Tony Blair seems to be in thrall to the idea of a global Ummah, albeit one that includes the other Abrahamic faiths. From his article inaugurating the NS’s new occasional faith column, it sounds as though, after years of having to keep quiet about his faith and his leanings towards Catholicism, he now longs for membership of a worldwide in-crowd himself. He suggests that “failure to understand the power of religion [means] failure to understand the modern world”.
“In western Europe,” he then notes, “this may sound counter-intuitive.” Or plain wrong. His framing of organised religion as the new grand narrative with the potential to imbue the financial system with “values”, and which could help navigate the confusingly fluid boundaries of race, culture and identity, just doesn’t make sense to a 21st-century British (cultural) Muslim like me.
My father, a first-generation Pakistani immigrant, was a practising Muslim. His faith, like Blair’s, underpinned his passionate, almost fanatical, commitment to a public service ethos. Unlike Blair, however, his religion was a very private relationship between himself and Allah, and he guarded that privacy jealously. The National Health Service was far more important to him than any religious institution. The only time I remember seeing him in a mosque, he was in a coffin. He was always careful to remind me that there is no pope in Islam, and that maulanas, the sometimes self-appointed religious “scholars”, are generally not to be trusted. Self-interrogation and inquiry were crucial elements of his faith, as I understood, and it was never an excuse to conform.
If anything the freedom from a stifling sense of conformity in an Islamic state (and the frequent instances of hypocrisy and corruption that often accompanied it) was one of the reasons he left Pakistan for Britain, and preferred it here throughout his lifetime.
Ubi deliberately chose not to settle in a predominantly Muslim community in Britain. Although it meant he ran a greater risk of his own children straying from the flock (as I did), he considered it a price worth paying because he knew the cost of that kind of narrow belonging. This was a brave and self-examining way to live as a devout Muslim in Britain, and although one consequence of this light touch was that I grew up not to believe in God – which must have been painful for him – it left me with an abiding respect for the progressive, secular Islam he embodied, and is the reason why I still identify as culturally Muslim – because most of my values (including what the LSE social theorist Paul Gilroy calls Britain’s “convivial multiculturalism”) are rooted in that upbringing.
Blair’s call for religion to have a higher profile in public life probably makes sense for him, as a Catholic operating in the aggressively secular political classes. But most British Muslims have experienced the fetishisation of our religious identity over our citizenship – and are exhausted by it. A lower profile would be great. In fact, a return to the closet would be a blessed relief. I miss the relative anonymity of being British Asian.
A few years ago I interviewed the postmodern French philosopher Julia Kristeva. I was very sceptical of the French position on public displays of religious identity, which seem like unreconstructed racism from my British perspective. When I said many young Muslim women wear the hijab not because of parental pressure but out of pride and desire to assert their religious identity, she said: “It is a reaction against colonialism and a symbol of pride, but maybe we could explain to them why they locate pride in this symbol and not in another. We are at a particular moment in human history when human beings are not asking the question ‘who am I?’, but ‘to what do I belong?’. Identity is confused with belonging. But this is a dead end, because belonging is not about questioning.”
Once again, I thought of Ubi and how stubbornly he refused the easy belonging of his religious identity for a more ambitious postmodern one (though he would never have called it that: just being a good Muslim, he would have said). He struggled hard to represent both parts of that construct, “British Pakistani”. At times, it conflicted with the brand of Islam he had been weaned on in 1950s Pakistan. But then he usually rose to the occasion and took on the complicated ideological challenge entailed in living in multicultural Britain, such as at my civil wedding to an agnostic Englishman of Jewish heritage. He stood up proudly in front of his many conservative Pakistani peers and told them he couldn’t have found a better match for me had he looked himself. This is the kind of everyday convivial multiculturalism we need in our private lives, not top-down interfaith initiatives. So when I come across rampant hostility to religious culture, such as that generated by Tony Blair’s article, I’m gutted on Ubi’s behalf.
Blair is right to object to the secular fundamentalist lobby’s knee-jerk opposition to religious people. The language employed often appears to be more high-minded, but the sentiments it expresses seem remarkably similar to old-fashioned racism. Living in modern multicultural Britain is an existential adventure, and we should all, devout secularists and believers included, rise to the challenge of a self-interrogating life and give up on illusory grand narratives once and for all.
Sara Wajid is a critic and journalist
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