British Muslims poll analysis misses the mark

HA Hellyer says it's time to end talk of "us" and "them" in the UK.

Muslim women shopping on the Edgware Road in London. Stephen Lock / The National

The subject of “British Muslims” has cropped up again in the United Kingdom this week. A poll commissioned by Channel 4 News received the analysis of one of the country’s most prominent figures in race relations, Trevor Phillips, and the discussion continues to rage on.

The headlines around the poll raised concerns that British Muslims are not particularly liberal and thus constitute (in Mr Phillips’s words) “a nation within a nation”. The implication is clear: British people have something to be concerned about when it comes to extremists in the Muslim community, whose centre of gravity is different to the rest of the population.

There’s a great deal to be questioned here. From the outset, the polling methodology that delivered these results is deeply questionable. It wasn’t nationally representative nor could it claim to have a representative sample of all Muslim Britons. Instead, it utilised a methodology that focused on areas where Muslim Britons were upwards of 20 per cent of the population.

In other words, it ignored around half of the Muslim population. As a former senior consultant with Gallup, I found the methodology interesting but peculiar. Polling minorities properly in any country is difficult and expensive, because one has to oversample from that community – but it can be done. In this case, it wasn’t.

I’ve helped to design many questionnaires for social issues and it isn’t an easy job. It requires specialists who understand how such questions play into identity, and what lessons to draw from them.

Because of the nature of the methodology, it’s difficult to make comparisons to any broad national sample. Muslim Britons are a minority defined by faith – but the comparisons being carried out weren’t with other faith minorities. Why? Because they weren’t asked. It would have been interesting, for example, to see how Orthodox Jews or Catholics would have answered these questions. But was it really about the questions? Or was it about Muslims? Because if it was about the questions, then such comparisons with other faith communities might have been carried out.

If it was about the questions, then one might have thought that attention would have been given to the fact that Muslim Britons identified overwhelmingly with the UK, according to this poll – even more so than the average. Yet, for some reason, they were still described by Mr Phillips as a “nation within a nation”. Surely the overwhelming feeling of belonging among Muslim Britons with the UK ought to have at least dispelled that notion?

But the way in which we will look at the poll has little to do with the questions. It’s about Muslims on the one hand and British identity on the other.

When it comes to Muslims, this discussion, as with so many others, becomes securitised. Muslim Britons are problematised – Mr Philips might have just as easily said the words “fifth column” to describe them. Why? Because they don't quite fit into his notion of liberalism – and how liberalism defines the centre ground of British identity.

That’s quite problematic. From the outset, even if one presumes that the polling numbers are correct, there is no way to compare them with other faith groups or other minorities in the UK. And what is more, no one is even interested. This is about Muslims, it’s not about the data.

But more than that, British liberalism in 2016 is the product of an increasing fragmented reality. Traditionally, British identity has been associated with British institutions: if you identify with those, then you’re able to partake of the British identity. .

The basic principle of liberalism is to allow for freedom of the individual to reign supreme – whether one approves of the choices that individual might make or not. But in the UK over the past few years, liberalism is increasingly about being “intolerant of the intolerant”, which is turning the original basis for liberalism on its head.

But postmodernism does precisely that: it removes the root of meaning and we’re left to figure out what to do next. Whatever Mr Phillips’s objections to Muslims today, someone else will have a wholly different critique in 20 years or 50 years. This week, the conversation around integration is mixed up with radicalism, and mixed up further with terrorism – a generation from now, it will probably be different. The reality is the goalposts constantly change.

In that, however, there is a hint of what this is all about. British identity has historical institutions and deeply embedded traditions.

Brits – and Europeans more generally – have been in the midst of that crisis of identity for a long time, and Muslim communities are often focused on at the expense of facing that crisis head-on.

Hence why the discussion degrades to talk of “us” and “them”. But at some point, Mr Phillips and others will have to recognise that us includes them. And “we” need to have a fully inclusive discussion about “we” stand for – as opposed to what we supposedly stand against.

Dr HA Hellyer is an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London and a non-resident senior fellow at the Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East at the Atlantic Council in Washington, DC

On Twitter: @hahellyer