Notions of ‘them’ and ‘us’ are toxic

Shelina Zahra Janmohamed says it is dangerous to suggest that Muslims are different to other Britons

Trevor Phillips, the former chair of the UK Equality and Human Rights Commission, has made some controversial remarks about Muslims. Oli Scarff / Getty Images

What do British Muslims really think? That is the question that’s been at the forefront of discussions in the United Kingdom this week.

Trevor Phillips, once the head of the UK’s Equalities and Human Rights Commission, who led a poll exploring this question, claims that Muslims pose a “threat to our very way of life”. He previously said that Muslims are “not like us”.

It’s a dangerous point at which to start a journey to understand a hugely maligned population. “Not like us” has been ringing through the western discourse when it comes to “other” groups for centuries. And this has been bolstered by claims that these findings are based on science.

In the mid-18th century, the philosopher David Hume stated that Africans were “naturally inferior to whites”. Immanuel Kant rejected a comment from a black man by saying that nothing except stupidity could emerge from someone “black from head to toe”. The 19th-century pseudoscience of phrenology claimed to look at skull shapes and sizes to assess intelligence, and claimed that skulls of African people showed they were less advanced intellectually, culturally and morally.

It’s not hard to see echoes of this story when it comes to discussing Muslims today.

The story runs that Muslims are not civilised like “us” and are not able to adopt British values. They oppress their women, they’re not morally “liberated” from religion and “they’re sexually repressed, not like us”.

Similar stories are told about women, their inferiority and how they are not like us. Darwin claimed that women were less advanced in evolutionary terms. British debates against women’s suffrage claimed that their physical nature made them unfit to compete with men and that the idea that women were equal to men was erroneous.

In fact, the well-worn strategy of identifying groups as “not like us” lays the groundwork for exclusion, abuse and even hatred. Views like that of Hume and Kant were the underpinning of the slave trade. The arguments that the suffragettes had to fight were implicit for centuries and underpinned societies where women were by law the chattel of their fathers and husbands.

Today, Muslims are seen with deep suspicion. Every data point, every poll is seen as supposed proof that Muslims are “not like us”.

The stories of the change in status of racial minorities and women offers us hope that this notion can be challenged. But there's a complication. When studies claim to show what Muslims really think, it entrenches the idea that even when Muslims appear to be like us, they are hiding something. Deep down, they can never truly be "like us".

This brings us to the biggest problem: who exactly are “us”? “Us” are those who hold power, who consider themselves legitimate, who monopolise power and wish to keep it that way. “Us” are those who get to define what is acceptable and demonise anyone who doesn’t conform. Those who are “not like us” cannot even protest at their labelling, because their responses are deemed inferior. Even if they show similar attitudes, they are deemed to be hiding what they really think.

History demonstrates again and again, that the designation “not like us” is degrading and dangerous. The idea must be destroyed at its very root, or it will destroy all of us.

Shelina Zahra Janmohamed is the author of Love in a Headscarf and blogs at www.spirit21.co.uk