We’ve Been Here Before
Since the attack on the
Diatribes against Islam in the media, dark mutterings about where the sympathies of British Muslims lie, Asians insulted and beaten, attacks on mosques – all these have rocketed since 9/11. Coming from an Irish family, I find the vilification heaped upon the Muslim community depressingly familiar, and see many parallels with the attitudes displayed towards the Irish in
From the twelfth century, when Gerald of Wales described the Irish as "a filthy people, wallowing in vice," to the nineteenth century, when Thomas Carlyle called Ireland a "human swinery", and well into the next, the Irish have were viewed as an inferior race by the British. Declan Kiberd, in ‘Inventing Ireland – The Literature Of The Modern Nation’ argues that Ireland was pressed into service as a foil to set off English virtues.
‘Victorian imperialists attributed to the Irish all those emotions and impulses which a harsh mercantile code had led them to suppress in themselves. Thus, if John Bull was industrious and reliable, Paddy was held to be indolent and contrary;if the former was mature and rational, the latter must be unstable and emotional;if the English were adult and manly, the Irish must be childish and feminine.’ (Page 34)
The English, then, projected onto the Irish all the feelings and behaviour that they couldn’t face in themselves and, argues Kiberd, Ireland became England’s subconscious. Traces of this persist to the present day – Leeds, where I now live, is one of the most violent cities in the UK, yet people here still refer to someone losing their temper as ‘Throwing a Paddy” (and, of course, people still continue to use the expression “to welsh on a deal”). It can be argued that the British have been ‘in denial’, and projecting their unwanted characteristics onto other people ever since, and that Muslims are just the latest in a long line of ‘Others.’
The Irish, being Britain’s closest neighbours, and white, have often been neglected in postcolonial studies, and sometimes even accused of being a ‘junior partner’ in the British Empire (an accusation also leveled at Wales). But Irish, Asians and Africans drew many connections between their situations when they were all part of the British Empire. For example, J.M. Synge’s ‘Playboy of the Western World’ was adapted by the Trinidadian writer Mustafa Matura as ‘The Playboy of the West Indies’. Yeats and De Valera cultivated contacts with Indian writers, intellectuals and political activists. Indians, in turn, studied the methods of Irish nationalists, and an Irish woman, Annie Besant, was elected president of the Indian National Congress in 1917.
Crucially, both the Irish and Muslim communities in this country have their origins in ex colonies, and therefore arrived here burdened with the negative stereotypes bestowed upon them by their conquerors (for Muslim read Asian, they being most readily associated with the religion in the popular imagination). Only able to find accommodation in the poorest areas, and shunned by the locals, both the Irish and Asians found themselves accused of creating ghettoes. The only jobs they could get were those offering low pay and long hours (labouring, catering, the rag trade, etc), which served to further isolate them from the host society. In addition, both believed in religions which were viewed as threatening and fanatical by the British, and finding integration so difficult, retained strong emotional bonds with the countries from which they had emigrated, which in turn provoked suspicion about where their loyalty lay.
Just as people are now paranoid about Islam, in the past Ireland’s Catholic faith provoked hostility and suspicion, as it aligned the Irish with Britain’s traditional enemies. Ireland was seen as a backdoor to England through which the French and Spanish might force entry. Resistance to Roman Catholicism was one of the ways England defined its very identity, and Protestanism and empire became crucial elements in the creation of Great Britain. Fear of invasion was used to help forge patriotism. Catholics were viewed as alien to the British way of life, and potential traitors. More recently, at the height of The Troubles in the 1970s and 80s, there was an echo of this fear when the Irish in Britain were routinely accused of hiding IRA units in their midst, and raising funds for them.
As British troops were killed and injured in the six counties, and bombs exploded in England, the condemnation of the IRA’s tactics spilled over into ever more extreme and offensive racist stereotyping of the Irish. The Irish, it was said, were not like ‘us.’ They were simple minded and bloodthirsty fanatics, blinded by Republican propaganda, the priests who should be calling for restraint instead blessing IRA units as they set off to bomb Britain. Cartoons in The Evening Standard and The Daily Mail depicting the Irish as apes and sub humans bore a quite uncanny resemblance to those found in Punch a century earlier as the Irish struggled for independence from colonial rule (the subtext then being that it was hilarious that such a backward people could possibly hope to govern themselves). These grotesque images are collected in Liz Curtis’ seminal work Nothing But The Same Old Story:The Roots Of Anti-Irish Racism.
Now similar fears are being expressed about Asian communities becoming the back door through which al-Qaida might enter England. For hundreds of years Islam has been portrayed as a fanatical and bloodthirsty religion, glorifying in martyrdom, implacably opposed to modernity, and fuelled by hatred of the west, ultimately seeking it’s destruction. Every time there is a new terrorist attack, the media is saturated with voices not just condemning the tactics of al-Qaida, but contrasting barbaric Islam with the freedom and tolerance to be found in Western civilization (When more than 7,000 Muslims were massacred at Srebrenica, where were the diatribes about bloodthirtsy Christians?). Asians are then left to face the inevitable backlash just as the Irish did during The Troubles. Recent Home Office figures, showing a 300% increase in the number of Asians being stopped and searched under anti-terrorism legislation in the last year have reinforced the impression that the whole community is being criminalized. Often the people stopped were wearing traditional clothes, or had what were perceived to be Muslim style beards - every visible manifestation of adherence to the Muslim faith now provokes fear and suspicion. But it is not only the police who think like this, Islamophobia can be found in supposedly much more enlightened areas of society. In an article in The Guardian, Labour peer Manzila Uddin described the reaction of her fellow MPs when she started wearing a scarf to Westminster. For her this was an expression of her deepening faith, but it provoked, from people she’d known for years, a barrage of suspicious questions – was it a sign of her support for the French schoolgirls who’d been banned from wearing the hijab? Had she become a fundamentalist? ‘It was as if they thought’ she wrote ‘that one piece of silk cloth over the hair changed one’s personality.’
In the English imagination, Ireland, writes Kiberd, became ‘a fantasy land in which to meet fairies and monsters’, a description which now seems more applicable to the Muslim community. Muslims are now being used, as the Irish were in the past, as a foil to set off supposed British virtues, taking the place of Ireland in Britain’s subconscious. If the British are outgoing and friendly, Muslims must be insular and hostile. If the former are moderate and tolerant, the latter must be fanatical and intolerant, and so on. This dangerous dichotomy is made possible only by the most extreme form of Islamic fundamentalism being singled out as being representative of the whole of the religion, as if there is one monolithic, and uniform Muslim mindset. A quick trawl through the internet reveals a disturbing level of paranoia. One person said that when they saw someone covered up by a hijab they felt threatened, as it reminded them of the balaclava that terrorists used to hide their faces in Northern Ireland (I have the usual Western liberal problems with the wearing of the hijab, but it signifying support for al-Qaeda is not one of them). When I told an Asian friend about this comment, he replied that if clothing is to be the yardstick by which we measure individuals, then why is it young women who wear mini skirts, and black knee high leather boots aren't branded prostitutes? Is it only white people, he asked, who are allowed to re-interpret images?
And a Muslim brave enough to join the discussion about terrorism in the media soon finds that any attempt to widen the scope of the debate is severely stamped on. Suggesting that al-Qaeda’s (or, in the past, the IRA’s) activities, no matter how revolting, cannot simply be dismissed as the work of psychopaths, that they gain credibility by feeding off the suffering caused by imperialism and racism, is greeted with howls of outrage. Drawing attention to the fact that the world is riddled with injustice, and suggesting that the best way to tackle terrorism might, in the end, be to address this, is perceived as an attack on ‘us’, and therefore siding with the enemy. It’s reminiscent of the reaction that arguing the case for self government for Wales is guaranteed to bring down on your head. Before you have barely begun you are angrily interrupted and accused of condoning burning cottages, forcing people to learn a dead language, and kicking out the English. A lot of heat, and little light, is generated.
It is only one step from an assertion of national or cultural pride and self-glorification to feelings of superiority, and eventually the marginalisation and exclusion of the Others. Anti Irish racism contributed to the British attitude that the Irish were responsible for their own plight and undeserving of assistance during the famine (it was claimed that the starving Irish were willingly foregoing food and using English charity money to buy arms). Later on, the attitude that all Irish people were somewhow implicated in terrorism led to such appaling miscarriages of injustice as the jailing of the Birmingham 6 and Guilford 4, and 13 civilians being murdered on Bloody Sunday. Similarly, in Guantamo Bay, when those guarding the inmates are led to believe that they belong to an inferior race or despicable religion, it is hardly surprising that torture is the result.
A few months ago I spoke to a man who lectured social workers. He told me how his students (mostly black and Asian this year) had been amazed to discover how much discrimination and racism the Irish had suffered. For them, the Irish had always been popular and successful. When they reflected on how, despite years of racism and poverty, the Irish had eventually triumphed against the odds, these students found their example inspirational. The black and Asian students felt a tremendous empathy with them, and were all now going, for the first time, to the Leeds St Patrick's Day celebrations. I found this an uplifting anecdote, and it made me hopeful that, in particular, Muslims will also be able to overcome the prejudices stacked up against them.
The Irish themselves are happy to accept the typical foreigner’s view that theirs is simply a poor country come good. However, there are two main reasons for the transformation of Ireland’s image. It’s economic boom, the much trumpeted ‘Celtic Tiger’, which allowed the Irish to re-invent themselves as progressive, sophisticated, and media friendly. The ceasefire in Northern Ireland, and the subsequent reduction in the paranoia and suspicion about the Irish in Britain as the violence scaled down, then set the seal on their rehabilitation. Indeed, it can be argued that the former impacted on the latter, as the IRA realized that many of their own supporters were desperate to share in the economic benefits taking place in the Republic, and that the continuing violence in the six counties was preventing this.
The prospects for a ceasefire between the West and al-Qeada are rather remoter, however, than the one between the IRA and the British government. So what are the chances of the Muslim community transforming it’s image by economic growth, like the Irish? Fintan O’Toole, in his book ‘After The Ball’ deconstructs the myth of the Celtic Tiger, and takes a hard look at the particular circumstances of Ireland’s economic revival. The Republic of Ireland has the most globalised economy on earth (and also one of the most unequal). It’s economic transformation is largely down to massive EU and American investment. Since 1993, 25% of all US investement in the EU has gone to Ireland, which has only 1% of the population. What are the chances of America investing so heavily in the Muslim population?