Subcontracting Political Responsibility

Kenan Malik takes up Amartya Sen’s point about assigning identities to people:

The Government has long since abandoned its responsibility for engaging directly with Muslim communities. Instead it has effectively subcontracted its responsibilities to so-called community leaders. When the Prime Minister wants to find out what Muslims think about a particular issue he invites the Muslim Council of Britain to No 10. When the Home Secretary wants to get a message out to the Muslim community, he visits a mosque. Rather than appealing to Muslims as British citizens and attempting to draw them into the mainstream political process, politicians of all hues prefer to see them as people whose primarily loyalty is to their faith and who can be politically engaged only by other Muslims.

The consequences of this approach are hugely damaging. “Why should a British citizen who happens to be Muslim have to rely on clerics and other leaders of the religious community to communicate with the Prime Minister?”, asks Amartya Sen, the Nobel prize-winning economist, in his new book Identity and Violence. Far from promoting integration, government policy encourages Muslims to see themselves as semi-detached Britons. After all, if the Prime Minister believes that he can engage with them only by appealing to their faith, rather than their wider political or national affiliations, who are Muslims to disagree? If politicians abdicate their responsibility for engaging with ordinary Muslims, is it surprising that those Muslims should feel disenchanted with the political process? Or that disenchantment should take a radical religious form?

The policy of subcontracting political responsibility allows politicians to wash their hands of the alienation of sections of the Muslim community. And it allows self-appointed community leaders with no democratic mandate to gain power both within Muslim communities and the wider society. But it does the rest of us — Muslim and non-Muslim — no favours. It is time that politicians dropped the pretence that there is a single Muslim community and started taking seriously the issue of political engagement with their constituents, whatever their religious faith.