By Ruth Peacock
The worst and the best of communities have emerged during the week of race riots across the UK, says Zara Mohammed, secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain.
In a Religion Media Centre briefing, she described the events as “a really horrible time” and said the feeling of fear in the community was “palpable”. Mosques and Muslims were targeted, cars were overturned, buildings torched and people beaten up and injured.
Ms Mohammed was among more than 20 community leaders who shared their stories of violence in their neighbourhoods, the fear among communities and the determination to rebuild.
They offered early suggestions of measures to help, including immediate assistance with security for buildings and people; an emphasis on community building and a national strategy for cohesion; encouraging more open conversations with children in schools and with adults, which would allow fears to be voiced with respect: and above all deeper and more numerous conversations between people of all faiths and the wider community.
Ms Mohammed has spent the past week fielding phone calls and communications from Muslims throughout Britain, reporting personal attacks of violence and the destruction of mosques and other Muslim properties.
She said the role of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) was to ensure additional security was in place and that the government provided the means to address this need. The MCB has also been encouraging communities to unite and look after all generations, and advocating on behalf of all Muslims with government, especially on security.
But unrest had been building up over years, she said, as Muslims had been demonised by politicians and in the press. She cited the previous government’s failure to work on a definition of Islamophobia, and its failure to engage with Muslims at any level. Islamophobia had been normalised in society: it had passed the “dinner party test”. And this explained why the fake news that the Southport attacker was a Muslim asylum seeker was believed so easily and then acted upon in hate-filled riots throughout the country.
Phil Champain, director of the Faith & Belief Forum, agreed that there had been persistent Islamophobia. The new government, he said, needed a cohesion strategy, talking to faith and belief groups about what this should be. He and others had formed the Faith and Belief Policy Collective, to further this aim. He was also concerned that there had been a failure to engage with the far right.
The first reaction of all the faith groups represented at the briefing was the impulsive need to sign a shared statement of sympathy in response to the Southport tragedy, when three young girls were stabbed to death at a dance class, as well as to condemn the violence and thuggery in towns and cities across England that followed.
Another shared reaction was to support and protect Muslims, many of whom feared to leave their homes. Joanna Wake, who is from Middlesbrough, said the fear was unprecedented. She knew many Muslims who had not left their house from Friday to Tuesday, had chosen to do their shopping online, stopped their children from playing in parks or taking part in sports activity, and who were working from home.
But one shaft of light was in the clean-up operation that followed in Middlesbrough, as in all other affected cities, where hundreds of volunteers of all ages and from all religions joined forces to clear the damage. Ms Wake said they went from feeling shame on Sunday evening to feeling pride on Monday morning, when as many people as those who had rioted turned out with brooms and buckets at 8am to clean up the mess. She knew the town was a united community but the number of helpers took her by surprise.
It was a similar picture in Bradford, even though there were no riots there. Humma Nizami, executive director of the Race Equality Network, said many Muslims, migrants, asylum seekers and refugees were frightened and fearful, with threats on social media that far-right troublemakers might enter the district. Her organisation is working with others helping those communities to give assurance.
In Manchester, Khalid Anis from the Islamic Society of Britain, said members of its youth wing, which catered for people aged 16 to 26, were really scared and looking for help. The society had started a network to help them navigate the situation.
It has also come up with an initiative for Manchester and Birmingham to encourage Muslims to have a cup of tea with people who had “angst”, sharing fears, making contact and breaking down barriers.
Coventry has escaped the riots and Manjit Kaur, who runs the standing advisory council on religious education there, wondered whether this was because the city had put in so much work on encouraging positive attitudes towards people from differing communities: making people aware, for example, that the Jewish community brought engineering to the city and that the Irish built the infrastructure. She was struck that many on the call had spoken of people from outside coming in to cause trouble and pleased to hear that most communities turned round and said: “This isn’t us.”
She was concerned at the impact on young people, especially because several in their early teens had been arrested. She suggested that RE syllabuses would have to be reviewed after this. Another teacher on the call, Karen Crussell, thought the riots were more about deprivation and lack of education. But the main problem was people not being able to articulate what they thought and believed about race for fear of being called racist.
The Rev Clive Foster, from Nottingham, pointed out that many people of colour had been affected by the riots and elders in the black community were greatly concerned for their children and grandchildren.
The city had riots after the far-right English Defence League appeared, and 15 people were arrested. But much work had been done in the city by community groups, civil and religious leaders, to work in common and in the riots “we had to draw on our collective and shared history of addressing racial injustice and inequality”.
For Rabbi Warren Elf, from Manchester, the violent protests were rooted in racial prejudice and hatred, but also underlying sense of disorder. He drew parallels with the history of the Jews.
“It feels a lot like Kristallnacht,” he said, “where some incident happened — then, it was in the German embassy in Paris — that was used as an excuse to create a whole load of riots and pogroms. I have no doubt that the criminality and the violence and the thuggery that has been perpetrated on our streets across our cities was waiting to happen.”
Something needed to be done, he added, to combat people on social media peddling messages of hate, such as Tommy Robinson (real name: Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) or the Reform UK Party MP Nigel Farage, a sentiment echoed by many, including Zara Mohammed.
Looking to the future, Jagbir Jhutti-Johal, a professor of religion at Birmingham University, agreed that there needed to be critical conversations among children in school — and adults, too — about the sense of fear that lay behind the hatred.
Laura Marks, co-founder of Jewish-Muslim women network’s Nisa-Nashim, ended the conversation by identifying two big issues to address. One is what faith communities can do to support the rebuilding of society. The other was a rallying cry to women.
“The women are the people who know pretty much about what their sons are up to,” she said. “They know what their husbands are up to. They know what their communities are up to. They are building, they are nurturing, they are feeding, they are reaching out to people and they’re not involved enough in the conversation that’s going on around this.”
You can view the briefing again on our YouTube channel here or listen to the discussion as a podcast here
