Kenan Malik: «Born in Bradford»

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Today, "radical" in an Islamic context means someone who espouses a fundamentalist theology. Twenty years ago it meant a secularist who challenged the power of the mosques. The expunging of that radical secularist tradition has played an important part in the rise of Islamic militancy in this country.

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At one time, the left had been a champion of Enlightenment rationalism, of a common humanity and universal rights. Over the past 20 years, however, many key figures and organisations on the British left have promoted the idea of multiculturalism.

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The roots of the politics of difference can be found in the new forms of radicalism that emerged in the 1960s. Radicalism came to mean the rejection of all that is "western" in the name of marginality or difference. Traditionally even those hostile to capitalism saw themselves as standing in the western intellectual tradition. "I denounce European colonialism," CLR James once wrote. "But I respect the learning and discoveries of western civilisation."

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The postwar left was shaped by the experience of Nazism, the failures of old-style class politics and the emergence of new struggles such as the civil rights movement and feminism. People asked why it was that Germany, with its deep roots in the Enlightenment, should succumb to Nazism. The answer seemed to be that it was the logic of Enlightenment rationalism itself that gave rise to such barbarism. As Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, founders of the Frankfurt school, put it in their seminal work, Dialectic of Enlightenment: "Enlightenment is totalitarian." Or as Herbert Marcuse, one of the Marxist gurus of the 1960s student revolt, explained: "Concentration camps, mass exterminations, world wars and atom bombs are no 'relapse into barbarism' but the unrepressed implementation of the achievements of modern science, technology and domination.

Where the "old left" of the communist parties and trade unions still looked to the working class as the agency of change, the "new left" found surrogate proletariats in the "new social movements" third world liberation movements, feminist groups, campaigns for gay rights, and so on. Where the old left talked of class and sought to raise class consciousness, the new left talked of culture and sought to strengthen cultural identity. Culture was the defining feature of groups and the means by which one group differentiated itself from others. Every group, whether Cuban peasants, black Americans or women, had a specific culture, rooted in its history and experiences. That culture gave shape to an individual's identity. For an individual identity to be authentic, collective identity must be too. That required the group to be true to its own culture, to pursue the traditions that mark out that culture as unique and rebuff the advances of modernity and of other cultures.

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The weakening of both social democratic and Stalinist parties, the demise of third world liberation movements, the transformation of many third world countries into tyrannies and, finally, the end of the cold war all added to the belief that radical social transformation was a chimera. The new social movements themselves had largely disintegrated by the 1990s. All that was left was the sense of difference. (...) What began in the 1960s as a way of organising against oppression had ended up by the 1990s as a way of rationalising the left's impotence.

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Racism now meant not simply the denial of equal rights but the denial of the right to be different. Black and Asian people, many argued, should not be forced to accept British values, or to adopt a British identity.

Multiculturalism transformed the character of anti-racism. By the late-1980s the focus of anti-racist protest in Bradford had shifted from political issues, such as policing and immigration, to religious and cultural issues: a demand for Muslim schools and for separate education for girls, a campaign for halal meat in school, and the confrontation over The Satanic Verses. As different groups began asserting their identities ever more fiercely, so the shift from the political to the cultural arena helped to create a more tribal city. Secular Muslims were regarded as betraying their culture.

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Multiculturalism did not create militant Islam, but it created a space for it within British Muslim communities that had not existed before. It fostered a more tribal nation, undermined progressive trends within the Muslim communities and strengthened the hand of conservative religious leaders. It is true that since 9/11 and particularly since 7/7 there has been growing questioning of the consequences of multiculturalism.

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The idea that society consists of a variety of distinct cultures, that all these cultures should be respected and preserved and that society should be organised to meet the distinct needs of different cultures: these continue to be regarded as the hallmarks of a progressive, anti-racist outlook. The lesson of the past two decades, however, is this: a left that espouses multiculturalism makes itself redundant.(...)»

(Kenan Malik na Prospect; vale a pena ler na íntegra.)