Creating a new culture for British Muslims

Rachel Elbaum Reporter • Profile • E-mail

LONDON - Fareena Alam’s life doesn’t sound too different than the starving artists in New York’s East Village in the ‘70s and ‘80s -- a struggling journalist, living in the center of London, who is desperately trying to make ends meet by doing the work she loves. She picks up enough freelance work to pay most of the bills and takes in roommates to help pay the rent on the apartment she shares with her husband.

What makes her a little different is that Alam is the managing editor of Q News, the only serious Muslim news magazine in Britain, and her background mirrors those of thousands of other young Muslims here who are caught between two cultures.

While clerics on trial and protesters threatening violence are the most prevalent images of Muslims in Britain, moderates such as Alam are working hard to combat the stereotypes.

Q News along with the Khayaal Theater Company and the social group The City Circle are working hard to spread a message of tolerance, inclusiveness and openness to the outside world.

Through their work, the three organizations are slowly creating a new discourse for the community. Each group faces similar pressures — mainly financial — and it’s a statement of the size of the moderate movement that the leaders of each of these groups are well acquainted, although no formal ties exist between the organizations.

‘The confidence to disagree’
Alam’s parents came to Britain from Bangladesh to work and left several years later to Singapore where she was raised. After a religious reawakening of sorts, she returned to Britain with her family at age 21, wearing a headscarf and hoping to find a job with a Muslim organization.

“I always felt out of place in Singapore,” said Alam, who is a British citizen. “I’m not Bangladeshi; I go back there and don’t fit in at all. Then you come here and with all the problems — integration, discrimination —you don’t feel like you belong here either. The only thing to hold onto is Muslim identity.”

Muslims are returning to the traditions of their faith in higher numbers in Britain, according to Alam. However, the community at large is strongly in favor of integration and accepting Western values.

A large majority of British Muslims believe that immigrants should integrate fully into British society, learn English and pledge their primary loyalty to Britain, according to a BBC/Mori poll conducted in August.

Fareena Alam, Q News managing editor, uses her post to encourage greater openness in the Muslim community.

Slowly these views are being reflected in the lifestyle of the community. When at one time it would have been revolutionary to have a woman editing a Muslim magazine, it is now normal. And with so many challenging and troubling issues facing the religion, there is a higher level of comfort in openly discussing problems in the Muslim community.

Under Alam’s watch, the magazine has helped bring once-taboo subjects like extremism, teenage rebellion and mental health out in the open.

“Now Muslims are demonstrating against Muslims,” she said referring to counter-protests after the violent London demonstration against the Muhammad cartoons published in a Danish newspaper. “The community now has the confidence to disagree.”

The presence of Muslims in Britain is fairly recent. A large part of Britain’s Muslims emigrated from South Asia and other former British colonies in search of economic opportunity during the 1960s. Now, decades later, their children are British citizens, speak fluent English and have more of a connection to the rainy streets of London than the dusty villages of Pakistan.

These children are caught between two worlds struggling to find their way. But with few organizations and little established infrastructure to guide them, it is too easy to fall into the extremism preached by foreign clerics, who are often imported by the community from other countries.

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