The fact remains that most British Muslims, like the wider community, are not politically active, do not sit on committees, and do not attend seminars and meetings. They are working hard, bringing up families, planning their holidays, and going about their business.
– Rt. Hon. Hazel Blears MP, Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government on ‘Preventing Violent Extremism’: the Government’s Approach, 17 July 2008.
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Depoliticization involves construing inequality, subordination, marginalization, and social conflict, which all require political analysis and political solutions, as person and individual, on the other hand, or as natural, religious, or cultural on the other. Tolerance works along both vectors of depoliticization — it personalizes and it naturalizes or culturalizes — and sometimes it intertwines them.
– Wendy Brown, Regulation Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire, Princeton University Press, 2006, p.15.
