Race & Class

What lay behind the founding of the Institute of Race Relations in 1958 and its subsequent transformation in the early 1970s, through the agency of its staff, radical academics and black activists, is told here by a major protagonist of that change. Edited and abbreviated from a 1974 pamphlet, long out of print, not only does the article give an object lesson in how to effect far-reaching and radical organisational change, but it also contextualises the IRR story in the history of post-war race relations in Britain, pointing the way to its future development.

The development of the Institute of Race Relations' (IRR) work, from its transformation in the early 1970s through to the present day, is traced here by one of its central figures. An account is given of how the UK's experience of fighting racism was applied by the IRR to other European contexts and also became the basis for a UK news service using new media. Finally, the establishing of an archive documenting the black struggle in Britain is described.

As the neoconservative idea of a clash of civilisations is increasingly challenged, a number of liberal writers — Paul Berman, Nick Cohen, Martin Amis, Andrew Anthony, Bernard Henry-Lévy and Christopher Hitchens — are rethinking the `war on terror' as a cold war against Islamism, defined as a totalitarian political movement analogous to fascism or Stalinism. Europe is the new front line in this battle for the `hearts and minds' of Muslims and, it is argued, violations of certain human rights are necessary in the name of defending liberal freedoms. Yet such an analysis fails to comprehend the complex dynamics of Islamism in Europe. Members of a new generation of European Muslims are creating a globalised Islamic identity that is distanced from the ethnic cultures of their parents — a process that is more likely to lead to new forms of democratic activism than to political violence unless diverted from this course by counter-productive policies.

The context in which the current `debate' about Muslim women and the veil is taking place, in Britain and elsewhere in Europe, is that of the new orthodoxy, the `clash of civilisations'. This attempts to explain much of the world's political turmoil in terms of a clash between the (`secular modern') West and the (`traditionalist religion') Islam. The increased visibility of veiled bodies in Britain today has stirred a response that draws on long-standing orientalist oppositions and reworks them in the current climate of the `war on terror', connecting them to parallel racist discourses about `threats' to British culture. Sections of the British media have homogenised the variety of Muslim veiling practices and have presented the veil as an obstacle to meaningful `communication'; an example of Islamic `refusal' to embrace `modernity'. Veiled women are considered to be ungrateful subjects who have failed to assimilate and are deemed to threaten the `British' way of life. This paper reviews the debate over the veil in Britain in the context of British foreign policy, attacks on civil liberties, the further marginalisation of poor communities and the politicisation of British Muslims, where the veil is an increasingly political image of both difference and defiance.

The struggle of villagers in the Chana district of southern Thailand to resist the construction of the Trans Thai-Malaysia gas pipeline and its various spin-off industries illustrates some of the ways in which questions of ethnic, religious and class conflict are tightly bound up with industrial development, the global financial sector and human rights abuses. While the Thai elite and international investors portray the project as `socially responsible', the protesting villagers have increasingly turned to Islamic principles of waqf — land designated as given over to God and therefore available for common use — to articulate their opposition.

One of the main groups involved in organising the mobilisation of millions of people in opposition to the Iraq war of 2003 was the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB). Much recent commentary has focused on the involvement of MAB (an offshoot of the Arab Muslim Brotherhood) in the coalition of organisations that led the anti-war movement. Less attention has been paid to how MAB activists themselves understood their working relationship with the other organised groups in the Stop the War coalition. Based mainly on interviews with MAB activists, this article examines their perspectives and experiences of working within a broad Left movement.