Introduction

Abstract

Since the start of the first decade of the twenty-first century the concerns over Muslims communities, schooling and integration have never been far from Britain’s political and media debates. The racial disturbances in some northern mill towns and cities such as Oldham, Burnley and Bradford in the summer of 2001 saw young Muslim men of Asian heritage routinely clash with police and white young men from neighbouring wards. Images of these clashes prompted significant concerns amongst politicians and the media. The government took the view that the riots were caused by the existence of spatial ‘self-segregation’ whereby distrust of wider communities was set off by the lack of social contact between the various communities. The events of 9/11 and the subsequent bombings in London in July 2005 (7/7) by four young men, most of them born and educated in the UK, helped to consolidate a ‘worrying’ level of concern regarding the nature of Muslim communities in general and young Muslims in particular around the nexus of hyper-masculinity anti-liberalism and violent extremism. The government responded to these ‘concerns’ by re-focusing state policy away from multiculturalism and community cohesion and towards a counter-terrorism agenda based upon a logic which argued that if spatial self-segregation led to the 2001 civil disturbances then cultural self-segregation led to violent extremism which culminated in the London bombings.

Intellectuals are of their time, heralded along by the mass politics of representations… capable of resisting those only by disputing the images, official narratives, justifications of power circulated by an increasingly powerful media — and not only media, but trends of thought that maintain the status quo, keeping things within acceptable and sanctioned perspective on actuality by… unmasking or alternative versions in which to the best of one’s ability the intellectual tries to tell the truth… This is not always a matter of being a critic of government policy, but rather thinking of the intellectual vocation as maintaining a state of constant alertness, of a perpetual willingness not to let half-truths or received ideas steer one along.

(Edward Said 1994:16–17)