Serious Golmal

In a minor CiF comments box turf war, ‘Muslim journalist’, Faisal Bodi, left a pugnacious note on a post by Sunny Hundal, who is rightly perturbed to have the “brown sahib” epithet thrown his way. Bodi’s comment opens with this nugget:

Sunny, I have very little respect for people who designate themselves according to their ethnicity. Unlike religions, or philosphies, they’re not exactly a meaningful basis on which to build an identity or on which to construct your life. You never see “whites in the media” or “white professionals”, do you?

Apart from the duplicity inherent in that statement (Bodi wouldn’t find employment to say his bit as a journalist if he were a “white” Muslim), it is also a recipe for a social tinderbox. Anyone who bases his identity wholly on their religion, and naught else, is going to find negotiating life outside of their bubble ultimately impossible. And Bodi is being duplicitious if he is advocating that unhappy state to his fellow Muslims.

Outside of the UK, Muslims are not compelled by the Bodi-effect of seeing the world through a denominational lens. People, Muslims included, are happy to define themselves in terms of their ethnicity, often unconciously. It only takes a trip to Dalston, London to confirm this. There you will see Arabs living next to Indians, Somalis and Kurds. All of whom are Muslim but all, by way of illustration of cultural and ethnological diversity, do very different things with aubergines, for example. These racial groups will inevitably gravitate into enclaves based on their ethnicities.

Bodi’s insinuations that Muslim cooperation with authorities is an indication of compliance and therefore of weakness is only good for soundbites on the Islam Channel but counter-productive to Muslims in the scheme of things. We should all be working towards a review of legislation that marks Muslims as ‘threat’, and that means addressing the prejudices that Muslims face rather than reinforcing them. The quiet resilience of these men is going to be far more productive for Muslims in society than these.

If this is the advice disseminated by Bodi, a “leading Muslim commenter”, we can expect to see more non-compliance and festering alienation in Muslim communities leading to a self-perpetuating cycle of public violence. Rather than despair, it’s time ordinary Muslims told jerks like Faisal Bodi and friends to develop a sense of responsibility and do something constructive with their religious identity.

This entry was posted Tuesday, June 13th, 2006 at 5:50 pm and is filed under Religion. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.