Understanding Al-Taqiyya

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Al-Taqiyya is an Islamic concept that allows Muslims to conceal their true beliefs or actions in certain situations, particularly when their safety or well-being is at risk. This practice is most commonly associated with Shia Islam but can also be found in some Sunni traditions. Al-Taqiyya is often misunderstood and misinterpreted, leading to misconceptions about its purpose and implications.

The primary idea behind al-Taqiyya is to protect oneself or others from harm, especially in situations where revealing one's true beliefs could lead to persecution, imprisonment, or even death. It's a strategy of self-preservation that doesn't necessarily involve deception for personal gain but rather for survival. Al-Taqiyya is not an obligation in Islam, but it becomes permissible when one's life or safety is threatened due to their religious beliefs.

Muslims practice al-Taqiyya primarily as a means of self-preservation in situations where their safety, well-being, or life is at risk due to their religious beliefs or identity. Al-Taqiyya allows individuals to conceal their true beliefs or practices temporarily in order to avoid harm, persecution, or danger. Here are some reasons why Muslims might practice al-Taqiyya:

1. Protection from Persecution: In certain historical and contemporary contexts, Muslims, particularly minority sects like Shia Muslims, have faced persecution and discrimination due to their beliefs. Al-Taqiyya enables them to protect themselves from harm by concealing their true religious affiliation or practices.

2. Maintaining Life and Safety: Al-Taqiyya can be used when an individual's life or physical safety is at stake. If openly identifying as a Muslim could lead to harm or danger, a person might choose to hide their religious identity temporarily until the threat subsides.

3. Preserving Harmony: In situations where revealing one's true beliefs could lead to conflict or tension within a community or family, al-Taqiyya might be practiced to maintain harmony and avoid unnecessary strife.

4. Living in Non-Muslim Societies: Muslims living in predominantly non-Muslim societies might choose to practice al-Taqiyya to avoid misunderstandings, discrimination, or potential backlash from the majority population.

5. Avoiding Extremist Threats: In some cases, Muslims might use al-Taqiyya to protect themselves from threats posed by extremist individuals or groups who target those they consider to be "heretical" or not adhering to their specific interpretation of Islam.

It's important to note that al-Taqiyya is not intended to promote deception or manipulation for personal gain. It is a practice rooted in the principle of protecting oneself or others from harm, particularly in situations where religious beliefs are under threat. Al-Taqiyya is not an obligation in Islam but is rather a concession allowed in cases of necessity. It is also a topic of debate among scholars, with differing opinions on when and how it should be applied.

Using the term "al-Taqiyya" to describe Pakistanis praising India or its economy would likely be an inappropriate and misleading application of the concept. Al-Taqiyya is primarily concerned with concealing one's true beliefs or practices in situations of danger or threat to protect oneself from harm. It is rooted in religious contexts and is not meant to describe casual behavior or actions.

When Pakistanis praise India or its economy, it can stem from a variety of reasons that have nothing to do with al-Taqiyya. People's opinions and behaviors are influenced by various factors, such as political considerations, personal experiences, economic analyses, diplomatic goals, or even genuine appreciation for certain aspects of another country.

It's important to avoid misusing or overgeneralizing concepts like al-Taqiyya to label behaviors that might have different motivations. Applying such terms inaccurately can perpetuate stereotypes and misunderstandings. Instead, it's better to approach people's actions and expressions with an open mind and seek to understand the complex factors that influence their perspectives.

The Future of Pakistan

THE PERFORMATIVE POLITICIAN

Nadeem F Paracha in The Dawn

Illustration by Abro



Populism is a way of framing political ideas that can be filled with a verity of ideologies (C. Mudde in Current History, 2014). These ideologies can come from the left or the right. Populism in itself is not a distinct ideology. It is a performative political style.

No matter where it’s coming from, it is manifested through a particular set of animated gestures, images, tones and symbols (B. Moffitt, The Global Rise of Populism, 2016). At the core of it is a narrative containing two main ‘villains’: The ‘elites’ and ‘the other’. Elites are described as being corrupt. And ‘the other’ is demonised as being a threat to the beliefs and values of the ‘majority’.

Populists begin by glorifying the ‘besieged’ polity as noble. They then begin to frame the polity’s civilisation as ‘sacred’. Therefore, the mission to eradicate threats, in this context, becomes a sacred cause. The far-right parties in Europe want to protect Europe’s Christian identity from Muslim intruders. They see Muslim immigration to European countries as an invasion.

Yet, these far-right groups are largely secular. They do not propose the creation of a Christian theocracy. Instead, they understand modern European civilisation as the outcome of its illustrious Christian past. They frame the Muslim immigrant as ‘the other’ who has arrived from a lesser civilisation. So, according to far-right populists in Europe, the Muslim other — tolerated and facilitated by a political elite — starts to undermine the Christian values that aided European civilisations to become ‘great’.

Ironically, most far-right outfits in Europe that espouse such notions are largely critical of conventional Christian institutions. They see them as being too conservative towards modern European values. Far-right outfits are not overtly religious at all — even though their fiery populist rhetoric frames their cause as a sacred undertaking to protect the civilisational role of Christianity in shaping European societies.

Thus, European far-right populists adopt Christianity not as a theocratic-political doctrine, but as an identity marker to differentiate themselves from Muslims (Saving The People, ed. O. Roy, 2016). It is therefore naive to understand issues such as Islamophobia as a tussle between Christianity and Islam. Neither is it a clash between modernity and anti-modernity, as such.

The actions of some Islamist extremists, and the manner in which these were framed by popular media, made Muslim migrants in the West a community that could be easily moulded into a feared ‘other’ by populists. If one takes out the Muslim migrants from the equation, the core narrative of far-right populists will lose its sting.

Muslims in this regard have become ‘the other’ in India as well. Hindu nationalism is challenging the old, ‘secular’ political elite by claiming that this elite was serving Muslim interests to maintain its political hegemony, and that it was repressing values, beliefs and memories of a Hindu civilisation that was thriving before being invaded and dismantled by Muslim invaders.

Here too, the populist Hindu nationalists are not necessarily devout and pious. And when they are, then the actions in this respect are largely performative rather than doctrinal. That’s why, today, a harmless Hindu ritual and the act of emotionally or physically assaulting a Muslim, may carry similar performative connotations. For example, a militant Hindu nationalist mob attacking a Muslim can be conceived by the attackers as a sacred ritual.

Same is the case in Pakistan. The researcher Muhammad Amir Rana has conducted several interviews of young Islamist militants who were arrested and put in rehabilitation programmes. Almost all of them were told by their ‘handlers’ that self-sacrifice was a means to create an Islamic state/caliphate that would wipe out poverty, corruption and immorality, and provide justice. This idea was programmed into them to create a ‘self’ in relation to an opposite or ‘the other’. The other in this respect were heretics and infidels who were conspiring to destroy Islam.

When an Islamist suicide bomber explodes him/herself in public, or when extremists desecrate Ahmadiyya graves, or a mob attacks an alleged blasphemer, each one of these believe they are undertaking a sacred ritual that is not that different from the harmless ones. But Islamist militants are not populists. They have dogmatic doctrines or are deeply indoctrinated.

Not so, the populists. Populists are great hijackers of ideas. There’s nothing original or deep about them. Everything remains on the surface. Take, for instance, the recently ousted Pakistani PM Imran Khan. He unabashedly steals ideas from the left and the right. His core constituency, which is not so attuned to history, perceives these ideas as being entirely new. Everything he says or claims to have done, becomes ‘for the first time in the history of Pakistan.’

But being a populist, it wasn’t enough for Khan to frame his ‘struggle’ (against ‘corrupt elites’) as a noble cause. It needed to be manifested as a sacred conviction. So, from 2014 onwards, he increasingly began to lace his speeches with allusions of him fighting for justice and morality by treading a path laid out by Islam’s sacred texts and personalities. He then began to explain this undertaking as a ‘jihad’.

These were/are pure populist manoeuvres and entirely performative. Once the cause transformed into becoming a ‘jihad’, it not only required rhetoric culled from Islamist evangelists and then put in the context of a ‘political struggle’, but it also needed performed piety — carrying prayer beads, being constantly photographed while saying obligatory Muslim prayers, embracing famous preachers, etc.

And since ‘jihad’ in the popular imagination is often perceived to be something aggressive and manly, Khan poses as an outspoken and fearless saviour of not only the people of Pakistan, but also of the ‘ummah’.

Yet, by all accounts, he is not very religious. He’s not secular either. But this is how populists are. They are basically nothing. They are great performers who can draw devotion from a great many people — especially those who are struggling to formulate a political identity for themselves. There are no shortcuts to this. But populists provide them shortcuts.

Khan is a curious mixture of an Islamist and a brawler. But both of these attributes mainly reside on the surface and in his rhetoric. The only aim one can say that is lingering underneath the surface is an inexhaustible ambition to be constantly admired and, of course, rule as a North Korean premier does. Conjuring lots of adulation, but zero opposition.

Will India remain a democracy?

 

Islamophobia And Secularism

Nadeem F Paracha in The Dawn

Prime Minister Imran Khan frequently uses the term ‘Islamophobia’ while commenting on the relationship between European governments and their Muslim citizens. Khan has often been accused of lamenting the treatment meted out to Muslims in Europe, but remaining conspicuously silent about cases of religious discrimination in his own country.

Then there is also the case of Khan not uttering a single word about the Chinese government’s apparently atrocious treatment of the Muslim population of China’s Xinjiang province.

Certain laws in European countries are sweepingly described as being ‘Islamophobic’ by Khan. When European governments retaliate by accusing Pakistan of constitutionally encouraging acts of bigotry against non-Muslim groups, the PM bemoans that Europeans do not understand the complexities of Pakistan’s ‘Islamic’ laws.

Yet, despite the PM repeatedly claiming to know the West like no other Pakistani does, he seems to have no clue about the complexities of European secularism.

Take France for instance. French secularism, called ‘Laïcité’ is somewhat different than the secularism of various other European countries and the US. According to the contemporary scholar of Western secularism, Charles Taylor, French secularism is required to play a more aggressive role.

In his book, A Secular Age, Taylor demonstrates that even though the source of Western secularism was common — i.e. the emergence of ‘modernity’ and its political, economic and social manifestations — secularism evolved in Europe and the US in varying degrees and of different types. 

Secularism in the US remains largely impersonal towards religion. But in France and in some other European countries, it encourages the state/government to proactively discourage even certain cultural dimensions of faith in the public sphere which, it believes, have the potential of mutating into becoming political expressions.

Nevertheless, to almost all prominent philosophers of Western democracy across the 19th and 20th centuries, the idea of providing freedom to practise religion is inherent in secularism, as long as this freedom is not used for any political purposes.

According to the American sociologist Jacques Berlinerblau in A Call to Arms for Religious Freedom, six types of secularism have evolved. The American researcher Barry Kosmin divides secularism into two categories: ‘soft’ and ‘hard’. Most of Berlinerblau’s types fall in the ‘soft’ category. The hard one is ‘State Sponsored Atheism’ which looks to completely eliminate religion. This type was practised in various former communist countries and is presently exercised in China and North Korea. One can thus place Laïcité between Kosmin’s soft and hard secular types.

The existence of what is called ‘Islamophobia’ in secular Europe and the US has increasingly drawn criticism from various quarters. According to the French author Jean-Loïc Le Quellec, the term is derived from the French word ‘islamophobie’ that was first used in 1910 to describe prejudice against Muslims.

L.P. Sheridan writes in the March 2006 issue of the Journal of Interpersonal Violence that the term did not become widely used till 1991. According to Roland Imhoff and Julia Recker in the Journal of Political Psychology, a wariness had already been building in the West towards Muslims because of the aggressively anti-West ‘Islamic’ Revolution in Iran in 1979, and the violent backlash in some Muslim countries against the publication of the novel Satanic Verses by the British author Salman Rushdie in 1988.

Islamophobia is one of the many expressions of racism towards ‘the other’. Racisms of varying nature have for long been present in Europe and the US. Therefore Imhoff and Recker see Islamophibia as “new wine in an old bottle.” It is a relatively new term, but one that has also been criticised.

Discrimination against race, faith, ethnicity, caste, etc., is present in almost all countries. But its existence gets magnified when it is present in countries that describe themselves as liberal democracies.

Whereas Islamophobia is often understood as a phobia against Islam, there are also those who find this definition problematic. To the term’s most vehement critics, not only has it overshadowed other aspects of racism, of which there are many, it is also mostly used by ‘radical Muslims’ to curb open debate.

In a study, the University of Northampton’s Paul Jackson writes that the term should be replaced with ‘Muslimphobia’ because the racism in this context is aimed at a people and not towards the faith, as such. However, he does add that the faith too should be open for academic debate.

In an essay for the 2016 anthology The Search for Europe, Bichara Khader writes that racism against non-white migrants in Europe intensified in the 1970s because of a severe economic crisis. Khader writes that this racism was not pitched against one’s faith.

According to Khader, whereas this meant that South Asian, Arab, African and Caribbean migrants were treated as an unwanted whole based on the colour of their skin, from the 1980s onwards, the Muslims among these migrants began to prominently assert their distinctiveness. As the presence of veiled women and mosques grew, this is when the ‘migration problem’ began to be seen as a ‘Muslim problem’.

The Muslim diaspora in the West began to increasingly consolidate itself as a separate whole. Mainly through dress, Muslim migrants began to shed the identity of their original countries, creating a sort of universality of Muslimness.

But this also separated them from the non-Muslim migrant communities, who were facing racial discrimination as well. Interestingly, this imagined universality of Muslimness was also exported back to the mother countries of Muslim migrants.

Take the example of how, in Pakistan, some recent textbooks have visually depicted the dress choices of Pakistani women. They are almost exactly how some second and third generation Muslim women in the West imagine a woman should dress like.

But there was criticism within Pakistan of this depiction. The critics maintain that the present government was trying to engineer a cultural type of how women ought to dress in a country where — unlike in some other Muslim countries — veiling is neither mandatory nor banned. This has only further highlighted the fact that identity politics in this context in Pakistan is being influenced by the identity politics being flexed by certain Muslim groups in the West.

Either way, because of the fact that it is a recent phenomenon, identity politics of this nature is not organic as such, and will continue to cause problems for Muslims within and away.

The Map of Pakistan by Rahmat Ali

 

Interview with Sanjay Dixit

Interview with Pervez Hoodbhoy

India: Where does one turn when law, political parties and the state turn their back on justice?

P B Mehta in The Indian Express


Anand Teltumbde, one of India’s important and courageous thinkers, just turned 70 in prison. He, along with Sudha Bharadwaj and others, is being held in the Bhima Koregaon case. They are being repeatedly denied bail. Varavara Rao, poet and Maoist intellectual, contracted COVID and has been subject to degrading and humiliating conditions at the age of 80. The overwhelming power that the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act gives to the state, the sheer impunity with which government can treat this group of accused, the Kafkaesque role of the judiciary in denying bail and making procedural safeguards ineffective, and the deafening political silence on their detention, all warrant deeper reflection. The accused in the Bhima Koregaon case are not the first to be victimised in this way; and they will not be the last. The UAPA is being used to target protest from Assam to Delhi.

Anand Teltumbde’s work, particularly “Republic of Caste”, presciently forecast his own condition. He, like the others, has drawn support from the usual petition-writing crowd of intellectuals. But his case provides a disturbing window on the political loneliness of a genuine intellectual in Indian conditions.

Here is a well-known Dalit intellectual being put in prison and yet no serious political protest, even from Dalit politicians. Teltumbde had, in another context written, “When Sudhir Dhawale, a Dalit activist, was arrested in 2011 on the trumped up charge of being a Naxalite and incarcerated for nearly four years, there was hardly any protest from the community.” This phenomenon of figures like Teltumbde not drawing broader political support requires some reflection. Teltumbde himself, in part, attributed this to divisions amongst Dalits, and their greater faith in the state. But his work points towards a subtler reason.

For all of India’s handwringing, that we need to escape identity politics, there is a great antipathy to anyone who tries to escape it. Teltumbde is one of those rare figures who argued that the Left and liberals failed to take caste seriously, and caste mobilisation failed to take class and economics seriously. But the result is a kind of suspension in between two constructions: Most of society does not get outraged because he is often reduced to being a Dalit intellectual; Dalits don’t get outraged because he becomes a “Left” intellectual. The blunt truth is that, if we leave the rarefied world of petitions, the only modality of protest that is politically effective is the one that has the imprimatur of community mobilisation behind it. If you can show a community identity is affected, all hell will break loose; without it, there is no political protest.

Teltumbde was also prescient about the way the term “Left” is used in India. Teltumbde himself is closer to the Left in his economic imagination. But the rhetorical function of the “Left” in India is not to describe the contest over the free market versus the state. The rhetorical function of the “Left” is to describe any ideological or political current that, while recognising the importance of identity, wants to escape its compulsory or simplistic character; so any broadly liberal position or a position that distances itself from “my community right or wrong” also becomes Left. For Hindutva, anyone who resists or transcends the narcissisms of collective identity becomes “Left.” But the same is increasingly true of other identities — Maratha, Jat, Dalit, Rajput. “Left” is anyone who complicates identity claims. That, rather than secular versus communal, is the big chasm in Indian politics. But the result is that if you are labelled “Left” in this way, you will have no political protection.

The charge of Maoism is the hyper version of this “Left” in the context of Adivasi mobilisation. Which is why the entire political class, and so much of India’s discursive space, keeps invoking the “Left” spectre. And Teltumbde was insightful in thinking that once you had been labelled Left in India, it was easy to secure a diminution in your legal and cultural standing. Even the Courts will turn off their thinking cap. It is in this that the genuine intellectual enterprise is a lonely one, whose disastrous political consequences Teltumbde is facing.

The Bhima Koregaon cases also throw a spotlight on so many state institutions. The UAPA, and its ubiquitous use is a travesty in a liberal democracy. The lawyer, Abhinav Sekhri, has, in a recent article (“How the UAPA is perverting the Idea of Justice”, Article14.com) pointed out two basic issues with the law. The law is designed in a way that it makes the question of innocence or guilt almost irrelevant. It can, in effect, inflict punishment without guilt. The idea that people like Teltumbde or the exemplary Bharadwaj cannot even get bail underscores this point. And second, the safeguards of our criminal justice process work unevenly at the best of times. But in the case of the UAPA, the courts have often, practically, suspended serious scrutiny of the state. What legitimises this conduct of the court is two things: The broader ideological construction of the “Left” as an existential threat. And the impatience of society with procedural safeguards. The UAPA has in some senses become the judicial version of the encounter — where the suspension of the normal meaning of the rule of law is itself seen as a kind of justice.

The state has been going after Varavara Rao for his entire life. He is a complicated figure. He is an extraordinarily powerful poet who made visible the exploitative skeins of Indian society; his poetry, even in translation, cannot fail to move you out of a complacent slumber. He was formidable in consciousness raising. Of this group, his ideological excusing of horrendous Maoist excesses, has been indefensible and disturbing. His moral stance once promoted a deeply meditative critique on the morality of revolutionary violence by Apoorvanand (“‘Our’ Violence Versus ‘Their’ Violence”, Kafila.online).

But the farce that the Indian state is enacting in pursuing Varavara Rao in the Bhima Koregaon prosecutions is proving him correct in two ways. First, in his insistence that what is known as bourgeois law is a sham in its own terms; the rule of law indeed is rule by law. And second, that repression and degradation is indeed the argument of a despotic state. Where does one turn when law, political parties and the state turn their back on justice?

An insight into Imran Khan

Britain’s immigration debate is not only about economics

Culture, identity and a sense of fairness matter just as much to many people writes  CAMILLA CAVENDISH in The FT

Last summer I was sitting in a café in Boston, Lincolnshire , interviewing Karol, its enterprising Polish owner. He arrived in England to pick lettuces ten years ago, worked his way up to factory packing, and then started this little restaurant on a side street. Sipping tea, he told me of his high hopes for the pierogi dumplings cooked by his wife. 

I had sought out Karol as an example of the kind of immigrant we want in Britain — friendly and hard-working. He was sheepish about his very limited English, though, and said that his wife and parents, who have joined him, barely speak it at all. Their customers, he said with a tone of regret, are almost all Polish, Romanian and Lithuanian. Here on the east coast of England, the old residents and the new arrivals are largely living parallel lives. 

 This was perhaps inevitable. The population of this little town grew at more than double the average rate for England and Wales in ten years from 2004. This followed the decision of the Blair government to open the UK to the eastern European accession countries without a transitional period. There was a 460 per cent increase in immigration. Unsurprisingly, Boston registered the highest Leave vote of the 2016 referendum: almost 76 per cent. 

Boston is an extreme example, but it is only one of many places I have visited where we have utterly failed to integrate people — including, sometimes, those of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin. The government has been attacked for attempting to limit low-skilled immigration in this week’s white paper. But it is trying to respond to a deep malaise which is driving far-right populism in both Europe and the US, and even in previously moderate Sweden. 

As Britain tumbles towards a future which I still hope will see us clinging on to the EU, not crashing out of it, I am concerned that so many members of the establishment continue to paint anxieties about migration as purely economic, the misplaced rage of those “left behind” by globalisation and the financial crisis. 

While these are clearly factors, this explanation overlooks the fact that the challenge is not merely an economic one, of wages and productivity — it is cultural, too. The Migration Advisory Committee, which has done so much to provide objective analysis of this fraught subject, has stated that migration from the European Economic Area “as a whole has had neither the large negative effects claimed by some, nor the clear benefits claimed by others”. Something else is going on: boiling resentment at years of being ignored by the ruling classes who have benefited most from immigration. 

Academics including Eric Kaufmann and Jens Hainmueller have shown that attitudes to immigration in the US and Europe are not as highly correlated with personal economic circumstances as many commentators assume. Many Leave voters and supporters of US president Donald Trump have been influenced more by deep fears about the impact on national identity. 

Economists will argue that consumers benefit from cheaper vegetables in the supermarkets. But Boston voters who might prefer to pay a bit more to preserve their sense of identity should not be lightly dismissed. If we do end up remaining in the EU, we must not simply breathe a sigh of relief and resume business as usual. 

This week’s argument over the proposed £30,000 income threshold for new arrivals will no doubt continue through the consultation period. So will the debate — vital for the NHS — over how to define a “shortage occupation”. But £30,000 was not plucked out of the air. It was based on the committee’s finding that EEA/EU migrants as a whole pay more in than they take out, in services and benefits — but only when they earn roughly £30,000 or more. 

This goes to the heart of what many people feel deeply: that no one should take out more than they have paid in. During David Cameron’s renegotiation of the terms of the UK’s EU membership in 2015-16, polls showed that many people were aware that British taxpayers were paying child benefit to children who lived in Warsaw and had never set foot in Britain. 

Mr Cameron bumped up against not only the theology of free movement of people, but also the incompatibility between Britain’s free universal healthcare and school systems, and contributory social insurance schemes in other member states which require far higher levels of prior contribution before getting entitlement to benefits. 

The white paper states that people who arrive speaking only basic English are required to become more fluent; but I have interviewed many people who have survived for over a decade with no English at all. It makes a nod towards reducing entitlements for short-term workers, but does not address the question of contributions from people who want to put down roots and bring dependants, beyond the blunt instrument of income thresholds. We must bring back the contributory principle to our welfare state. 

I would never argue that immigration was the sole factor driving the Leave vote in the 2016 referendum. Nor will it be the sole consideration in any “people’s vote”. But we ignore it at our peril. This week, it felt as though the debate had shrunk back into convenient tracks. 

I hope that my friend Karol will succeed. Of course, if we crash out of the EU on March 29, high tariff barriers to agricultural imports will probably bankrupt our farms — and his café business. If that happens, Boston’s problem will no longer be too many people, but too few. 

Brexit won't affect only the UK – it has lessons for the global economy

Exiting the EU highlights the risks of economic and political fragmentation writes Mohamed El Erian in The Guardian 

 

Brexit will have an impact on the global economy, not just the UK. Photograph: Fabian Bimmer/Reuters


The singular issue of Brexit has consumed the United Kingdom for two-and-a-half years. The “if”, “how” and “when” of the country’s withdrawal from the European Union, after decades of membership, has understandably dominated news coverage, and sidelined almost every other policy debate. Lost in the mix, for example, has been any serious discussion of how the UK should boost productivity and competitiveness at a time of global economic and financial fluidity.

At the same time, the rest of the world’s interest in Brexit has understandably waned. The UK’s negotiations with the EU have dragged on through multiple déjà vu moments, and the consensus is that the economic fallout will be felt far more acutely in Britain than in the EU, let alone in countries elsewhere.

Still, the rest of the world is facing profound challenges of its own. Political and economic systems are undergoing far-reaching structural changes, many of them driven by technology, trade, climate change, high inequality and mounting political anger. In addressing these issues, policymakers around the world would do well to heed the lessons of the UK’s Brexit experience. 

When Britons voted by a margin of 51.9% to 48.1% to leave the EU, the decision came as a shock to experts, pundits and Conservative and Labour party leaders alike. They had underappreciated the role of “identity” as a driving force behind the June 2016 referendum. But now, voters’ deeply held ideas about identity, whether real or perceived, can no longer be dismissed. Though today’s disruptive politics are fuelled by economic disappointment and frustration, identity is the tip of the spear. It has exposed and deepened political and social divisions that are as uncomfortable as they are intractable.

Experts also predicted that the UK economy would suffer an immediate and significant fall in output following the 2016 referendum. In the event, they misunderstood the dynamics of what economists call a “sudden stop” – that is, abrupt, catastrophic dysfunction in a key sector of the economy. A perfect example is the 2008 global financial crisis, when financial markets seized up as a result of operational dislocations and a loss of mutual confidence in the payments and settlement system.

Brexit was different. Because you cannot replace something with nothing, there was no immediate break in British-EU trade. In the absence of clarity on what type of Brexit would ultimately materialise, the economic relationship simply continued “as is,” and an immediate disruption was averted.

It turns out that when making macroeconomic and market projections for Brexit so far, “short versus long” has been more important than “soft versus hard” (with “hard” referring to the UK’s full, and most likely disorderly, withdrawal from the European single market and customs union). The question is not whether the UK will face a considerable economic reckoning, but when.

Nonetheless, the UK economy is already experiencing slow-moving structural change. There is evidence of falling foreign investment and this is contributing to the economy’s disappointing level of investment overall. Moreover, this trend is accentuating the challenges associated with weak productivity growth. 

There are also signs that companies with UK-based operations have begun to trigger their Brexit contingency plans after a prolonged period of waiting, planning, and more waiting. In addition to shifting investments out of the UK, firms will also start to relocate jobs. And this process will likely accelerate even if Theresa May manages to get her proposed exit deal through parliament.

The Brexit process thus showcases the risks associated with economic and political fragmentation, and provides a preview of what awaits an increasingly fractured global economy if this continues: namely, less efficient economic interactions, less resilience, more complicated cross-border financial flows, and less agility. In this context, costly self-insurance will come to replace some of the current system’s pooled-insurance mechanisms. And it will be much harder to maintain global norms and standards, let alone pursue international policy harmonisation and coordination.

Tax and regulatory arbitrage are likely to become increasingly common as well. And economic policymaking will become a tool for addressing national security concerns (real or imagined). How this approach will affect existing geopolitical and military arrangements remains to be seen.

Lastly, there will also be a change in how countries seek to structure their economies. In the past, Britain and other countries prided themselves as “small open economies” that could leverage their domestic advantages through shrewd and efficient links with Europe and the rest of the world. But now, being a large and relatively closed economy might start to seem more attractive. And for countries that do not have that option – such as smaller economies in east Asia – tightly knit regional blocs might provide a serviceable alternative.

The messiness of British party politics has made the Brexit process look like a domestic dispute that is sometimes inscrutable to the rest of the world. But Brexit holds important lessons for and about the global economy. Gone are the days when accelerating economic and financial globalisation and correlated growth patterns went almost unquestioned. We are also in an era of considerable technological and political fluidity. The outlooks for growth and liquidity will likely become even more uncertain and divergent than they already are.

How to win an argument online

We Scots have kept our kilts but shed our historical myths – a process sadly lacking south of the border

Ian Jack in The Guardian


I had never heard of the game called “welly wanging”, but there it was on the News at Ten this week – in a report by the BBC’s home editor, Mark Easton, on the traditions that give the English regions their splendid variety. The report showed some people, probably children, throwing gumboots in a field – the competitor who threw a boot furthest was the winner. It was things like this, Easton said, that made Yorkshire different from other places, which had their own traditions that were just as special to them. Some morris dancers appeared, and a man in a Tyneside pub talked about how collective hardship had forged the Geordie identity, these days manifested in a love of Newcastle United Football Club and an equal hatred of its rival in Sunderland. It all felt flimsy and sad – that “regional identity” should amount to this rickle of bones.

FacebookTwitterPinterest A welly-wanging contest in an English village. ‘So far as I can tell it dates all the way back to AD2010.’ Photograph: Alamy.

The last colliery in the north-east closed in 2005, while the last shipyard on the Tyne launched its last ship in 2006, though those masculine industries had ceased to employ significant numbers long before. The north-east is poor, but then so are many other de-industrialised parts of the United Kingdom; hardship and heavy industry alone can’t explain its particular difference. As for “welly wanging”, so far as I can tell it dates all the way back to AD2010.

Thinking of Newcastle, I thought of my late mother-in-law, who lived and died there: a sweet and clever woman blessed with good humour (“This is my last territorial demand in Europe,” she might say, requesting a cup of tea at bedtime), who in her forgetful days asked me the same set of questions more than once. “What’s your tartan? Isn’t there a Jack tartan? Have you never worn a kilt?”

My answers puzzled her – “I don’t know”, “I hope not”, “Not ever” – more by their brevity than anything else. I feel sorry for my irritation now. My explanation, that I came from a Lowland family, and had no entitlement to tartans, clearly didn’t wash. Having glanced through the window of more than one kilt emporium, she knew that the enterprise of the Scottish tourist industry had allotted a tartan to almost every surname in an old British telephone directory, often by deciding that a common Lowland name such as Taylor was really a “sept”, or subdivision, of a Highland clan such as Cameron. The clans ruled the roost.

Oddly, given that Jacks lie thick in the graveyards of the Black Isle, my surname didn’t then feature on these lists. (It does now; the Clan Jack Society registered a new design with the Scottish Register of Tartans in 2012.) But I didn’t at all regret the omission. What I found impossible to tell my mother-in-law, without making a priggish meal of it, was that the whole rigmarole of clans and tartans, sometimes known as Highlandism, was largely confected in the 18th and 19th centuries, and that any reality it might be connected to was far removed from the one most Scottish people knew; and also that this feudal, claymore-wielding “identity” obscured a true history of achievement that had once made a trousered Scotland important to the world: Adam Smith, James Watt, Keir Hardie, the Forth Bridge and so on.

It could have been a long speech, and tedious to the listener. I grew up hearing versions of it. Tartanry had many enemies in Scotland, particularly inside a socialist movement that was keen to establish a more class-based and less fanciful view of history. It fought what amounted to an underground campaign against figures such as Bonnie Prince Charlie and the music hall singer and comic Harry Lauder, who with his kilt and curly stick presented a caricature of Scotland at home and abroad.  

Kilts in the 1950s were still worn mainly by Scottish regiments and public schoolboys, and often regarded by the rest of us as a middle-class affectation. Mocking evidence came from new scholarship that the kilt’s modern form – the “small kilt” – had been invented in the 1720s by a Lancashire Quaker and ironmaster, Thomas Rawlinson, to dress the workers at his Highland smelter. In the first half of the next century, the Anglo-Welsh Allen brothers printed the first colour illustrations of tartans – inspired, they said, by an ancient but never produced manuscript – that showed how different clans and families had adopted their distinctive patterns at least as early as the 16th century.

Hugh Trevor-Roper gave an entertaining account of these developments in his contribution to The Invention of Tradition, a collection of essays edited by his fellow historians Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger and published in 1983. “The creation of an independent Highland tradition, and the imposition of that new tradition, with its outward badges, on the whole Scottish nation, was the work of the later 18th and early 19th centuries,” he wrote combatively and, as it turned out, to no sartorial consequence. (Thirty-odd years later, nine out of 10 Scottish bridegrooms get married in the dress devised by the ironmaster Rawlinson.)

But his words were part of a general revaluation of Scottish history that did have a political effect. Scottish nationalism became less backward-looking, less romantic, less in thrall to fancy dress and myth. What too few people recognised – I include myself – was that no similar process was happening south of the border. England clings to history. Its view of its glorious past – as, for example, the begetter of parliamentary democracy and the lonely bulwark against Hitler – remains unmodified and may even have recently intensified. No myths have been shed.

The results are apparent in opinion polls about national identitycommissioned by the BBC, which led this week to Easton’s nightly appearance on the evening news. Welly wanging turned out to be a catchpenny sideshow, a misleading overture to more serious surveys of the states of mind of England, Scotland and Wales. All kinds of differences showed up, some unsurprising: fewer people in Scotland said that they felt “strongly British” than in England or Wales; the percentage of people in Scotland who strongly identified as Scottish was larger than the percentage in England who strongly identified as English, or as Welsh in Wales.

But the most marked contrast between England and Scotland was optimism. In England many more in the 20,081 sample said the country was better in the past (49%) than it would be in the future (17%). In Scotland, more people believed it would be better in the future (36%) than it was in the past (29%). The pollster John Curtice attributed this difference to two kinds of nationalism – defining English nationalists as those who said they were English and not British (one sixth of the sample in England), and Scottish nationalists as people who supported the SNP. More than two-thirds (70%) of English nationalists said the past was better; only 16% of Scottish nationalists felt the same. Only 8% of English nationalists felt “strongly European”; among Scottish nationalists the figure was 44%.

And so the quickening current sweeps our raft towards the waterfall, and the bones of Sir Francis Drake at its bottom.

The struggle to be British: my life as a second-class citizen

Ismail Einashe in The Guardian

I used my British passport for the first time on a January morning in 2002, to board a Eurostar train to Paris. I was taking a paper on the French Revolution for my history A-level and was on a trip to explore the key sites of the period, including a visit to Louis XIV’s chateau at Versailles. When I arrived at Gare du Nord I felt a tingle of nerves cascade through my body: I had become a naturalised British citizen only the year before. As I got closer to border control my palms became sweaty, clutching my new passport. A voice inside told me the severe-looking French officers would not accept that I really was British and would not allow me to enter France. To my great surprise, they did.

Back then, becoming a British citizen was a dull bureaucratic procedure. When my family arrived as refugees from Somalia’s civil war, a few days after Christmas 1994, we were processed at the airport, and then largely forgotten. A few years after I got my passport all that changed. From 2004, adults who applied for British citizenship were required to attend a ceremony; to take an oath of allegiance to the monarch and make a pledge to the UK.

These ceremonies, organised by local authorities in town halls up and down the country, marked a shift in how the British state viewed citizenship. Before, it was a result of how long you had stayed in Britain – now it was supposed to be earned through active participation in society. In 2002, the government had also introduced a “life in the UK” test for prospective citizens. The tests point to something important: being a citizen on paper is not the same as truly belonging. Official Britain has been happy to celebrate symbols of multiculturalism – the curry house and the Notting Hill carnival – while ignoring the divisions between communities. Nor did the state give much of a helping hand to newcomers: there was little effort made to help families like mine learn English.

But in the last 15 years, citizenship, participation and “shared values” have been given ever more emphasis. They have also been accompanied by a deepening atmosphere of suspicion around people of Muslim background, particularly those who were born overseas or hold dual nationality. This is making people like me, who have struggled to become British, feel like second-class citizens.

When I arrived in Britain aged nine, I spoke no English and knew virtually nothing about this island. My family was moved into a run-down hostel on London’s Camden Road, which housed refugees – Kurds, Bosnians, Kosovans. Spending my first few months in Britain among other new arrivals was an interesting experience. Although, like my family, they were Muslim, their habits were different to ours. The Balkan refugees liked to drink vodka. After some months we had to move, this time to Colindale in north London.

Colindale was home to a large white working-class community, and our arrival was met with hostility. There were no warm welcomes from the locals, just a cold thud. None of my family spoke English, but I had soon mastered a few phrases in my new tongue: “Excuse me”, “How much is this?”, “Can I have …?”, “Thank you”. It was enough to allow us to navigate our way through the maze of shops in Grahame Park, the largest council estate in Barnet. This estate had opened in 1971, conceived as a garden city, but by the mid-1990s it had fallen into decay and isolation. This brick city became our home. As with other refugee communities before us, Britain had been generous in giving Somalis sanctuary, but was too indifferent to help us truly join in. Families like mine were plunged into unfamiliar cities, alienated and unable to make sense of our new homes. For us, there were no guidebooks on how to fit into British society or a map of how to become a citizen.

My family – the only black family on our street – stuck out like a sore thumb. Some neighbours would throw rubbish into our garden, perhaps because they disapproved of our presence. That first winter in Britain was brutal for us. We had never experienced anything like it and my lips cracked. But whenever it snowed I would run out to the street, stand in the cold, chest out and palms ready to meet the sky, and for the first time feel the sensation of snowflakes on my hands. The following summer I spent my days blasting Shaggy’s Boombastic on my cherished cassette player. But I also realised just how different I was from the children around me. Though most of them were polite, others called me names I did not understand. At the playground they would not let me join in their games – instead they would stare at me. I knew then, aged 11, that there was a distance between them and me, which even childhood curiosity could not overcome.

Although it was hard for me to fit in and make new friends, at least my English was improving. This was not the case for the rest of my family, so they held on to each other, afraid of what was outside our four walls. It was mundane growing up in working-class suburbia: we rarely left our street, except for occasional visits to the Indian cash-and-carry in Kingsbury to buy lamb, cumin and basmati rice. Sometimes one of our neighbours would swerve his van close to the pavement edge if it rained and he happened to spot my mother walking past, so he could splash her long dirac and hijab with dirty water. If he succeeded, he would lean out of the window, thumbs up, laughing hysterically. My mother’s response was always the same. She would walk back to the house, grab a towel and dry herself.

At secondary school in Edgware, the children were still mostly white, but there was a sizeable minority of Sikhs and Hindus. My new classmates would laugh at how I pronounced certain English words. I couldn’t say “congratulations” properly, the difficult part being the “gra”. I would perform saying that word, much to the amusement of my classmates. As the end of term approached, my classmates would ask where I was going on holiday. I would tell them, “Nowhere”, adding, “I don’t have a passport”.

When I was in my early teens, we were rehoused and I had to move to the south Camden Community school in Somers Town. There, a dozen languages were spoken and you could count the number of white students in my year on two hands. There was tension in the air and pupils were mostly segregated along ethnic lines – Turks, Bengalis, English, Somalis, Portuguese. Turf wars were not uncommon and fights broke out at the school gates. The British National party targeted the area in the mid-1990s, seeking to exploit the murder of a white teenager by a Bengali gang. At one point a halal butcher was firebombed.

Though I grew up minutes from the centre of Europe’s biggest city, I rarely ventured far beyond my own community. For us, there were no trips to museums, seaside excursions or cinema visits. MTV Base, the chicken shop and McDonald’s marked my teen years. I had little connection to other parts of Britain, beyond the snippets of middle-class life I observed via my white teachers. And I was still living with refugee documents, given “indefinite leave to remain” that could still be revoked at some future point. I realised then that no amount of identification with my new-found culture could make up for the reality that, without naturalisation, I was not considered British.

At 16, I took my GCSEs and got the grades to leave behind one of the worst state schools in London for one of the best: the mixed sixth form at Camden School for Girls. Most of the teens at my new school had previously attended some of Britain’s best private schools – City of London, Westminster, Highgate – and were in the majority white and middle-class.

It was strange to go from a Muslim-majority school to a sixth form where the children of London’s liberal set attended: only a mile apart, but worlds removed. I am not certain my family understood this change. My cousins thought it was weird that I did not attend the local college, but my old teachers insisted I go to the sixth form if I wanted to get into a good university. A few days after starting there, I got my naturalisation certificate, which opened the way for me to apply for my British passport.

Around the time I became a British citizen, the political mood had started to shift. In the summer of 2001, Britain experienced its worst race riots in a generation. These riots, involving white and Asian communities in towns in the north-west of England, were short but violent. They provoked a fraught public conversation on Muslims’ perceived lack of integration, and how we could live together in a multi-ethnic society. This conversation was intensified by the 9/11 attacks in the US. President George W Bush’s declaration of a “war on terror” created a binary between the good and the bad immigrant, and the moderate and the radical Muslim. The London bombings of 7 July 2005 added yet more intensity to the conversation in Britain. 

Politicians from across the spectrum agreed that a shared British identity was important, but they couldn’t agree on what that might be. In 2004, the Conservative leader Michael Howard had referred to “The British dream” when speaking about his Jewish immigrant roots. After 2005, he wrote in the Guardian that the tube attacks had “shattered” complacency about Britain’s record on integration. Britain had to face “the terrible truth of being the first western country to have suffered terrorist attacks perpetrated by ‘home-grown’ suicide bombers – born and educated in Britain”. Many commentators questioned whether being a Muslim and British were consistent identities; indeed whether Islam itself was compatible with liberal democracy.

Howard defined a shared identity through institutions such as democracy, monarchy, the rule of law and a national history. But others argued that making a checklist was a very un-British thing to do. Labour’s Gordon Brown, in a 2004 article for the Guardian, wrote that liberty, tolerance and fair play were the core values of Britishness. While acknowledging such values exist in other cultures and countries, he went on to say that when these values are combined together they make a “distinctive Britishness that has been manifest throughout our history and has shaped it”.

For me, at least, becoming a British citizen was a major milestone. It not only signalled that I felt increasingly British but that I now had the legal right to feel this way.

But my new identity was less secure than I realised. Only a few months after my trip to Paris, the Blair government decided to use a little-known law – the 1914 British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act – to revoke the citizenship of naturalised British persons, largely in terrorism cases. Before 1914, British citizenship, once obtained, could only be given up voluntarily by an individual, but that changed with the advent of the first world war. According to the Oxford politics professor Matthew Gibney, the 1914 act was a response to anti-German sentiment and fears about the loyalty of people with dual British-German citizenship. A further law, passed in 1918, created new and wide-ranging grounds to revoke citizenship.

In theory, since 1918, the home secretary has had the power to remove a naturalised person or dual-nationality-holder’s British citizenship if it was considered “conducive to the public good”, but a 1981 law prevented them from doing so if it made the person stateless. Since 9/11, that restraint has been gradually abandoned.

In 2006, the home secretary was given further powers to revoke British citizenship. At the time, the government sought to allay concerns about misuse of these powers. “The secretary of state cannot make an order on a whim,” the home office minister Angela Eagle had said when the law was first proposed, “and he will be subject to judicial oversight when he makes an order”.

Although the post-9/11 measures were initially presented as temporary, they have become permanent. And the home secretary can strip people of their citizenship without giving a clear reason. No court approval is required, and the person concerned does not need to have committed a crime. The practice is growing. Under Labour, just five people had their citizenship removed, but when Theresa May was at the Home Office, 70 people were stripped of their citizenship, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Yet these near-arbitrary powers have caused remarkably little concern.

 

‘Before, citizenship was a result of how long you had stayed in Britain, but now it was supposed to be earned through active participation in society.’

People have largely accepted these new powers because they are presented as a way to keep the country safe from terrorism. After 9/11, the public became more aware of the Islamist preachers who had made London their home in the preceding decades. Abu Hamza, who was then the imam of Finsbury Park mosque, and became a notorious figure in the media, was, like me, a naturalised British citizen. For several years as a teenager, I attended the Finsbury Park mosque. It was small; I remember the smell of tea, incense and feet that greeted you every time you walked in. I also remember the eclectic mix of worshippers who visited – Algerians, Afghans, Somalis and Moroccans. Unlike Muslims of south-Asian background, few of these people had longstanding colonial ties to Britain. Most had fled civil war in their home countries, while some of the North Africans had left France because they felt it treated Muslims too harshly. The mosque was not affiliated with the Muslim Association of Britain, and its preachers promoted a Salafi form of Islam.

I remember Abu Hamza as a larger-than-life character, whose presence dominated mosque life, especially at Friday prayers when he would go into very long sermons – usually about the dangers of becoming too British. Attending this mosque was like being cocooned from the realities of modern life. I recall Abu Hamza once going off about how, as young Muslim teens, we were not to follow the “kuffar” in their habit of engaging in premarital sex. For much of my teens, this mosque held a kind of control over me, based on fear. That changed when I moved to my new sixth form and felt able to start exploring the world for myself, and began to realise that I could be secular, liberal and humanist.

I went in one direction, but other people I knew chose different paths. Before 2001, I don’t recall many women wearing the niqab, but as the years wore on it became a more common sight on the streets of London. My sister even began to wear one – contrary to media stereotypes of women being coerced, she chose to, as did many of the young women I had gone to school with. The way that young Muslims practised Islam in Britain changed, in line with global developments. They dropped the varied cultural baggage of their parents’ versions of the religion and began a journey to a distinct British Islam – something that connected the Somali refugee and the second-generation Bangladeshi, the Irish and Jamaican converts.

Some of the white working-class kids I grew up with converted to Islam. Daniel became Yusef and Emma became Khadija. Before I knew it, they were giving me advice about how Muslims should behave. I observed this role reversal with amusement. One boy in particular would preach to me while incessantly saying “bruv”. I also saw the young men I had grown up with move away from a life sat on bikes wearing hoods under bridges in Camden listening to grime, to practising their Islam more visibly. Out went the sneaky pints, spliffs and casual sex. Now it was beards, sermons about the faith and handing out Islamic leaflets on street corners. But I did not heed their words. When I was 16 I stopped attending the mosque and I began to question my faith.

Mahdi Hashi was one of the young men I grew up with. Hashi was another child refugee from Somalia. As a teenager he used to complain that he was being followed by the British security services. He said they wanted to make him an informant. Hashi was not alone. In 2009, he and other young Muslim men from Camden took their allegations to the press. One said that a man posing as a postal worker turned up at his door and told him that if he did not cooperate with the security services, then his safety could not be guaranteed if he ever left Britain.

For most newcomers, citizenship is not just confirmation of an identity, it is also about protection: that you will be guaranteed rights and treated according to the law. Hashi lost that protection. In 2009, he left for Somalia because, his family say, of harassment by the security services. In June 2012, his family received a letter informing them that he was to lose his British citizenship. Later that summer Hashi turned up in Djibouti, a tiny former French colony on the Red Sea. He was arrested. He alleges that he was threatened with physical abuse and rape if he did not cooperate with authorities in Djibouti – and he alleges that US officials questioned him. In November 2012, he was given over to the Americans and taken to the US without any formal extradition proceedings. In 2016, Hashi was sentenced in New York to nine years in prison for allegedly supporting the jihadist group al-Shabaab. He will be deported to Somalia upon his release.

Hashi’s case is not unique. Bilal Berjawi, who came to Britain from Lebanon as a child, had his British citizenship revoked in 2012 and was killed in a US drone strike on the outskirts of Mogadishu. His friend Mohamed Sakr, who held dual British-Egyptian nationality, was also killed by a drone strike in Somalia after he had been stripped of his UK citizenship. Together with a third friend, the two young men had visited Tanzania in 2009 on what they claimed was a safari trip, but were arrested, accused of trying to reach Somalia and returned to the UK. The third friend was Mohammed Emwazi, now better known as the Isis executioner “Jihadi John”.

The war in Syria, and the attraction that Isis and other jihadist groups hold for a small minority of British Muslims, has led to a further increase in citizenship-stripping. In 2013 Theresa May, who was then home secretary, removed the citizenship of 13 people who had left for Syria. The government has a duty to protect people, but the tool it is using will have wider, damaging consequences.

The right of newcomers to be considered fully British has been a long struggle. The first border controls of the 20th century were introduced to stop the movement of “alien” Jewish refugees from eastern Europe. In 1948, the British Nationality Act gave citizenship to anyone who had been a subject of empire, but those black and Asian migrants who took up the offer – indeed, who often thought of themselves as British – were met with shocking racism: with “no Irish, no blacks, no dogs”. The 1962 Immigration Act began to limit the citizenship rights of people from the non-white colonies, and by the 1982 Act it was all over.

Now we are caught in a paradox, where the state is demanding more effort than ever on the part of the migrant to integrate, but your citizenship is never fully guaranteed. Fifteen years on from the events of 9/11, gaining British citizenship is a much tougher process. And becoming a naturalised citizen is no longer a guarantee against the political whims of the day: you are, in effect, a second-class citizen. Citizenship-stripping is now a fixture of the state, and it is defended in the usual vein, which is to say: “If you have not done anything wrong, you have nothing to fear.” The usual caveat is that this concerns terrorists and criminals – a red herring that masks the true purpose of such laws, which is to empower the state at the expense of ordinary people. The philosopher Hannah Arendt memorably described citizenship as “the right to have rights”, but for people of migrant background such as myself, this is being eroded. We are not a small group: according to the 2011 census, there are 3.4 million naturalised Brits.

As I was writing this piece, Donald Trump issued his executive order that bans people from seven majority-Muslim countries, including Somalia, from entering the US – even if they hold dual nationality. I happened to be visiting New York at the time, and the ban has left me wondering if I will ever be allowed to again. Despite assurances from Britain’s government, it remains unclear whether the ban applies to people who hold a British passport, but were born overseas. Trump’s ban did not happen in a vacuum: there is a thread linking the anti-terror policies of western governments and this extreme new step.

Today, I no longer feel so safe in my status as a naturalised British citizen, and it is not just the UK. In other liberal democracies such as Australia and Canada, moves are under way to enable citizenship-stripping – sending people like me a clear message that our citizenship is permanently up for review.

We’re doomed by the identity trap, damned when we try to escape

Nesrine Malik in The Guardian

 

Illustration by Andrzej Krauze




Diane Abbott wrote a powerful article in these pages last week about the hatred she receives. Whatever one thinks of her politics, the veteran Labour MP has for decades been a fireball of public service. But her star has always been followed by a comet tail of toxic vapour. This personal abuse is at times snide and implied, at other times explicit, vicious and unprintable. But it is a constant in her political life, following her round, undermining her, consistently framing her in terms of her gender and her race.

Abbott’s article came just days after she received an exceptional and sustained amount of personal abuse over the article 50 vote, culminating in a leaked text sent by Brexit secretary David Davis, in which he made derogatory comments on her appearance. Her article was necessary and timely, but something about her speaking out made my heart sink. It felt like defeat; the ultimate feeding of the trolls. It is important to look beyond the headlines and understand the significance of what happened.

The fact is that her tormentors had hounded this most resilient of characters to a point where she finally cracked and, breaking a longstanding habit in a 30-year career of not commenting on personal insults, she laid it all out. She was forced to sound an alert, warning that something must be done before we get to the point in our democracy where women and minority candidates, already low in number, are bullied out of the political arena altogether.

Diane Abbott: misogyny and abuse are putting women off politics



Since then, she has been forced to go further, revealing this weekend that she does not walk or drive around her constituency as freely as she used to because, in the wake of Jo Cox’s murder, the death threats she receives can’t be shrugged off any more. It was a piece in which she used the word “I” for the first time in respect of her identity – it wasn’t about her profession or her political views. It is this forced “coming out” by Abbott as a black woman in public life that was disheartening.

Contrary to the view so widely held on the right, of this country being in the grip of a constantly aggrieved professional-victim class, few people actually like to talk about their experience of receiving abuse. It is uncomfortable and excruciating and diminishing, and above all a distraction when one just wants to get on with one’s business.

It is also, as many who are on the receiving end of such onslaughts (including myself) can testify, boring and predictable to have to keep running the gauntlet between attack and defence. There is another, silencing fear, as the bile swirls and rises around you: that you come across as attention-seeking or fragile. Above all, you want to show that the blows have not landed.

But when somebody occupies a public position, not speaking out becomes an abdication. It is a decision that is never taken lightly because it plays into the hands of the racists and misogynists whose ultimate motivating animus is to disabuse you of the notion that you can ever be anything but a woman who does not know her place or a member of an inferior race.

Oh but now you wince at the N-word. Come on now, you might say, let’s not get carried away and blow it all out of proportion. And besides, Abbott is hardly a flawless political figure who doesn’t deserve criticism. OK, she gets compared to a monkey and is the butt of her male colleague’s jokes about being too unattractive to hug, but what about sending her child to private school?

This is the line of argument that enables the masking of abuse behind legitimate criticism of an individual or their views. As if calling for a tree strong enough to carry her weight so she can be hanged, as was said, is a logical follow-on from any of her failings or political hypocrisies.

And then there are the accusations of playing the race card or the gender card – both denying that the abuse is real, and blaming the victim for using their minority status as a shield of deflection. It is a closed loop, a circular firing squad. You either accept the abuse with grace, turn the other cheek, or invite more abuse and derision for speaking out against it. The logical conclusion is that the only winning move is not to play.

It is ultimately this potential chilling effect that forces people to break their silence. Abbott said she had never complained until now. And she will have known of the potential cost to her stature, not to mention the possibility that her perceived vulnerability might encourage trolls further.

But ultimately, she said, she went into politics “to create space for women and other groups who have historically been treated unfairly”. It is only by creating this space that the abuse will subside, and that an individual like Diane Abbott will no longer be an offending novelty who is seen to only represent her own narrow racial or gender interests, rather than the people who elected her.

Diane Abbott on abuse of MPs: 'My staff try not to let me go out alone'



She and others like her are obliged to confront one of the most persistent political myths: that identity politics is a divisive phenomenon that actively seeks to separate minorities or women from the mainstream, conferring on them dispensation to act with impunity because any criticism is automatically bigotry. It is a notion that fails to recognise what is obvious, which is that identity is dictated from above. Abbott’s defining character as a black woman is imposed and kept alive by others, not by her. She has spent decades integrating into the mainstream.

Women or minorities aren’t droning on about discrimination and abuse because they’re snowflakes demanding special treatment. They do so because they keep being limited, circumscribed, told that they cannot have roles in public life that extend beyond their identity. But then they are condemned when they respond in terms of what is being attacked. But what else can one do? Hannah Arendt said: “If one is attacked as a Jew, one must defend oneself as a Jew.”

Playing identity politics, as critics describe it, seems less an offensive ploy than a defensive posture, akin to raising your arms to cover your face when it is repeatedly being punched.
The whole affair exemplifies the precariousness of how to deal with what is now an epidemic. Silence is not an option. Even those not personally distressed have a duty towards others – those younger, more vulnerable or just made of different stuff – to clear the way for them to claim their rightful positions in public life. But there is also a risk that by doing so, any progress minorities or women have made to break out of their pen is undermined. It is a quiet stranglehold. Diane Abbott is trying to break free of it, but at what price?