On Friday night at Soul City Arts in Birmingham, the Muslim Institute, in collaboration with the An-Nisa Society, launched Birmingham’s Muslims – Conversations on grassroots community and change, authored by Humera Khan, a civil society campaigner, author, and activist with over forty years of experience working in the third sector on questions relating to Muslims in Britain, belonging, association, identity, gender, health, politics, and society. Unfortunately, a thunderstorm meant that attendance was lower than anticipated. Nevertheless, the room was packed, with over 70 people from across the city keen to hear the findings and recommendations concerning Muslims in Birmingham. This remains an ongoing concern for the city’s residents, political actors who are arguably mobilised to achieve better outcomes for them, and the civil servants who run the local authority in Europe’s youngest city, which also has the largest local authority.
The city has received considerable negative attention over the last few years, particularly over financial mismanagement that has led to it being placed in administration. Issues of political representation and participation have also fractured Labour’s dominance, leading to growing numbers of Independent, Green, and Reform councillors in recent elections. The result is effectively a coalition administration. There is also the stark reality of acute poverty and disadvantage, with recent statistics identifying certain wards in Birmingham as among the poorest in the country. Overcrowding is another serious issue, alongside the deterioration of parts of the city caused by limited funding for physical infrastructure. Potholes, neglected parks, and a general malaise reflect these problems and the city’s perceived decline.
Another troubling reality is that people are leaving the city, taking their talent, experience, and knowledge with them. Those who remain are increasingly left to rely on themselves, contributing to poverty, disadvantage, alienation, anxiety, stress, and a sense of disillusionment with politics, the economy, and the wider national political culture. These conditions affect both minorities, who now make up more than 50% of the city’s population, and the majority population. The city has also become associated with the bin strike, which has lasted two years and remains unresolved for various reasons. Meanwhile, the Raise the Colours initiative has emerged in outer areas, whose largely white-majority populations have experienced up to two generations of downward social mobility and economic decline.
Both communities, minorities in the inner city and majorities in the outer areas, suffer from exclusion, alienation, and disadvantage accumulated over generations. Over the last 60 years, the city has grappled with ideas about racism and race relations, developing concepts such as housing classes, immigrant classes, and the underclass, and even moving towards the notion of super-diversity. Yet a substantial number of people continue to experience poverty and hardship. These concepts have helped us understand aspects of the city’s social realities, but the underlying problems remain. The accumulated effects of exclusion continue to shape people’s lives, opportunities, and sense of belonging.
Many of these issues point to the structural realities facing the city within its regional context and a wider national picture of widening inequalities, geographical divisions, underinvestment, and a lack of economic development. Ordinary people face an acute sense of stress and anxiety arising from precarity on a scale that might previously have been difficult to imagine. Much of this can be explained by the response to the 2008 financial crisis, which led to austerity driven by ideological motivations rather than sound policy. What followed were the Occupy movements, frustration and riots in 2011, and ultimately Brexit. Ten years after Brexit, political elites in Westminster have increasingly recognised that it has brought considerable pain, suffering, humiliation, disadvantage, and missed opportunities. There are now moves to reverse its effects, slowly but surely. This is perhaps the only natural conclusion.
Britain no longer holds the power it possessed in the early twentieth century. Since the end of the Second World War, despite having been on the winning side, it has faced numerous pressures at the hands of what became the new global empire, the United States. It took until 2006, during the Blair government, for Britain to pay off the loans it had received from the Americans to support its war effort. The country cannot go it alone. The idea that it occupies a special place in the world has rapidly diminished, even more so as a result of Brexit. These are some of the national and global contexts within which Birmingham’s difficulties must be understood. They provide an important backdrop to the local picture, the report’s central concern.
The report was about Muslims speaking to one another about issues affecting their communities. It was not primarily concerned with everyday Muslims as individuals, but with academic and community actors, particularly those working within communities, who shape how Birmingham’s Muslims mobilise in ways appropriate to the world we live in today. Talent does leave the city when it would be more valuable for it to remain. There is also compounded disadvantage associated with inner-city poverty, where Muslim identity and Islamic norms and values can provide a basis for community bonds and mutual support in the face of external threats. These do not necessarily take the form of hostility; they can arise from a lack of economic opportunity. Within these spaces, however, there are internal pressures concerning youth engagement with mosques and the role of women.
These spaces are important and necessary in the context of ongoing issues of patriarchy and masculinity, which also affect young men who spend far too much time online and encounter particular ideas about what it means to be a man. Women, meanwhile, are quietly and confidently progressing through the education system, outperforming young men in higher education. A quiet but necessary revolution is taking place in the background, one that does not always receive the credit it deserves or feature adequately in accepted discourses about British Muslim women. This development extends across the country, not only to Birmingham. In some ways, the clash between an unreconstructed patriarchy and a highly educated and skilled Muslim female population creates internal tensions around representation, participation, acknowledgement, and appreciation.
Ultimately, there will always be room for Muslims to organise themselves more effectively, mobilise their skills, and work together across ethnic, racial, cultural, and political lines for the greater good. This collective endeavour can be informed by Islamic cultural norms and values while sitting alongside a wider anti-racist agenda that is inclusive, participatory, and oriented towards the common good. While minorities are more likely to experience racism, which is a tautological statement, many people in the UK are not hostile to immigrants and minority communities. Far from it. In fact, only about one in ten regularly engage in anti-immigration and anti-Muslim discourses. A substantial middle ground, however, remains uncertain about which direction to take, often pulled in competing directions by the national political landscape.
Evidence continues to confirm that how people feel about their local area depends less on the practicalities of their engagement with it and more on whether they buy into or reject the national political discourse. This finding recurs in surveys conducted through my own studies, as well as third-party research. Time and again, the evidence suggests that the local is not constructed entirely through local forces. People’s perceptions of their area are also shaped by wider national narratives, arguably narrowed further through social media echo chambers, discourses, and mobilisations. The national framing of local issues therefore matters enormously. It influences how people understand their immediate surroundings, interpret the experiences of others, and respond to the social and economic challenges facing their communities.
Overall, the event and the conversation that followed suggest that Muslims are very much part of Birmingham’s landscape. They are an embodied community with considerable capability, talent, ingenuity, and entrepreneurialism. At the same time, there is significant disaffection and disillusionment arising from ongoing alienation and marginalisation. These two realities sit uncomfortably alongside each other. The challenge is to bring communities together around faith-based principles that are effective, engaging, participatory, and inclusive. While this is important and valuable, it cannot happen in isolation. Muslims do not live in a vacuum, even when religious ideals, principles, values, and norms, learnt and taught across generations, underpin their motivations, aspirations, and behaviours. This approach works for some, but not for everybody.
What needs to work for everybody is a combination of local dynamics, local authority initiatives that move in the right direction, and a national approach that is aware, respectful, inclusive, and highly sensitive to its impact at the local level. All these elements need to operate simultaneously. Achieving this requires skill, ambition, strategy, and political will, all of which have been battered by two decades of post-austerity conditions and, arguably, three decades of distinct, clear, and direct forms of structural, cultural, institutional, and political Islamophobia. Although the wider landscape has developed, many obstacles remain.
One might picture this landscape as a garden. There are beautiful flowers in bloom and ornate arrangements of different flora, but also weeds and thorns, as well as plants that draw all the water from the ground for themselves at the expense of the many. It is a complex, multi-layered, multifaceted landscape, and everybody has a part to play. The report, its launch, and the conversation that followed were about Muslims making their contribution. While members of the audience felt that perhaps we should reach out to statutory bodies and engage with political and economic structures at the national level, Muslims can also take action themselves, as they should. This was a clarion call for collective action, greater organisation, and a renewed commitment to shaping the future of Muslims in Birmingham.