Britain's Muslim Question

...No trace of her has been found since then, and her family has responded to the investigation with a wall of silence...

...came fifth in the government's annual survey of the most popular names given to baby boys in England in 2004, way ahead of such old favorites as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John...

...Most attribute the spread of Islamophobia in this widely tolerant and historically welcoming country to the horrific destruction of 9/11...

...Countering Islamophobia Britain's Muslim Question By Norman Gelb London Controversy has flared here in recent months over legislation, now making its way through Parliament, designed to protect religious citizens from vilification...

...But some of its constituent bodies are suspected of having links with extremists in the Middle East and elsewhere...

...The law's ambiguities, though, will present difficulties for the police and judges charged with enforcing it...

...To the despair of moderate British Muslims, actions by their extremist brethren anywhere in the world raises the animus toward Islam here...

...Although some of the debate has skirted around the issue, the law is primarily an attempt to reverse the widespread growth of anti-Muslim sentiment in Britain...

...They are opposed by fundamentalist outfits like Hizb ut Tahir, which vigorously preach against integrating in Britain and for spreading Islamic rule throughout the world by whatever means necessary...

...Street attacks on individual Muslims, vandalism of Muslim-owned stores and the desecration of mosques—there are now 1,200 in Britain—are reported regularly...

...The attitudes of certain Muslim organizations can at times be difficult to divine...

...But much more upsetting was the revelation that a cleric at a mosque in the Finsbury Park district of London specialized in indoctrinating young British Muslims to become suicide bombers...

...With outspoken local leaders, Muslims have built up their political muscle in some cities while nurturing a sense of beingunder suspicion and attack...

...A howl of protest has risen from lawyers, journalists, the National Secular Society, and others who say the law will inflame rather than calm religious passions...

...With tanks at times taking up positions at London's Heathrow Airport and the police openly toting automatic weapons in the terminals, government security precautions have further fed anxiety that Muslim extremists might commit similar atrocities here...

...And what exactly qualifies as a religious belief worthy of protection from ridicule...

...In her annual Christmas Message for 2004, Queen Elizabeth pleaded for her subjects to understand that "diversity is a strength and not a threat," and warned that "the peaceful and steady progress in our society of differing cultures and heritage can be threatened" by the acts of extremists...

...The escalation of anti-Semitic incidents in Britain when Israeli-Palestinian tensions rise has led the Community Security Trust, a Jewish organization, to conclude that Islamic extremists are most often culpable...

...Here Muslims account for only 3.5 per cent of the population, but are the nation's largest minority group...

...The Home Office maintains the law will protect religious believers, not their beliefs...

...Dominic Grieve, the opposition spokesman on Home Affairs, says Prime Minister Tony Blair is trampling on freedom of speech, particularly the right of Britons "to ridicule and caricature other people's views...

...Overtime they effectively became ghettoized...

...Groups like the Islamic Human Rights Commission based in London, for example, foster partnership with non-Muslims and seek to promote justice for all regardless of religion, class or ethnicity...

...Now," he says, "it has almost become anormal prejudice...

...In the tight-knit Muslim community of the Yorkshire city where she lived, and in similar communities, a family's honor can be damaged when a daughter takes up with a boyfriend not chosen by her father or refuses an arranged marriage...

...At the same time, it is barred from sending anyone back to a country where he might be executed or subjected to other cruel punishment...

...Some observers predict that Labor may lose up to 13 Parliamentary seats to Muslim-supported candidates in cities with large Islamic populations in this year's national elections...

...Scotland Yard recently reopened the case of a 19-year-old Muslim girl born in Britain who may have been murdered in a so-called honor killing three years ago...

...Will poking fun at tree worshipers, for instance, constitute a punishable violation...

...That is, of course, not the whole story...

...Though 45 per cent of Britain's 1.6 million Muslims are citizens by birth, most of the rest—from Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Middle East, and Southeastern Europe—arrived impoverished and staked out districts in the larger urban centers...

...Causing offense, the critics insist, is not the same as incitement to race hate—rightfully outlawed in their view, since it promotes attacks on people's life and property because of the color of their skin...

...The Muslim Council of Britain, the UK's leading Islamic association, describes itself as "a broad-based, representative organization accommodating and reflecting the variety of social and cultural backgrounds that make up British Islam...

...The name Mohammed, in its various spellings (Muhammad, etc...

...Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that Islamist terrorist acts have increased wariness of Islam here...

...They strain publicly provided housing, educational facilities, health services, and financial support— programs that were underfunded even before their influx...

...There were similar reactions in December 2001, when Richard Reid, a British convert to Islam, tried to blow up a transatlantic airliner with a shoe bomb, and in April 2003, when two young English Muslims affiliated with the group Al Muhajiroun carried out a suicide attack in Tel Aviv, killing three Israelis and injuring 50 others...

...The Conservative Party has sought to politicize this aspect of the issue...

...Usman Afzaal has played cricket for England in international matches...

...On the issue of freedom of speech in matters of religion, raised by the proposed legislation, Muslim groups have taken a firm stand...

...Nonetheless, Islamophobia continues to be fueled by evidence that most of their coreligionists are determined not to integrate fully into society...

...Prince Charles, heir to the British throne, a stern critic of Islamophobia and strong advocate of multiculturalism, drew prominent press coverage last December when he objected to the Islamic religious law that authorizes the killing of Muslims who convert to other religions...

...Books that are holy to some established religions, they point out, including the Bible and the Koran, can be interpreted as encouraging hatred of other religions...

...Moreover, in London and such cities as Birmingham and Bradford their numbers reach 15 per cent, and they constitute sizable communities in other towns as well...

...They are monitored by covert surveillance but are otherwise protected by law...

...But that assertion is being challenged...

...According to author Theodore Dalrymple, a core problem is that most Muslim immigrants come to Britain not to expand their horizons but to conduct themselves as before under improved living conditions...

...Arzu Merali, of the Islamic Human Rights Commission, contends that the attacks "legitimized" discrimination against Muslims...

...Within living memory, the British attitude toward Muslims has been influenced by the image of Arabs as the dignified, noble desert nomads whom T.E...

...France, Turkey, Egypt, Algeria, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and Israel are among the countries that have protested Britain's refusal to extradite terror suspects...

...But they say mocking someone's ideas, including religious beliefs, is something else altogether...

...The song was requested by a young man who had been her secret boyfriend...

...The latest polls suggest that their support for the prime minister and his Labor Party, previously overwhelming, has slumped by half...

...Antiterrorist legislation passed by the House of Commons after 9/11 is not considered to be as draconian as the American Patriot Act, but it has given the courts and the police broader powers to counter suspected terrorists based in Britain...

...They said they wanted Islamic Sharia law to prevail in civil cases related to the Muslim community, and that they wanted workplaces and schools to accommodate their prescribed five-times-daily prayer sessions...

...A great many see President George W. Bush's "war on terror," which Blair has firmly backed, as a war on Islam...

...This has been a source of frustration for foreign security organizations...

...London Daily Telegraph columnist Charles Moore argues that this would stretch the law of libel to beyond the grave, granting religion "a protection extended to no other creed or version of history...

...Despite the impulse within the Muslim community to maintain unity by discouraging public expression of internal criticism, these suspected honor killings have been condemned by several Islamic organizations in the United Kingdom...

...The girl's devoutly religious parents are immigrants from Pakistan...

...Britain's political commentators and other television personalities, who enjoy a freedom to be abusive that would enrage the self-appointed guardians of public morals in the United States, also fear the bill will scare off their advertisers...

...Will those who consider them sacred be subject to prosecution...

...Still, this country remains the haven of choice in the Western world for some suspected extremists who have claimed asylum because their activities would not be tolerated in their native lands...

...Mohammed Sarwar swore allegiance to Queen Elizabeth on the Koran after being elected to Parliament...

...Suspicions about Islam have been heightened, too, by publicity being given these days to aspects of the faith that were not commonly known...

...A British television documentary has claimed that while acts against individual Muslims and mosques continue to be a deplorable part of the British scene, the number of them is greatly reduced compared to 20 years ago, when the Islamic influx into Britain gathered momentum...

...They feel pledging allegiance to Queen and Country would conflict with their devotion to Allah, the Prophet Mohammed and the Koran...

...And how many more in the future...

...The government claims the proposed law is part of its broader program to protect human rights...

...Salim Al-Hassani is a professor of mechanical engineering at the prestigious University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology...

...For Blair and Britain in general issues related to the Islamic community have taken on crucial political importance...

...Numerous Muslims have joined the British mainstream and are active in the wider communities where they live and work as businessmen, politicians, lawyers, academics, journalists, shop owners, and laborers...

...An unknown number of immigrants from Muslim countries are suspected of having connections to terrorist organizations...

...Sent there to visit her relatives, she disappeared shortly after a popular love song, dedicated to her, was broadcast on a British radio station that caters to immigrants...

...Muslims are active in local government as well, and their political disputes with colleagues tend to reflectparty lines, not religious ones...

...Iqbal Sacrarne of the Muslim Council of Britain says any defamation of the character of the Prophet Mohammed is "a direct insult and abuse of the Muslim community," and such slurs should be punished by law...

...The television study suggested charges that Islamophobia is spreading widely, and that violence against British Muslims is growing, are deliberate exaggerations by Muslim organizations meant to silence all criticism of Islam, especially with regard to its treatment of women...

...The popular TV and film comic Rowan Atkinson avers that the right to cause offense is enshrined in the British tradition...

...Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) aided in the struggle for freedom from Turkish rule in World War I. In the years after World War II, the Islamic world's general failure to establish democratic rule and guarantee human rights tarnished that romanticized perception...

...Norman Gelb writes regularly for The New Leader on British affairs...

...Britain's Islamic community is not as large as that of France, where Muslims make up 10 per cent of the population, or Germany, where they total 5 per cent...

...While great numbers of Muslims do proudly identify themselves as British, for countless others Islam remains their exclusive identity...

...Indeed, they refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of British law and customs that intrude upon traditional Islamic codes and practices...

...As in other West European countries, the tendency of many immigrants to insulate themselves from the mainstream stirs suspicion and antipathy...

...The proposed Serious Organized Crime and Police Bill contains a provision against stirring religious hatred through threatening, abusive or insulting behavior, with penalties of up to seven years in prison for those found guilty of such conduct...

...The government is unwilling to put them on trial for fear of compromising undercover security operations...

...The Yorkshire case is only one of more than 100 involving missing young British Muslim women in the last 10 years...

...The Labor government has backtracked somewhat, offering assurances that the measure is not an attack on what it calls legitimate freedom of speech...

...Increasingly, in fact, conflicts among progressive and extremist Muslim elements have come to the fore...

...Street-level Islamophobia, however, not comedians and pundits, is the real target of the legislation...

...The increase in Islamophobia has come in the wake of a wave of immigration from Muslim countries in recent years...

...A recent poll published in the Guardian found that a majority of young Muslims, who might be expected to be more open to British influences than their elders, favor the codification of special arrangements to perpetuate their isolation...

...So did the murder of Dutch politician Pirn Fortuyn in 2002 and film director Theo van Gogh in 2004, for having offended Muslims in the Netherlands...

...They have called into question what it means to provoke religious offense...

...Blair has praised it for encouraging and promoting "dialogue, tolerance andrespect between communities so that Britain remains a vibrant and exciting place to live...

...The Madrid train bombing by Muslims last March, which killed 191 people, provoked great revulsion in Britain...

...Hostility to British Muslims—in the form of discrimination and physical assaults—is today common enough to be a matter of concern...

...His sentiments were seconded by a survey that found 58 per cent of British Muslims think people who criticize or insult their religious beliefs should face criminal prosecution...

...Accounts of his views on the subject were accompanied by reports that hundreds of Muslims who converted to Christianity in Islamic countries were subsequently murdered...