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Me and my Muslim Shadow

Last Updated on Monday, 11 January 2010 09:24

On 4th January 2010, Anjem Choudary, leader of Islam4UK, a local derivative of the outlawed extreme Islamist political body Al Muhajiroun, announced his group’s intention to stage a march commemorating the Muslim dead of the war in Afghanistan. The group intended to process, carrying symbolic coffins, through the small Wiltshire town of Wootton Bassett, until then the gathering place of mourners wishing to pay their respects to the remains of British servicemen killed in the conflict as they made their way through the town on the way from the nearby military airport to which they had been repatriated.

The plan was greeted by the British press with howls of outrage at the sacrilegious disrespect shown to the grieving families of those servicemen honoured by the crowds that now regularly lined the streets for each sombre vigil. Every major national newspaper featured the story prominently with appropriately disgusted headlines, apoplectic op-eds and a steady stream of obligatory token Muslim columnists, wheeled out to heap their own opprobrium on Choudary and his group.

Coming quite soon after another Islamist rump had barracked a returning parade of British troops in Luton, Islam4UK’s plans made dispiriting reading for Muslims who must have felt their collective loyalty fall once again under scrutiny but, one feels, set eyes a-gleaming among the Editoriat of the British dailies, for whom honouring the military dead ultimately trumps whatever reservations their newspapers might otherwise ordinarily express about the Afghan and Iraqi conflicts, and who know the value of a Muslim scare story when they see one.

Choudary subsequently did the round of television and radio news studios and appeared to equivocate about whether the publicised march would, in fact, take place at all. When pressed, he pointed out that the object of the exercise had been to gain publicity for the otherwise unheralded deaths of civilians in Afghanistan, and, no doubt, for his own fringe group. And, as he gleefully pointed out, that day’s headlines were ample evidence of the success of this tactic already. In a sense, any actual parade would now be, to an extent, beside the point: mission already accomplished.

Most journalists and correspondents were too busy indulging their righteous indignation, and eliciting furious splutterings from a competing gaggle of similarly outraged politicians, each vying to seem tougher than the other – discussing banning the march, punishing the organisers and so on – to consider whether or not they may have been ever so slightly outwitted by Choudary: manipulated into giving him exactly that oxygen of publicity that he craved. Only Tom Sutcliffe in the Independent paused to consider whether all the brouhaha might not be exactly what Mr Choudary was after. (Tom Sutcliffe: Outrage would suit this panto villain nicely, Tuesday, 5 January 2010)
And, in truth, this is not really a story of a wily Muslim villain putting one over on a gullible yet public-spirited press. Instead, the teacup-sized storm is a picture perfect example of all those qualities involved in framing Muslims.

It is perfect because of the visual fit of Anjem Choudary – copiously bearded and, clearly, the self-fashioning bogeyman of secular, liberal Britain: the opportunity afforded the press to run, for the umpteenth wearisome time, an implicit questioning of Muslims’ loyalty to Britain coupled with a contradictory avowal that mainstream Muslims were ‘not like that’ (the Daily Mail website later featured an elderly Muslim couple who had turned out, on a freezing cold day in Wootton Bassett for a vigil marking the return of yet another dead soldier); the lazy journalese in which Choudary was termed a ‘cleric’ despite having, and claiming, no religious training; and, finally and most importantly, because it illustrates the intensity of the embrace in which the two opposing sides in War on Terror discourse have necessarily become entangled. Just as politicians fell over themselves to countenance revoking the principle of free speech they were otherwise incessantly flaunting as something ‘we’ had and ‘they’ didn’t, by banning the march, so the extremists could be buoyed by the certainty that, if the political establishment who began the war did not rise to their bait and the march actually went ahead, then the racist right – always up for a fight – most certainly would. Choudary and Islam4UK had cleverly contrived for themselves a win-win situation, in which every eventuality served their purpose. Here, in the black and white of newsprint and in the digital images of the broadcast media, is a living, breathing instance of that dialogic quality at the heart of the framing of Muslims. Islamist fanatics rely on regular vilification to keep their rebel chic for the young and disaffected, politicians and newspaper editors, likewise depend on regular appearances from members of the Muslim lunatic fringe to remind ‘us’ what ‘we’ are fighting against (and to boost circulation figures). In the depressing catalogue of Muslim framing since 9/11 and 7/7, the Choudary/Islam4UK debacle offers a moment to stop and think about the incestuous dyad which blights representation and prevents things ever moving on very far.