How to Fail Multiculturalism

Read Husain in the company of the standard Left-liberal clutter and he will seem a too-convenient-by-half, born-again non-Islamist, who helps confirm every prejudice about Islam, who makes a non-issue of genuine Muslim grievances. Read him with the aid of the standard Right-conservative clutter and Husain appears to be deep thinker, a man capable of heroically resisting Hizb ut-Tahrir brainwashing and then embracing democracy and freedom.

Whether Husain is convenient for those who supported the Iraq invasion is beside the point, although this is difficult for most Left-liberals to understand since they make it a point to miss the wood for Bush. Husain is naive, sometimes cringe-makingly so, when he lectures after seeing the light. If that makes some in the Right happy, that’s not his problem. It is the Right’s problem though if it makes Husain into what he isn’t.

What Husain’s book is, is an unwittingly asked clear question: it doesn’t matter what you are angry about, if you are citizens of a liberal democracy, what are the limits to your response? Or, put another way, if Muslim communities were targeted in any country by the state, a violent response is understandable in that country, in that context. But an across-continents, violently politicised response to global and moral offences real and perceived is simply not on. Because if you are part of that you cannot also say that you are part of a modern, liberal society where citizenship is blind to creed and race. Then multiculturalism doesn’t fail, you fail multiculturalism.

Many beautifully erudite accounts about jihad, American power, British foreign policy, the West, the Orient, culture clashes, etc will not ask this question. But this is at the heart of the jihadi problem. One can agree that the Iraq war and occupation are morally reprehensible and still ask why a British Muslim should wage a war against his own country. Or why any non-Iraqi Muslim should do so. Ordinary citizens in countries like Britain ask this question, and if learned treatises on imperial arrogance won’t admit this as an issue, it explains why they are so frequently irrelevant when a society tries to come to terms with boys next door going off to kill girls in nightclubs.

Husain’s book is neither learned nor is it a treatise. It’s not particularly well-written. After the first curiosities about Islamist mobilisation in a liberal society have been whetted, much of the details seem tedious. His account after he left Hizb ut-Tahrir, the radical Islamist group that’s banned in the Arab countries but legal in Britain, is sometimes pedestrian. His pre-Islamist days, as a child in East London schools and growing up in a devout but completely un-Islamist family, are not recalled with the narrative sophistication that would have made his radicalisation seem as disturbing as he says it was. If this was a book about a British Trotskyite rejecting his ideology and returning to liberal democracy, it would have sunk because it’s such an average book.

But Trotskyites — thank god for small mercies — are not mobilising in three continents to take on the world order and girls in mini skirts. Islamists are. So Ed Husain’s narrative deficiencies don’t kill the book. Rather, through him and because of him it is easier to ask another crucial question he doesn’t quite want to. Modern societies work only when the way we live isn’t informed largely by religion. (That’s why India’s Hindu Right tub thumpers are a religious Hindu’s worst enemy.) Is this a point those closely involved with the praxis of Islam need to ponder on? They definitely should read Ed Husain — with an uncluttered mind.