Great British Islam
First shown on Channel 4 in October 2005
Presenter
Anila Baig
In this Channel 4 programme, Sun reporter Anila Baig traces Islam's centuries-old relationship with Britain and discovers that it it is more creative than most people realise. Cassandra Balchin reports.
Filmed against the background of the bombings in London on 7 July, and the polarisation that those attacks both reflected and threatened, the Muslim journalist Anila Baig asks whether this conflict has always existed. Hoping to set the record straight, she highlights the positive contribution Muslims and Muslim cultures have made to life in today’s Britain.
Incalculable benefits
Perhaps Islam’s most important contribution has been to give Britain zero – the zero – which was brought back to Britain around 1100 AD by Adelard of Bath after his visit to Muslim North Africa. There he found books by scholars such as Al Khwarizmi, including one whose title. Ilm al-jabr wa’l muqabalah, has given us the word ‘algebra’. It is a sign of how the exotic can become the ordinary and how cultures can fuse, that we forget how such concepts reached us.
Take the more humble pot of hummus. Not only has that become, like the introduction of coffee discussed in Great British Islam, an ordinary part of our supermarket lives, it also illustrates the difficulty in tying down exactly what is ‘Islamic’ or ‘Muslim’. Are we sure that it was Muslim Turks who invented coffee and hummus? There are of course plenty of non-Muslim Turks. Are coffee and hummus, or the search for the divine in science, elements of culture or religion? Can the two be divided?
Diverse and adaptable
Islam’s greatest strength has always been its flexibility and ability to adapt to the local culture. This was what allowed it to spread from Spain to Indonesia and down through Africa, and what has given us today’s immense diversity of Muslim practices and cultures. This flexibility is also where hope lies for the future of Great British Islam, with the youth seeking their own ways of being both British and Muslim. For some this means an emphasis on a ‘pure’ form of Islam; for others, a recognition of cultural heritage, no more and no less; and for yet others, a challenge to find new ways of interpreting faith in line with changing human needs. All this is Great British Islam: it is politically and culturally diverse, and experienced differently by Muslims of various ages, classes, abilities and orientations.
The programme shows some of this diversity in Islam, highlighting the South Shields Yemeni community that has been in Britain since the 1870s. How many of us knew about them? Or the Moroccan Ambassador who hunted in Hyde Park in the 1680s? Or the Bengali who brought steam-bathing and alternative Eastern medicine to Brighton's high society in the 1820s?
Colonial history
Of course in recent centuries Islam in Britain has been seen through the colonial lens. The largest communities of Muslims here are South Asian, from former colonies. How different would our notion of what is and is not ‘Islamic’ be if, like the Netherlands, Britain had colonised Indonesia instead?
As Great British Islam reveals, the relationship between Britain and Islam has been driven by self-interest. In the 16th century this was a political alliance between Protestant England and the Muslim Ottoman Empire against Catholic Spain, allowing the English to defeat the Armada. By the 19th century, this had changed to Britain’s need for cheap labour, including the seamen recruited in India, Somaliland and Yemen, who ran away from their appalling conditions to set up the earliest Muslim communities in London’s East End, Cardiff, Liverpool and Glasgow. Is it in Britain’s self-interest today to have Islam as the universal bogeyman after the collapse of Communism?
But interaction has not always been a matter of exploitation. In the 18th century, British officials of the East India Company often married Indian Muslim women, and converted to Islam, becoming William Dalrymple’s White Mughals. There was also intermarriage closer to home between the 19th century Yemeni seamen and local women. And finally, even closer to home still, there are the estimated 15,000 white converts to Islam. They are yet another aspect of the vibrant, continuing story of Great British Islam.
