Team Islam and Team France

Reflections on ‘Reflections on the Revolution in Europe’, Part Five

Part One: Europe’s absent-minded revolution
Part Two: Welcoming the stranger
Part Three: Leaving behind the history written in blood
Part Four: On French assimilation and British multiculturalism

Newcomers arrived from many different backgrounds. In Britain, even Pakistanis might be divided between Mirpuris and Punjabis, let alone other Muslim groups such as the Bengalis concentrated in London’s East End and Arabs in the west of the city. This diversity perhaps contradicted and confused the idea of a monolithic ‘Islam’, but the effect of migration was to sharpen the commonalities not the distinctions.

In their new European home, religious identity became only stronger. Across Europe, Islam became a ‘hyper-identity’ for many in the second generation who found themselves torn between cultures, something that would become more pronounced in England with the Salman Rushdie Fatwa in 1989. Inayat Bunglawala of the Muslim Council of Britain recalled a rally in Hyde Park in 1989 protesting that novel as deeply empowering:

‘It was an amazing day. There was an increasing realisation that by giving greater importance to our Islamic identity we could transcend and overcome the divides among us. We may have Pakistani, Bengali, Gujarati, Arab, Turkish backgrounds, but this was less important than what brought us together: we were British Muslims. And so Rushdie's novel became, unwittingly no doubt, the catalyst for the forging of a more confident Islamic identity.’