Winners and losers
In the summer, the publication of Amartya Sen's book, Identity and Violence, was greeted with delight by many reviewers and commentators. The Grand Old Man of economics threw his huge moral authority into the fevered debate about multiculturalism and argued that it was a huge mistake for British government policy to have cultivated the rise of religious identity. He was promptly adopted by the lobby of vociferous aggressive secularists who regard all faith in the public sphere as evidence of some sinister plot.
Sen promoted the idea of multiple identities - we all have them, he writes, and cited himself as an academic, Indian, father and husband. Why should one of those identities have primacy?
In a
debate on Bengal and its history of multiple identities sponsored by the Guardian and the British Museum last week, Sen and his influential arguments were challenged.The biggest problem about Sen's thesis, as fellow panelist
Tufyal Choudhury pointed out, is that its pretty hard to argue that the increasing prominence of British Muslim identity is a creation of government policy. Quite the reverse: most public services are still organised to meet the needs of ethnic minorities rather than religious minorities, and despite increasing demand to change that, the government has been reluctant.Rather, argued Choudhury, a British Muslim identity has been driven from the ground up because of a series of factors: a response to racism, a way for young Muslims to define themselves against the marginalisation and low status of their parents; a way for young Muslim women to challenge the cultural expectations of their parents and as a means to build bridges across ethnic communities.
As a second generation becomes more distant from its roots in the rural Sylheti region of Bangladesh, the religious identity rather than the cultural identity is easier to accommodate with being British, concluded Choudhury. In other words, the Muslim religious identity has been a mechanism for integration - providing a young educated second generation the way to a dual identity as British Muslim.
The prominence of British Muslim identity is partly because a growing number of Muslims felt that the old identities of race and ethnicity had served them badly; divided up by ethnic groups, many Muslims felt they had not had the influence to protect their interests in places such as the
Commission for Racial Equality.But Sen would have none of this. He insisted that Britain was in the process of abandoning its model of multiculturalism at the peak of its success.The exchange between Sen and Choudhury showed up the faultline in the debate about "communal" or faith identities. It exposed the thinness of Sen's analysis; identity is a comfortable (though complex) narrative to an educated cosmopolitan elite to which he belongs. They move in social milieu in which their identity and status are constantly affirmed. But his analysis doesn't reach to those whose identity is continually challenged, marginalised and whose status is one frequently of humiliation and rejection.The latter is the political and social context in which people prioritise one of their identities to fight back. Identity is always about context and relationships - we never develop them in isolation. If Sen wants to understand why Asians want to define themselves by their faith, he has first to ask what is the context of British and global politics which has encouraged that.
New identities may help some but they may marginalise others. There is no doubt that faith identities have thrown the race debate into disarry (as the recent
race and faith week on CiF showed). It has fragmented old alliances around a common anti-racism banner and that has left some groups more marginalised than ever. For example, the poverty of some black communities gets neglected as public debate intensifies over abstract questions of faith identity.But the rise of a faith identity has also built new alliances across ethnic divides. It has been an effective tool for a marginalised community to establish itself in this country. It's a complex picture of some losses and some gains.
This entry was posted
on Monday, December 11, 2006 at 11:19 AM.
You can skip to the end and leave a response.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment