Chandrika Parmar listens to debates exploring the concept of community at the Muslim Institutes’ Summer Conference.

The Muslim Institute’s Summer Conference brought a diverse set of individuals together in Cardiff to explore ‘the idea of community’. The conference could be visualised as a conversation, mediation and dialogue with three forms of identity. Most of the participants were ‘British Muslims’. The two words can be a hyphenated whole, a hybrid or a perpetual quarrel between the two identities. In another sense, the participants were all citizens. But citizenship itself, as a settled concept, faces the unsettling fact of the migrant, the stranger offering alternative ideas on dwelling. Finally the participants’ sense of being Muslim and being British and citizens confronted a time cycle as three generations confronted their diverse experiences of home. They confronted not just ‘England’ but the sense of culture and heritage that they brought with them. What one sensed throughout was the creativity, the tension and the openness of the encounter and its future possibilities.

The first speaker was Aled Edwards, a Church minister for over 30 years. During the last ten years, he has focused on the prospects of devolution both as an idea of government and governance. His search also addresses ideas of equality within a double matrix of race and faith relations.

Edwards spoke of Welsh history and Welsh identity. His mode of presentation was that of the storyteller. He piled up anecdotes and histories to build up a picture of Welsh identity, focusing in particular on Welsh myths.

At a second level, Edwards spoke about politics, focusing on the devolution of power in recent times. He examined how the idea of devolution has been used to rework the idea of Welsh identity. He considered three issues, in particular, seeking to explore and understand how 1) child rights 2) sustainability and 3) issues of equality have been used to rework the sense of Welsh identity.

Using these three issues, the 44 communities that live in Wales have built a weave between the local and the plural that transcends the tyranny of the parochial, thus creating a more variegated idea of the community. If survival in a cultural sense is an adaptation of one’s identity to diverse contexts, the Welsh, he claimed, have done it several times over. The processes were varied. One worked often through myths, sometimes through the use of Welsh language. He also noticed the irony and the possibility of the meaning of the word Welsh. It means “one of us” and yet sadly he recognised the language was disappearing.

Stories are stories after all

Edwards was an interesting storyteller. But the grammar of storytelling allows both for other stories and even variants of the same story. Surely his narrative and its accompanying ideas of myth and memory are only one way of telling that story. It immediately demands a neighbourhood of competing and overlapping stories, which both thicken the argument and expose its weaknesses. What are and where are these alternate forms of contestation? More significantly where are the alternative memories and narratives? The grammar of devolution at the level of cultural practice is not clear. How do the 44 communities assembled together live and look at their practices? In particular, how do the practices that go into the making of political citizens interplay with the civics of a community? The sense of multiplicity of identity, memory and practice need to be worked out. It is as if the theatre of alternative spaces is still empty or vacant. One has to ask for a drama of multiple communities, enactments, tensions and the continuing development of difference.

There is also a question of hierarchy, priority and dominance. Conventional politics creates its own imposing categories, which encompasses those of the community. One confronts the category of national identity, which is usually expected to supersede the tribal one. What one needs is a scenario of multiplicity, a plot of how tensions are worked out and how the nation becomes a plural possibility instead of a standard trope.

Storytelling and devolution are good beginnings. What one needs are stories of the middle and the end. There is another danger. The nation state can be a homogenising term. One way it operates is through the demands of the idea of progress. Progress is often uni-linear and in its demand to move to the future, it often simplifies the past or impoverishes it. It creates a sense of amnesia as for example about the history of slave trade in Wales. A new identity is often created through violence to old identities. Storytelling as a form of trusteeship of memories must expose the logic of such an imposition.

Forget the Peasants

The second presentation, by Austin Williams, director of Future Cities Project, picked up the current debate on the “Big Society”. It is an attempt to encourage the spirit of voluntarism to create what David Cameron calls communities with “oomph”, with a sense of anticipation and effervescence. Williams think that state backed, compulsory voluntarism is an oxymoron. The number of official volunteers who are waged has increased steeply from 130,000 to 778,000. Employment in the voluntary sector has gone up. So one can legitimately ask: is a paid volunteer just another salaried job? People are giving time but the work is not free. In that sense, does voluntarism create a different sense of community?

Williams also argued that the urban renaissance is a way out of the village community. What one needs, he argued, is dynamism and not the stasis of old communities. Cities personify progress; it is where dynamic and innovative people are found. Williams also wants to do away with the whole idea of sustainability, which he argues has become an unthinking and reigning orthodoxy. Instead, he wants to reinstate the notions of development, progress, experimentation and ambition. Such a process creates a transformative space for citizens to act. The community life of the village has fixed statuses while the anonymity of the city provides more enabling spaces.

Williams provoked a heated discussion about the notion of progress, the meaning of development and the necessity of sustainability.

But my questions to Williams are angled differently. I wonder if his notion of voluntarism was frozen and monolithic; and also whether in de-freezing sustainability, he was freezing voluntarism. Beyond official voluntarism, there are NGOs and communities organisations which have their own notions of voluntarism, which stem not from official dictates but from a community’s cosmology and ideas of fraternity, solidarity and service.

Isn’t the practice and space of voluntarism more messy and layered? Consider for example the notion of khidmat amongst Muslim Asians or seva in Hindu communities. They are different from the ideas of charity, philanthropy or even caring which stem from a secularised or not so secularised Christianity? It is not just that the meaning of words is different but also their implications for the community - ideological and organisational - are different. For a Muslim paying zakat, part of his income to the poor, is not “charity” but an act of faith and a right of the poor. The idea of sewa is not translatable as service. It belongs more to the world of gift and hospitality. It is freely given within the logic of a different sense of individual and community. Given these differences in voluntarism, one has to then recognise they have different implications for democracy and the democratic imagination.

Consider now Williams’ argument about the city. As the political psychologist Ashish Nandy has shown, the journey to the city is an ambiguous one and a variety of selves can be shelved or deployed in the process. The two processes - voluntarism and city life - have to be pluralised so they do not succumb to standard narratives of development. There is work both conceptual and institutional to be done here. One needs to rework both the nature of public space and civics in terms of these competing vocabularies of engagement and involvement.

Bring Back the New Enlightenment

If Edwards was an act of story telling and Williams a sociological fragment, Matthew Taylor, the Chief Executive of RSA, presented a discourse analysis, an updated scrutiny of the fate and possibility of Enlightenment.

Taylor’s sees the Enlightenment not as a rigid construct but as a concept open to diversity of interpretations. He begins by stating that one must revisit the Enlightenment and ground it in the emerging models of human nature. While the Enlightenment, as a reaction and a response, emerged in coffee houses, Church pulpits and royal societies, it hardly touched, Taylor notes, the lives of the overwhelming majority of the rural and the emerging industrial working class. The Enlightenment project, he adds, is incomplete, open and subject to new and conflicting interpretations. It can be invented anew beyond the earlier radical and reformist arguments.

But before recognizing the possibility of change, Taylor wants us to recognize the power and creativity of the Enlightenment in shaping us as we are. He demands a gift of gratitude as a prelude to any act of reinvention or criticism.

Taking Todorov’s In Defence of the Enlightenment as his basic text, Taylor identifies three ideas at the core of the Enlightenment: autonomy, universalism and human nature of all our acts.

Autonomy implies choice and reflection about choice. Universalism contains the foundational possibilities of dignity and the prospect of fundamental rights. And there is a sense that the world is organized to serve human beings. This raises the question of ethics. Taylor proceeds to a futuristic analysis of the Enlightenment as a global possibility.

This demands, he argues, a citizenship more engaged and reflective about societal possibilities. It necessitates a reflexive idea of trade offs between competing options like environmental limits and economic growth. It also requires not just citizen sensitivity and public debate but a new expectation of institutionalised transparency. The Enlightenment today is like the British population - a middle aged possibility. One must allow for a thickening of skin and sensitivity.

Let us now consider how Taylor explores the fate of each principle. While emphasising that civic republicanism is only possible with civic virtue, he admits that the decisional calculus of choice might be warped by possessive individualism. Here the aggregate preference of individuals does not add up to a collective or coherent programme and the preference of individual voters often turn out to be mutually incompatible.

He also explores the ironies, contradictions and paradoxes of Enlightenment in operation. For example he suggests that populist rhetoric often leads to an emptying out of politics. It used political involvement to signal political isolation and indifference.

He argues that political autonomy today needs a self awareness and inventiveness that moves beyond these limits. Anchored in Enlightenment premises, it must seek new possibilities which do not deny the hard won rights of the individual. Text has to recognise context. For example health, he shows, is an impact of lifestyles and neighbourhood. “If your friend’s friend gained weight, you gained weight.” Context is both fundamental and life giving. His work becomes in a sense an empirical onslaught on rational choice as a decisional calculus. He also argues that neurobiology shows that old dualisms were illiterate about choice. There is a need for a counter intuitive theory of foundational choice. He demonstrates that the value of goods is positional, that desire is influenced by what the other has and wants rather than being context driven. He thus seeks to embed the individual into a nested series of contexts. When choice is context dependent, rationality is no longer an abstract discourse.

Let’s Have Some Empathy

Once the importance of contexts is established, Taylor outlines the need for empathy. A universalism which is abstract can be facile. It is a bit like Charlie Brown’s contention “I love Humanity, it is people I don’t like”. The post Enlightenment discourse has to go beyond oppositions of welfare – freedom, or individual and community within a transformative global framework. Empathy encompasses objectivity, the gaze as the core competence of 21st century citizenship. The civics of problem solving must go beyond the old idea of rationality and objectivity. Taylor’s argument that “Empathic emotional universalism is the key to 21st century citizenship” is significant. Here Taylor internalises the psychological work of Piaget and Keegan to create a Post-Enlightment idea of actualisation. He argues that the diversity of values, traditions and lifestyles requires us to resist tendencies of right and true versus wrong and false. Yet this is not easy. Studies show that only one in five people can pass this new test of mature citizenship. The fixity of self and the threat of difference are still major problems. Empathy also has to be able to be scale-indifferent moving across the human chain from the local to the global, encountering a variety of strangers. This involves a new relation between the inner and outer self. What Taylor is asking for is an expansion of the Enlightenment project beyond its old spaces of market and radical egalitarianism. This would demand new ideas of childhood, which place the development of emotional attachment at the core of citizenship.

This emotional maturity needs a new approach to difference. He distinguishes between a strategy of disagreement and the closure of disparagement. It demands a balancing act which allows a sense of inventiveness to the migrant and the refugee. He adds that an over exposure to the virtual may blind this sensitivity.

Finally he emphasises the need for an ethics that goes beyond tradition, the words of Gods and Kings. Yet he warns that the logics that govern post enlightenment society - science, market and bureaucracy - need to be rethought. He tries to show that markets rely on trust, bureaucracy on duty, science on collaboration, that ethics is the core of our society: In this context, he also adds that ethics needs a sense of suspense that goes beyond the predictability of regulation. Such a mind set has to go beyond the certainty, the predictability, and the stereotypes of the old Enlightenment model and recognise that creativity often emerges from clumsy, dirty, fuzzy models of problem solving. Such a future demands a new theory of childhood rationality, communication and the body.

Taylor’s effort can be perceived as an attempt to create a new idea of public and a politics that goes beyond electoral issues, where the voter/consumer is always right. One moves beyond consumption to a civics of engagement, something that hybridises risk-taking with altruism and empathy rather than indifference or paranoia. A few natural questions emerge: is Taylor putting too much faith in the creation of new human beings? Do the psychological trends he talks about fit all contexts? Is evolutionary psychology, on which his arguments depend so much, as grounded as physics, and thus can be trusted? There is a substrate of utilitarianism and a majoritarian calculus which creates unease. What does the greatest good of greatest number mean to the minority and the margin? Numbers often helps create a cultural emptiness, a wasteland through frameworks which embody the best of intentions. Fundamentally one feels his optimism about new insights in psychology suggests a new ideal type of person and a value frame. How would such frameworks be institutionalised? Co-existence sounds friendly but what are the values and interests which bring it into being. The friendly evolutionary psychologist, like Plato’s philosopher, could be a potential disaster.

There is another more philosophical issue. Where do the dynamics of dissent, diversity, disagreement work themselves out on everyday level? How does an attempt to create a generalised paradigm such as the new enlightenment accommodate the margin? Paradigms incorporate and valorise mainstream voices. The dynamics of a Taylorian paradigm is not articulated; and I find it difficult to see what strategies could be created to go beyond current politics and move us towards the new horizons.

A range of responses emerge during the conference to these arguments.

Big Society and Big Muslims

Ali Miraj who anchored the open discussion on “The Big society”, described himself as a “loyal Tory”. He setup the directions of the debate by asking if the participants thought the state was too big. Asked in an abstract way, the answer with a few exceptions was a resounding “yes”. The state, participants stated, was interfering in all aspects of life; indeed, it had become a surveillance state according to one participant. Yet when asked if ‘Big society’ should take over some of the functions of the state, there was skepticism all around. One sensed a balancing act between expectation and ambivalence.

I found the encounter with Miraj himself quite fascinating. His politics is “Muslim” as well as “left of centre” he said. The question is what could be the creative links between autobiography and sociology, between individual perspectives and political structures. How does his personal politics help reclaim spaces? I think Miraj’s personal biography is a good example of the challenges Muslims faced on several issues that were being discussed.

The multiplicity of the debates was reflected well in the discussion on music videos during a presentation by Carl Morris, a PhD student writing a thesis on British Muslim music. It ranged from the presentation of “Islam” as benign religion seeking mercy, kindness and love to the hip hop and music videos of Mohammed Yahya, which reflected the anger of many Muslims on issues ranging from Palestine and Afghanistan to the pain of children and women living in conflict zones. But it was the last video by a group of young Pakistani artists, called “Yeh hum Nahein” (this is not us) which generated the most discussion. The video sought to reclaim spaces in terms of definitions, shunning violence and using footage from everyday lives to say “we are not terrorists. Do not mark us thus….”

Earlier in the day, Dilwar Hussain had pointed out that terrorism is the most common word associated with Muslims. In his presentation on the Islamic perspective on community, Hussain invited participants to search for the word Muslim in Google. What it throws up are “images of violence, blood and niqab”. This example he argued was a reflection, a small slice of “what the cyber space thinks of the word Muslim!”. Hussain, who is the head of Policy Research Centre at Islamic Foundation in Leicester, went on to ask a seminal question: “Is there a Muslim community?” . He suggested that the quest for a community – amongst Muslims has been rather illusive; perhaps it is a quest that ought to be abandoned. Using sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s definition and attributes of a community, Hussain explored the role of religion in public spaces. He asked: how can we manage the anxieties of nation state? Should nation state not expect allegiance, conformity, security and some meta-narratives of shared cohesion and shared values? What challenges do the Muslims pose to nation state as an imagined community? Who is “our people’ in a micro system?

This session was interesting as it reinforced some of the running themes in the conference: Islam, community, representation, visibility. A whole range of questions were debated. What are the anxieties of the modern multi-religious, multi-ethnic nation states? What and who will it co-opt to speak and reflect on these issues? What new challenges and stereotypes get built across various spaces?

Ehsan Masood, a science journalist and trustee of the Muslim Institute, stepped in to speak about community leaders. He noted two points. First, the fact that the Muslim leadership is always diverse yet one does not get a sense of this in terms of public presence. Second, top-down organisations, such as Muslim Council of Britain, can in fact end up destroying community cohesion. He argued that events often create and dilute contexts for emergence of a particular variety of institution or response. The MCB owes its emergence to the uproar about the Satanic Verses and the demand by the then Conservative government for “a united Muslim response”. The irony was that the leadership was created from the top. One sees similar gestations for other Muslim organisations.

Masood ended his presentation with a story. When he was working as news editor of Q News, he decided to showcase Muslim leaders. A number of leaders were asked what car they drove. There was no diversity in answers: they all drove a Mercedes. When asked what they were taking to read during their summer holidays, they all gave one answer: the Qur’an and Hadith! As one participant noted, the one thing that does not come through is that Muslim leaders are humans! Another pointed out that there is a difference between institutionalised and community leaders. The two are not always synonymous. I would also add the two often do work with the same framework or understanding of issues.

So what did I make of the Conference? At one level, it was a clearing house, a spring-cleaning of old ideas. It recognised tacitly that the keywords of Western society - democracy, citizenship, enlightenment, order - need to be rethought. The notion of community has to be understood at many levels. There was a conscious attempt to go beyond the old dualisms of modernity which places the other as outsider, a stranger full of menace and threat. Now that the outsider is inside, democracy is enriched through new narratives from different cultures, heritage and memories. Every new citizen is a linguistic and anthropological addition to the humanisation of Britain and its further invention and translation.

I loved the laughter, the self reflexive and reflective nature of the engagement. There was an understanding of the importance as well as the irony and poignancy of having such a debate.

Chandrika Parmar is completing her PhD thesis at the Said Business School, University of Oxford