrir use this dualism, as do jihadis, to justify their contempt for the rights – and lives – of the kufr, the unbeliever.

Various Islamic theologians have tried to challenge this intolerance. Dr Zaki Badawi said it was unacceptable to designate the UK as dar al-harb, and declared a third category, the land of contract – dar al-sulh – where Muslims have entered a contract to obey the law in exchange for protection and freedom. Significantly, this was an idea promoted by the controversial Egyptian theologian Yusuf al-Qaradawi, that hate figure of the neocons, over 20 years ago.

There are other equally fraught issues, such as the legacy of anti-colonial thinkers like Sayyid Qutb and Maulana Mawdudi, whose inflammatory, anti-western rhetoric, taken out of context, can sound much like a charter for jihad. Their books are still sold by mainstream Muslim organisations: why, asks Yahya Birt, a prominent member of this new reforming generation, in a recent posting on his blog. Is it tribal loyalty or what, he asks.

What’s remarkable is that these subjects are being aired in public and even discussed with non-Muslims; for years, the charge of washing dirty linen in public ensured silence. But Britain is now the arena for one of the most public, impassioned and wide-ranging debates about Islam anywhere in the world.

This debate won’t kill off extremism, but it’s one of several crucial elements required in a patient, painstaking strategy to win the hearts and minds of young Muslims. The new security minister. Admiral Sir Alan West. acknowledged as much yesterday when he spoke of a 10- to 15-year strategy to tackle extremism. Gordon Brown was back on the hearts-and-minds theme last week – it’s been one of the most familiar refrains of the government since 7/7. But what he proposed – a “propaganda effort” – shows how unfamiliar he is with this brief: how could he imagine propaganda will have any effect on media-literate youngsters deeply sceptical after Iraq of anything associated with this Labour government?

The truth is that the government’s hearts-and-minds strategy has been a fiction of speech writers. It has foundered in the break-up of the Home Office, been split across departments and got lost in the Department of Communities and Local Government’s cohesion agenda. A recent meeting at the Home Office on how to combat extremism attracted few Muslims but several journalists – including those who have lobbied hard that the government should withdraw from any engagement with organisations with historical links to Islamism, the broad 20th-century movement of political Islam. Their lobbying succeeded in freezing out a wide range of organisations, including the Muslim Council of Britain. It has been self-defeating; it left Ruth Kelly, then at the DCLG, with a bunch of tiny, well-meaning organisations as her appointed “strategic partners”, who had very little reach into the community.

Hazel Blears must be cannier than that. What matters is what works – who has the power in a community to inch through change, most importantly in that closed world of Britain’s 1,600-odd mosques that are fiercely independent, and have ethnic and sectarian allegiances. This is the most difficult front, and the most important. It is estimated that 90% of Britain’s male Muslims attend Friday prayers, making it the best place to connect to the core constituency.

The Metropolitan police’s Muslim Contact Unit has understood this, following a strategy of working with Islamist- and Salafi-dominated mosques such as the one in Brixton, well aware that their best chance of drawing extremists away from violence is through those who know how to argue the case on Islamic grounds and redirect the religious fervour of hot-headed young men. Winning hearts and minds will take a generation; but what’s becoming clear is just how many Muslims are engaged in this struggle already.

* This article was first published in The Guardian, Monday July 9, 2007. Read all articles by Madeleine Bunting.

Jack Straw feels uncomfortable and within a matter of hours, his discomfort is calibrated on news bulletins and websites in terms of an inquisitorial demand: do Muslims in this country want to integrate? How does Straw’s “I feel …” spin so rapidly into such grandstanding?

The confusions and sleights of hand are legion, and it’s hard to know where to start to unpick this holy mess. Let’s begin with its holiness, because this is an element which has been absent from the furore. There are two distinct patterns of niqab-wearing in this country. One group wears the niqab by cultural tradition. Often they are relatively recent migrants, from Somalia or Yemen for example, and for the record it is not a “symbol of oppression” but a symbol of status.

The second group comprises the small but slightly increasing number of younger women who wear it as a sign of their intense piety. This latter prompted the memory of being taken as a child by my mother to visit the Poor Clares’ convent in York. We gave alms to these impoverished women who had chosen complete segregation from the world as part of their strict spiritual discipline; we talked to the gentle, warm mother superior through the bars of a grille that symbolised their retreat from the world. No one accused these nuns of “rejecting the values of liberal democracy” – yet they were co-religionists of the IRA terrorists of their time.

The point is that within all religious traditions there are trends emphasising the corrupting influences of the world and how one must keep them at a distance. Catholicism and the celibate monastic tradition of Buddhism interpret this in one way. Salafi Islam interprets it in modes of dress and behaviour in public places. Since when has secular Britain become so intolerant that it can’t accommodate (no one is asking them to like) these small minorities of puritanical piety?

But the bigger part of the muddle is why Straw felt entitled to privilege his emotional response without questioning it more deeply. Does it not occur to men opining on their sense of “rejection” at the niqab that it could be equally prompted by separatist lesbians? Or on another even more obvious tack: how comfortable does the woman wearing the niqab feel coming to visit her MP ensconced in his cultural context, at ease with enormous power and authority? Comfort is a disastrous new measure for interactions in a diverse society. I’ve got a long list of discomforts. Does that licence me to make demands of others? I find talking to blind people difficult because I rely on eye contact. Similarly, dark glasses are problematic. And, to my shame, I often give up on conversations with people hard of hearing because I over-rely on chat to kindle warmth.

So forget comfort and accept the starting point for any kind of tolerance: that it’s not easy, that it requires imagination, that it makes demands of us. Learn new forms of communication and your world expands.

This debate about the niqab is the flipside of another, parallel debate (led by women) about the over-sexualisation of another subset of women who dress very provocatively (no men complaining here). One of the impulses for women who choose to take the niqab is how highly sexualised public space in this country has become. How do you signal your rejection – even repulsion – at what you regard as near-pornography blazoned over billboards?

A point worth pondering is that a minority of young women are so repulsed by the offer of femininity in Britain – rapidly rising alcohol abuse, soaring sexually transmitted diseases – that they have sought such a drastic option as the niqab.

And here’s the most damaging aspect of Straw’s self-indulgent intervention: the niqab is a drastic option and one that many Muslim women reject. It is the response of a minority who feel that they are living in a hostile climate. Straw’s comments have unleashed a storm of prejudice that only exacerbates the very tendencies which prompt some Muslims to retreat. They undermine efforts within the Muslim community to build more self-confidence, to encourage tightly knit communities to reach out. They have elevated the situation of a tiny minority of women who are often the most fearful anyway into a national problem – even that they form a barrier to successful integration.

This is dangerous and absurd. There are many far more important barriers to successful integration. Two-thirds of children from families of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin are growing up in poverty. More than 20% of all Muslim youths between 16 and 24 are unemployed. In many areas, the desire of second generation Muslims to integrate is being stymied by “white flight” from residential areas and white families using parental choice in education to avoid schools with large numbers of Asian pupils. Outgoing, confident ethnic communities are built where they find understanding, opportunity and engagement. We need to ask ourselves whether that is what we have provided.

Straw’s comments on the niqab escalated into an utterly false implication that Muslims don’t really want to integrate. Television reports ran over pictures of monocultural playgrounds. Ted Cantle’s identification of “parallel lives” in his report on the Bradford riots of 2001 has morphed into a problem that is being laid entirely at the door of a small minority that is impoverished and marginalised. This is ugly.

And there is another, equally ugly, agenda here. Many Muslims were surprised at Straw’s comments – including close political Muslim allies – given his long relationship with the community in his constituency. There has been speculation on his political ambitions. But the point that intrigues me is how Straw is elevating this question as one of primary national concern. In an article on Tony Crosland in the New Statesman last month, Straw cited the Labour thinker’s belief that class was the great divide in society, and added that, now, “religion” was the great divide.

Obviously, Straw meant Islam. No one is too worried about a shrinking number of Anglicans or Catholics. It’s a magnificent convenience for New Labour to let the divides of class slip from view as they prove intractable and social mobility grinds to a halt. In its place, a divide is drawn between a Muslim minority and the vast majority of non-Muslims. It resonates – as the public response to Straw testifies – but it is profoundly mistaken.

The job of a political leader at this historical juncture is to prod our complacencies and prejudices, to open our eyes to recognising how much we have in common; how much of Islam we non-Muslims can appreciate and admire. How much Islam can contribute to the far greater problems we all face. We shouldn’t be hounding those nervous or pious women in their niqabs. Their choice of clothing is as irrelevant as that of Goths. Beware, said Freud wisely, of the narcissism of small differences.

Madeleine Bunting is director of the thinktank Demos.

* This article was first published in The Guardian, Monday October 9, 2006. Read all articles by Madeleine Bunting.

A campaign is being orchestrated through the media to destroy the credibility of many of the most important Muslim institutions in Britain, including the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB). The impact of this campaign – in the Observer and particularly in John Ware’s Panorama documentary last night – will be a powerful boost for the increasingly widespread view that there is no such thing as a moderate Muslim: underneath, “they” are all extremists who are racist, contemptuous of the west, and intent on a political agenda.

A legitimate and much-needed debate among British Muslims about a distinctive expression of Islam in a non-Muslim country has been hijacked and poisonously distorted. Journalists need to be very careful: we are entering a new era of McCarthyism and, if we are not to be complicit, we need to be scrupulously responsible and conscientious in unravelling the complexity of Islam in its many spiritual and political interpretations in recent decades.

The central charge of the campaign is that the MCB, its secretary general, Sir Iqbal Sacranie, and some of its most important affiliates – such as the Islamic Foundation in Leicester, the Muslim Association of Britain and the East London Mosque – condone or even actively promote ideas which, as Ware claimed in Panorama, “feed extremism”; such ideas are a “slippery slope”, which “people who become extremists start to go down”.

This reflects a growing paranoia evident on the pages of tabloids and in government about “preachers of hate” and “hate literature”. It’s a paranoia which chooses to ignore that the main inspiration for British Muslim extremists is not their local mosques but television footage of Palestine and Iraq.

So what are those ideas that feed extremism? Ware veered erratically from the McCarthyite absurd to some legitimate accusations. First on the charge sheet were examples of the former: the “conviction that Islam is a superior faith and culture which Christians and Jews in the west are conspiring to undermine”, and a “distaste for western secular culture”. This is ridiculous; I’ve yet to meet a member of any faith who doesn’t believe in the superiority of their beliefs, while fear of being undermined is similarly common. Since when has “distaste” become a cause for suspicion?

On the other hand, where the campaign makes a legitimate accusation is that there is a virulent strain of anti-semitism and anti-Christian sentiment that appears in some Saudi-influenced strands of Islam. Ware points out that a Saudi imam invited to the East London Mosque had preached in just such terms in Saudi Arabia in sermons subsequently published on the web.

But alongside such troubling points, Ware launched an attack on the influential Pakistani political philosopher Mawlana Mawdudi with some sly editing of quotes. A key figure in the 50s, Mawdudi advocated that Muslims look to Islam, not the west, to build their post-colonial nations. He used anti-western, revolutionary language (but never advocated violence) and was a quintessential product of his time. A younger generation of British-born Muslim thinkers find his ideas less relevant for a minority in the west.

But Ware is not interested in that kind of context or in the process by which a distinctively British Islam is evolving from this legacy. The Leicester-based thinktank Islamic Foundation, founded in the 70s by a close associate of Mawdudi, and Sacranie, who openly acknowledges his huge debt to Mawdudi, are smeared by association.

Ware is at his most McCarthyite when he challenges Sacranie to account for an imam in Leeds who is preaching that the war on terror is really a war on Islam. Ware insists that it is Sacranie’s job to “disabuse” British Muslims of this view and put this imam “right”. Ware laid down his own opinion and, with extraordinary presumption, demanded that Sacranie impose it on the Muslim community.

In that short exchange, Ware revealed his lack of comprehension of the Muslim community. Sacranie only has as much power as the MCB affiliate organisations allow him – the idea of him putting an imam right is ridiculous. The tiny, volunteer-run MCB doesn’t have the power to police the views of its disparate membership. Sacranie and the MCB have a tightrope to walk. On the one hand, the government and non-Muslim Britain are piling on the pressure that they deliver a law-abiding, loyal ethnic minority. On the other, an increasingly restless younger generation of Muslims criticise the MCB as far too moderate, a sell-out establishment stooge cosying up to Tony Blair.

There are plenty of legitimate criticisms to make of the MCB and Sacranie – and Ware details some of them – such as Sacranie’s reprehensible refusal to attend the Holocaust memorial service last January and his decision to attend a memorial service for the spiritual leader of Hamas, Sheikh Yassin. The MCB bears all the characteristics of a diverse migrant community’s struggle to develop a common voice – and it makes plenty of mistakes. But Ware has thrown so much mud around in the course of his programme that much more of it will stick than is deserved.

What is deeply troubling is how exacting British society is becoming of its Muslims. A new set of “cricket tests” are being imposed on British Muslims – they are expected to sign up enthusiastically to every aspect of western secular society and to jettison any part of their intellectual heritage that is critical of the west. They are expected to keep their faith entirely out of politics (yet faith plays a crucial role in US politics). Set the bar high enough and all will fail – the consequences of that on the streets of Luton and Bradford will be disastrous, and not just for Britain’s 1.6 million Muslims.

The question that dogs Tony Blair at every turn reared up again in the extract from Greg Dyke’s memoirs yesterday: either Blair misunderstood the 45-minute claim and was therefore incompetent, or he lied. As long as he dodges this question, its corrosive impact on his reputation and that of his government spreads. He is gambling that, in time, the question will fade, but that gamble is profoundly disrespectful of the democratic principles he is so keenly claiming to be exporting to Iraq.
This is one of the paradoxes which has troubled the thousands who have filled the tents of the Edinburgh Book Festival over the past couple of weeks. One theme has repeatedly cropped up in the programme and has attracted sell-out audiences: it can be summed up as “the health of democracy in its heartlands of Britain and America”.

The audiences that listen avidly and ask sharp questions are, as Neal Ascherson pointed out in his lecture on democracy, evidence that Britain has a more confident, assertive, educated, curious electorate than at probably any time in its history. The audience at the book festival has doubled in the past three years to just under 200,000. It has a vibrant appetite for debate and information, but it no longer necessarily turns to the political parties to meet it. Events such as those taking place beneath the tents in Charlotte Square over the past fortnight are a reminder that the much-discussed crisis of democracy, as evident in falling turnouts, is a crisis of faith rather than a crisis of participation. Apathy is not the issue; disillusionment is.

In the US, that disillusionment is being driven by two issues, argued Michael Ignatieff last night in the last of a Royal Society of Arts series of lectures on democracy. First, the corrosive bitterness in American politics derives from the belief among many voters that the 2000 presidential election was stolen, and a fear that it could be again. (A bitterness evident on the streets of New York this weekend as big protests mark the opening of the Republican convention.) “How can the greatest democracy in the world be so indifferent to the practice of democracy – something as simple as whether the voting machines are working properly?” asked Ignatieff.

Second, after Iraq (a war Ignatieff supported), he acknowledges that there are grave doubts about whether “democracies can control the war-making powers of their executives”. The faulty intelligence and deliberate deception can only lead one to the conclusion that the “entire leadership of the north Atlantic elite wilfully deluded themselves and then deceived the people”. A point echoed by Anthony Sampson in his lecture on the UK in the same series.

What really concerns Ignatieff is that the Bush administration simply doesn’t understand the democratic system it is constitutionally entrusted to defend. The use of torture has been the totemic issue: ruling out its use was a founding principle of American democracy. For the founding fathers, torture was for the despots of Europe; the new American state forbade the use of “cruel and unusual punishments” in its bill of rights. “I’m a passionate lover of American democracy – a lot of my pessimism is disappointed love,” concluded Ignatieff.

So how could such a precious principle have been abandoned so lightly? The answer, of course, is fear. Underlying much of the thinking going on in Edinburgh was how fear can be used to acquire power. “Fear stampedes electorates and parliaments. Fear is tremendously destructive of democracy – it’s more damaging than terror,” said Ignatieff, while Sampson, in another, equally grim analysis, argued that “the fear of terrorism gave an obvious justification for secrecy, for ruthless action and, above all, for moving without democratic constraints”.

The gloominess of these analyses in a sunny Edinburgh teeming with festival jollity is echoed in the weird, disturbing US film The Village. Making a pitch for the post-9/11 political allegory, it is a film which, despite its near-universal panning from the critics, lodges in the memory. The “elders” conjure up an elaborate myth of beasties laying siege to their community, which ensures a docile population. Their rule is largely benign but absolute. Pretty rural cottages, rows of cabbages and roaring log fires: it’s a parody of the escape many already dream of. Its evocation of American rural pioneer life – Laura Ingalls Wilder meets Relocation, Relocation – is posing its US audience a question: is this the tightly controlled dystopia you want?

What the thinkers in Edinburgh are pondering is how fear could stampede willing millions into just such a dystopia. The neocons offer just that. The problem, argued the philosopher John Gray in his talk here, is that the myth of progress which has sustained western liberalism for 200 years – the belief that the condition of human beings, ethically and politically, can be irrevocably improved – is crumbling. Two bogus versions of progress are being offered at the ballot box: in the US, the neocons are hijacking the myth of progress for their imperial project of an American century, while, in the UK, New Labour struggles to package its managerialist politics in the transformational progress rhetoric of the past. The electorate is rightly sceptical.

For over a century, a belief in progress and faith in the state to deliver it have been the driving force of progressive politics, but both are losing their hold. The dangers of this belief in progress are becoming increasingly apparent. With progress comes a belief in your own superiority; progress can be used as a rationale for aggression and coercion – institutions have to be forced to “modernise”; countries have to be dragged into the 21st century; nations must be democratised (as if that could ever be a passive process).

“Why are you so pessimistic?” a member of the audience asked Gray. “I’m just saying the future will be just like the past – full of conflict. It’s others who say that’s pessimistic,” he replied. Abandoning the belief in progress is the first step to becoming aware of the particular dangers our age faces – for example, how the progress myth can blind us to the re-emergence of old forms of cruelty, such as torture, or, most important, fuel the hubris of democratic, progressive power. Humility and a much better understanding of the limits of our power are what we need at this point in history, said Gray.

None of these speakers were offering their audiences any relief from their anxieties. Their language was shocking and dramatic. I’m no intellectual historian, so I don’t know if such pessimism of the intellect recurs every generation – but it seems that the anger in political life in the 80s and 90s has given way to something compelling, but very much bleaker. “It’s not my job to offer Prozac of the mind,” an unrepentant Gray told his captivated audience.

Sheikh Maksud Kangat, the youthful director of education at Tooting’s mosque in south London, has around 500 children in four educational establishments under his jurisdiction. But on this particular Friday, Kangat has more on his mind than Ofsted, the national curriculum and devising the new school uniform. His daughter is begging for her lunch box, but he sends her out of the office before he will answer my question about the photographs of Iraqi prisoners being abused in Abu Ghraib by their American captors. “This kind of humiliation … from an Islamic perspective, covering is so important.” He lowers his voice, he doesn’t complete his sentences. “These are things we can’t even talk about. I feel so embarrassed.”

The subject also comes up next door in the mosque’s office, where Sheikh Suleman Gani and the mosque secretary, Farouk Valimahomed, have laid out tea and biscuits for me. “One Muslim brother came up to me in the station. He was very angry about what has happened to our Muslim brothers, and I had to calm him down. I told him that this is a time of testing,” said Valimahomed. “In every community, you find a small group who commit crimes. And in the Koran it says don’t make the whole people responsible for a crime which one individual has committed.”

The strain on community leaders like Valimahomed is evident. “People who had never identified with Osama bin Laden are now thinking again as the news comes – Bush’s agreement with Sharon, the Israeli assassinations of Hamas leaders, now the photographs. You begin to think there is more to it; I never used to consider there was any justification for Osama bin Laden, but now I’m not so sure. A lot of people feel the US is out for revenge for 9/11.”

“There’s a pattern of abuse in Guantánamo, Belmarsh. There’s more to come out in Afghanistan and Iraq. At first we were doubtful, but it’s all coming together,” said Gani. In their eyes, the “pattern of abuse” has come all the way to the quiet terraced streets of Tooting. Last December, four youngsters were arrested. In the close-knit Muslim community, the details of the police operation, with helicopters and dozens of police in the night, spread like wildfire. There was considerable publicity surrounding the arrests, but none around their subsequent discharges, and the damage was done – Muslims felt threatened, and they also felt their standing in the neighbourhood was irreparably harmed.

“At a meeting for youngsters of the mosque last winter, I said to them, ‘Don’t be vociferous, don’t talk on the pavement outside the mosque, don’t hold extremist views, don’t say too much on your mobile phones, because something could happen in this area’,” said Valimahomed. But they didn’t like what they were being told. “One said, ‘It sounds like you are restricting our freedom.’”

Iqbal Sacranie, secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain, has invested over 30 years of his life building up Tooting and its parent mosque in nearby Balham. In that time, Muslims have achieved something not far short of miraculous: self-financing mosques that serve as community centres for thousands of families, running women’s health groups, offering advice, education and police drop-in sessions. But now Sacranie and other community leaders find themselves in an increasingly precarious position, having to assure the police and Home Office of their cooperation, on the one hand, and reassure their own community, on the other.

“We have to convince two sets of people. If the government doesn’t listen to our points about how and why they make these arrests, then our community asks us, ‘What are we getting out of the relationship with the authorities?’ They want to see results,” says Sacranie. “During the arrests last December, one grandmother of a suspect, in her 80s, was very worried. She asked me, ‘Are we all targets now?’ I assured her, no, that wasn’t the case and I would help.”

The issue for Sacranie, Valimahomed and others like them, is how long will they manage to keep the community’s trust? The pressure is enormous; there have been 562 arrests since 9/11 under anti-terrorism legislation and only 97 charged. Plus, there has been a huge increase in the use of stop and search under terrorist legislation. In jeopardy are the achievements of a quarter of a century of dogged work to establish a strong, peaceful British Muslim community. In Tooting, the mosque’s schools integrate Muslims from every part of the globe – from Nigeria to Turkey and Afghanistan – and make them British. The little five-year-olds in their veils, caps and turbans, their faces beaming, recite English nursery rhymes, while their 15-year-old counterparts upstairs are poring over the Merchant of Venice.

For the past decade, the classrooms have been shoehorned into an old cinema and double up as the mosque at prayer time. Yet their Sats and GCSE results have been spectacular. Most of the children have English as a second language, yet by age 11 they achieved 100% at the government required reading level in 2003. They have finally been granted state funding, and the £7m purpose-built primary school is to open its doors – to Muslims and non-Muslims alike – in September. Kangat dreams of a Muslim sixth-form college, Muslim teacher training and a Muslim university – an entire Muslim educational system. Valimahomed talks of the sports academy they are developing on a 38-acre site for Muslims and non-Muslims.

The struggle by Muslims to establish their own institutions and identity in this country, in the face of hostility and suspicion, is comparable to that of the Catholics at the time of the Irish independence movement in the late 19th century. But the stakes are higher, and the international context and its global repercussions more insistent. So, where are their allies? Who’s helping? In the US, interfaith groups have mushroomed in a bid to build understanding between Christianity and Islam, and there have been comparable initiatives here, but they are less significant in a secularised Britain. The allies one might expect on the liberal left hold back. They find the religiosity alienating, they can’t get beyond the hijab issue, and in many quarters they’re no longer prepared to take up the cudgels on human rights – accepting the government line that such is the threat of terrorism that some rights have to be curtailed.

What the Muslims in Tooting most want is understanding of their faith – of its principles of community, peace and its abhorrence of violence. The same message was evident at an event in central London last week, addressed by the American Muslim convert Hamza Yousef. Over a thousand young Muslims turned up to discuss “Islam, citizenship and the west”. There’s a battle going on as to what kind of a religion Islam is; schools, public debates and clinics rarely make headlines, while bombs always do. Too many non-Muslims have listened only to the terrorists and have already closed their eyes and ears.