Yasmin Alibhai-Brown yet again reminds us that ‘middle class liberals can be Muslims too’.
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thabet
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thabet
It’s like these people read Mad Mel and then think her paranoid rants should be used to form the basis of ideas like this:
The proposed arches, part of a “cultural trail” through the street – immortalised in Monica Ali’s novel Brick Lane – have been criticised as “misconceived” and “excluding”. Locals have said they risk ghettoising a community that considers itself tolerant and diverse [...] One local Muslim woman has told the council that the stainless-steel, illuminated arches “create a stereotypical image of Islam, and endorse the practice of the veil that not all of us are happy with. It is a divisive image and one that in the present climate is highly inappropriate. Tower Hamlets should be seeking to bring communities together at this moment.” Another, a hijab wearer, said that to call the gates anything other than a hijab was “just semantics”. She said: “It is a huge waste of money. There has been enough conflict and tension since Brick Lane started developing after the yuppies moved in. This looks to me like a tool of aggravation and is taking a step backwards.”
I want to know how much Tower Hamlets (a totally inept borough in my experience) paid the ‘cultural consultant’ who dreamt up this idea.
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johnpi
Different Muslim communities in America may benefit from different approaches. If Umar wants to recommend a live-and-let-live appreciation of diverse paths in the religion, that’s great, but it would be more powerful if he stopped blasting moderates, ‘progressives’, Sufis, the ‘mainstream’ and others who differ in their practice from him, though I do think that in more recent times he has moderated his ‘blasting’ a bit.
And the thinking on this needs to go in the same direction that the American founders did when they wrote the First Amendment (freedom of religion). Earlier drafts suggested that the US would ‘tolerate’ non-Christian religions, but James Madison argued that tolerance presumed a place of superiority for the ‘tolerators’ that would incite prejudice and injustice, so the language was pushed to a full expression of support for freedom of religion.
I would also add my own critique to Umar’s point which is that the communities he describes as ‘urban’ and ’suburban’ are changing their geographical locations in many places in this country. Parts of America now resemble Europe where the wealthy and well-off live in cities, and the poor and desperate live in the suburbs.
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johnpi
Time magazine decides what the story is and then makes the facts fit.
Time has an article titled, “Defying stereotypes, most domestic ‘jihadists’ are educated, well-off” prominently illustrated with a courtroom sketch of David Coleman Headley.
Headley, according to Time, fits the definition of an educated, well-off ‘jihadi’ because – as the reporter describes him – he is a “Chicago businessman.” Actually, according to his Wikipedia bio, he was an employee of his friend’s immigration agency, hardly a “businessman.” It doesn’t appear that he ever went to college, and he’s a convicted heroin smuggler.
According to media reports, he was able to front himself off as a successful businessman in India, with a personal trainer and smoozing at the gym with Bollywood types, but it’s a huge inaccuracy to imply this con-man loser was some kind of successful person who inexplicably turned on his life of accomplishment and became a ‘jihadi.’
There are also problems with saying Ramy Zamzam comes from the ‘educated, well-off’ class. Zamzam may have been a student at the dental college, but his family lived in a basement apartment (we of the ‘educated, well-off’ class tend to like natural sunlight). The building shown in the media looks like typical public housing project construction. The local imam said he was carrying the hopes of his family on his shoulders for a better life.
I understand why educated, socially and economically accomplished terrorists are so fascinating, and some certainly do exist, but misrepresenting these people as something other than what they are is just shoddy.
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johnpi
Does your social class determine your online social network?
Is there a class divide online? Research suggests yes. A recent study by market research firm Nielsen Claritas found that people in more affluent demographics are 25 percent more likely to be found friending on Facebook, while the less affluent are 37 percent more likely to connect on MySpace.
….MySpace users tend to be “in middle-class, blue-collar neighborhoods,” said Mike Mancini, vice president of data product management for Nielsen, which used an online panel of more than 200,000 social media users in the United States in August. “They’re on their way up, or perhaps not college educated.”
By contrast, Mancini said, “Facebook [use] goes off the charts in the upscale suburbs,” driven by a demographic that for Nielsen is represented by white or Asian married couples between the ages of 45-64 with kids and high levels of education.
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thabet
Is so-called New Atheism in the US an elitist movement?
(I am a little wary of someone asserting “it’s obvious” without some data.)
Theos, a Christian think-tank, did a survey to look at religion, class and atheism in the UK too:
One of the questions, adapted from an earlier BBC/ICM survey, asked people not simply what they believed (about God) but whether they had changed their mind, and by cross-tabulating these results with standard demographic questions, we can get a reasonably detailed picture of the class composition of atheism and theism in the UK.
[I]n summary the study found that lifelong theists (“I have always believed in God”) are disproportionately from lower socio-economic grades (DE: semi-skilled and unskilled manual workers or those unemployed or on state benefits), whereas lifelong atheists (“I have never believed in God”) are disproportionately from upper social grades (AB: higher or intermediate managerial or administrative professionals).
No surprise there. The default position in the UK (and seemingly in humans themselves) has long been belief in God, so you would expect theism to be a mass movement and atheism a more select one.
What is interesting – and surprising – is that “converts” to theism (“I believe in God now but have not always done so”) are disproportionately from upper and upper-middle social grades (ABC1: as above plus supervisory, clerical, junior managerial or administrative professionals), whereas “converts” to atheism (“I used to believe in God but I no longer do so”) are disproportionately from lower social grades (DE).
Your thoughts?
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thabet
Back in 2005, Atif Imtiaz wrotes a series of essays (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6). It’s a very rich series of essays, and while he talks about Muslims in the UK, I think his point about the communicating with others would of interest to all:
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thabet
Sums this place up…
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thabet
Amanda Platell’s dog whistle is working overtime:
[...]
Sadly, though, it is not the indigenous middle-class, hard-working, tax-paying population that’s exploding.
According to statistics, our latest baby boom is partly down to high birth rates among immigrants, and partly due to rising numbers of younger mothers.
Amanda Platell was born in Perth… not the one in Scotland but the one thousands of miles away in Australia. She has a funny foreign accent (a weird combination of Australian and middle class English found in a London suburb). She is (I think) an immigrant to the UK…
So, basically what Platell means by immigrant is nigger, Paki, wog, darkie, blackie, etc.
At least Melanie McDonagh in The Daily Telegraph was honest about her dislike of Somali and ‘lower class’ mothers.
(Via Angry Mob.)
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thabet
I quite enjoyed this article on class and race:
Thus the primacy of anti-discrimination not only performs the economic function of making markets more efficient, it also performs the therapeutic function of making those of us who have benefited from those markets sleep better at night. And, perhaps more important, it has, ‘for a long time’, as Wendy Bottero says in her contribution to the recent Runnymede Trust collection Who Cares about the White Working Class?, also performed the intellectual function of focusing social analysis on what she calls ‘questions of racial or sexual identity’ and on ‘cultural differences’ instead of on ‘the way in which capitalist economies create large numbers of low-wage, low-skill jobs with poor job security’.
Race and socioeconomics intersect, and sometimes liberals don’t pay enough attention to this.
Life on the bottom of the pile is hard, no matter if you’re black, or white; Muslim or not (I mention Muslims because often reports like this on the state of Muslims unnecessarily ‘Islamise’ the problem).
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johnpi
An Iranian in Iran looks over the fence and tackles some of the disturbing counter-narratives that are developing in the US and the West about the Iranian election (I call out a few others here).
Their descriptions of where the protests are taking place, and why, also draw on pernicious myths of an iron correlation between religion and class, between location and voting tendency, in Iran.
This false geography imagines South Tehran and the countryside as home only to the poor, those natural allies of political Islam, while North Tehran embodies unbridled gharbzadegi (translated as “Weststruckness” or “Westernitis”) and is populated by people addicted to the Internet and vacations in Paris. It is as if political Islam withers north of Vanak Square and the only residents to be found are “liberals” who voted for the opposition leader, Mir Hussein Moussavi.
We must not assume that the engagement of members of society with their religion is uniform or that religious devotion equals automatic loyalty to a particular brand of politics. To do so is certainly to deny Iran’s poor the capacity to think for themselves…
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thabet
Mildly amusing: Here’s a list of Guardian journalists who attended Oxbridge.
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thabet
Middle class students have better genes, says a former chief schools inspector.
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thabet
If only the poor in Britain’s towns and cities had celebrity ‘friends’ to highlight their plight.
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thabet
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thabet
Taliban, Wahhabi-Islam, blah, blah, blah…
All the usual buzzwords to allow Fatima Bhutto published on any (not just liberal) Western media platform.
But notice there is no mention of how the role of the corrupt Pakistani ‘elites’ (who are elites only in material wealth) in contributing to these problems. And for all the talk of democracy, there is no mention of this.
No need to ask why.
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thabet
The strikes against ‘foreign workers’ across Britain raise the question as to why people aren’t out protesting against the institutions and individuals who have caused far more damage to the economy than low-waged workers from abroad.
Cases like this also raise the interesting (and dangerous) overlap between race and socioeconomics.
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thabet
So, it turns out there isn’t much evidence of white flight in Britain’s inner cities.
And it also turns out that there isn’t a British White Working Class, separate and remote from the British Working Class.
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thabet
I notice the government says nothing about correcting perceptions of ‘white working classes’ in response to a report produced for the Department for Communities and Local Government (this report does not appear to be online). This is the same government that has promoted a strange combination of animus towards ‘immigrants’ (when needed) alongside neoliberal economic policies (which have had an impact on jobs in the UK).
And Yasmin Albhai-Brown’s response to this report is silly and lopsided. Are these people examples of small-minded racists she says make up the ‘white working class’? How about acknowledging that bigots and morons can be found up and down the socioeconomic ladder?
Life is pretty grim if you’re poor — whether you are ‘white’ or not.
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thabet
Trevor Phillips tries once again to look like a ‘maverick’, but simply ends up looking stupid.
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thabet
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thabet
I have received an email inviting me to an Eid dinner/event in Dubai. The event is being organised by Western Muslim expats living in the UAE. The organisers clearly observe the traditional rules of social interaction quite strictly (there will be separate facilities for men and women).
Here is one of the ‘terms’ of entry into the event:
MAIDS WILL BE CHARGEABLE, BUT WE WOULD STRONGLY URGE YOU NOT TO BRING THEM UNLESS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY AS PLACES ARE LIMITED.
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thabet
No one is addressing the concerns of white working-class Americans, least of all the current Democratic candidates.
