British Islam after 7/7

By Siobhan Holohan

I recently attended the Encounters and Intersections conference at St Catherine’s College, Oxford, giving a paper with Liz Poole from Staffordshire University about the media construction of British Muslim’s after 7/7.

Tavistock Square, 7/7 (source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_pictures/4660563.stm)

The conference was part of two major research council programmes Identities (ESRC) and Religion and Society (ESRC / AHRC) and the culmination of many disparate projects broadly relating to the above themes.

Referring to a number of media stories of terrorist events after 7/7, Liz and myself argued that instead of simply repeating the Orientalist discourse described by Edward Said, they had the effect of inventing a new narrative that took into account the current political and legal notion of inclusive British citizenship. This new discourse sets up a binary of self / other not only in terms of ‘good’ Muslim / ‘bad’ Muslim, but also of ‘foreign’ Muslim / British Muslim. While foreign Islam remains tied to the usual negative connotations – e.g. insurgence, terrorism, fundamentalism – British Muslim is employed to reorder citizens in terms of their relationship to the State. For example, in last year’s car bomb attacks in Glasgow and London, those involved were declared criminal rather than terrorist. We argued that this was an attempt to overwrite the oppositional ideology which they might serve. So while terrorism is a term used to describe political violence, the criminal act can be constructed as an act of individual deviance, thus nullifying the need to associate it with all Muslims. We argued that removing religion as a valid ideological marker (while still recognizing its status as an identity marker, thus preserving Britain’s obligation to multiculturalism), had the effect of rebalancing power in favour of the State.

The paper is tied to a forthcoming article co-written by myself, Liz Poole and Mark Featherstone which considers the above within the context of global terrorism, political discourse and anxiety.