Some General Reflections on the Event

This event showed that British Muslims across three generations have been able to sustain a healthy radical tradition that speaks truth to power, building on decades of activism and cultural expression that has roots in anti-colonialism, trade unionism, anti-racism, anti-war activism and civil liberties and human rights struggles after 2001, both in communities and on campuses. We have yet to do justice in setting down and teaching this valuable aspect of British Muslim history. These various strands were represented by a distinguished panel, many of whom had not only bowed out of the festival because of this issue, but also came up to Bradford to educate and inspire. The panellists were Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan, Moazzam Begg, Tariq Mehmood, Malia Bouattia, Samayya Afzal, and Lowkey. The organisation of this event was also initiated and led by Muslim women, yet another sign of how they are now starting to set the agenda for Muslim community life in general.

The panellists affirmed their support for the festival as a whole, and the importance of cultural spaces as free zones in which British Muslims (and people of colour more generally) can think and dream and dissent and imagine out aloud as a profound public good in its own right. The linkage to a counter-extremism rationale, they averred, is profoundly racializing, and their criticism came from a place of personal commitment to the transformative power of the arts and its importance in the empowerment of individuals and communities. While the commitment from the festival to abstain from BSBT funding next year was welcomed, the panel rightly highlighted that this did not go far enough.[6] Firstly, there had been a breach of trust in not making this funding clear and transparent, particularly to participants whose criticism of these policies was already a significant strand in their work. Secondly, there has been no recognition from the festival that acceptance of these funds is wrong; in fact, all their public statements to date have defended the decision.[7]

So this is going to be a long, drawn-out public argument. A considerable number of Muslim community organisations, both national and local, have taken the calculated risk since 2016 that the BSBT fund might be seen as sufficiently differentiated from the toxic Prevent brand to be accepted, alongside buying into the rationale that it is meant to apply equally to all forms of extremism. Clearly BSBT is leveraged against the background of austerity cuts and the generally parlous financial state of the Muslim voluntary sector in this country, which has still to adapt the Islamicate endowment (waqf) institution to its advantage, despite its compatibility with existing English charity law. Yet such pragmatism or opportunism or naiveté (whichever applies) to opt for BSBT support still does not address its complicity in the further securitization of Muslim community life and its institutions to deleterious effect. Yet again, Bradford has led the way in calling out the dangers of this short-sighted approach. Let us hope that this can now be widened out nationally to look well beyond the festival, which was, after all, only one of many recipients.

The Bradford Literature Festival is a rare cultural space ‒ established and led by Muslim women ‒ for everyone in the city, yet it is also inclusive of various shades of Muslim cultural life in a unique way. It needs to preserve the breadth and generosity of its spirit in future years, and this can only be protected by seeing how pernicious it is that cultural life, literacy and education aren’t valued as public goods in their own right but as antidotes for a community stigmatised as at risk of extremism or political violence, misconstrued as always in need of such remedial measures. Why should we put up with the Bradford Literature Festival being singled out (among hundreds of literature festivals around the country) for counter-extremism funding? We should not take these monies to endorse the rationale that only further strengthens the well-established counter-extremism and counter-terrorism industry in this country. We can and must do better.

(Reposted with permission from Yahya Birt’s Medium blog: https://medium.com/@yahyabirt/british-muslims-cultural-freedom-and-the-counter-extremism-industry-d41d1faf96b9.)