The row over Channel 4's Ramadan plans would seem trivial were it not for the vicious spike in anti-Muslim attacks
If you're living in a Muslim country you'll notice Ramadan in many wonderful ways – but a not so wonderful way is the one where you live next to a mosque with really bad speakers over which it broadcasts those early, longer, seemingly louder calls to prayer during the holy month.
In stark contrast, it is hard to imagine Channel 4's planned 3am broadcasts of the Ramadan prayers will be observed by anybody not already observing this special holiday. And yet this move has been cast as a deliberate provocation by the channel itself – to bust our stereotypes of Islam – and by bigoted newspapers spinning the call to prayer as a call to impose sharia law in Britain.
It's a symptom of the febrile atmosphere around Islam, this ridiculous furore over a timeless spiritual occurrence across the Muslim world. But it obviously has a much more serious and troubling context. In late June a home-made bomb was found at a mosque in Walsall, from which 150 people were evacuated. Police are also investigating arson attacks a few weeks earlier on an Islamic centre in north London and a mosque in Grimsby, which was targeted with petrol bombs as worshippers prayed inside. Last Sunday a suspicious package was destroyed at a mosque in Liverpool, and a Muslim cemetery in Newport, south Wales was desecrated with swastikas. And last Wednesday saw the spraying of yet more Nazi symbols on a mosque in Redditch, Worcestershire.
These are just a few of more than a dozen recent racist attacks on mosques. And that's before we get to the death threats, taunts and spitting; the forced hijab removing; and the depositing of pig heads outside Muslim homes. Such incidents are believed to be widely under-reported – although the monitoring group Tell Mama UK says there were 212 hate incidents in the week following Lee Rigby's murder in Woolwich.
Responding to the Walsall bomb, West Midlands police amended a press release that stated the attack was not being treated as terrorism. But however you draw your definition of bombs intended to "intimidate … a section of the public" (as stated in the Terrorism Act 2000), it's safe to assume that the people using these places of prayer find such targeted violence, and the thought that it might spread, terrifying.
And yet, rather than recognise how alarming and frightening this vicious spike in anti-Muslim attacks truly is, sections of the British media have been engaged in trying to underplay it. When Tell Mama UK reported this rise in attacks after Woolwich, the Telegraph and the Daily Mail both pushed out reports suggesting fakery.
The monitors of the attacks, it was claimed, used dodgy methodology. Another complaint was that online abuses and threats were counted as attacks at all (both accusations were described by Tell Mama UK as a misunderstanding of the facts presented). Some articles stitched it together as the workings of an "Islamophobia industry" designed to inflate a sense of victimhood and thereby prompt support, including financial assistance, for Muslim groups. Underpinning all this was a confident appraisal of British culture, such as that suggested by Tony Parsons in the Mirror, who noted that we are "a civilised, polite, tolerant people" – as though that could magically stop us also being capable of bigotry or hatred.
Forty percent of anti-Muslim attacks recorded by Tell Mama UK last year were linked to English Defence League sympathisers. But these attacks can only take place and then be so casually diminished in a culture that sees some degree of hatred or suspicion of Muslims as acceptable and understandable.
Indeed, a report into far-right groups from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue found such groups switched their focus from Jews to Muslims because hatred of the latter is currently more socially palatable. And Islamophobia is so widespread, so dangerous and so rooted precisely because it is mainlined by our political elite, and at both ends of the political spectrum.
The right, for instance, has Charles Moore, who used a Telegraph column to cast the EDL as an "instinctive reaction of elements of an indigenous working class" – phrasing that could have come straight out of the Enoch Powell book of race relations. As Gavan Titley – co-author of The Crises of Multiculturalism: Racism in a Neoliberal Age– says, this is part of a history of racism that views the "Islamophobia industry" as the new "race relations industry", both peddling myths about fictitiously disadvantaged groups. "These tropes are well established, so it is easy to roll them out," says Titley. "Pooh-poohing the methodology is well rehearsed, a tried and tested offensive. It is about getting traction and power."
Meanwhile, parts of the supposed liberal left have swallowed a line about British Muslims being an inherently problematic community that is self-isolating, disloyal, prone to extremism and intent on trying to erode hard-won democratic values. Tony Blair is the classic proponent – he recently used a Daily Mail piece to warn of a "problem within Islam".
If we are to insist, as Blair and others do, that there is no causal connection between Britain's invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and the forewarned blowback of domestic terror, that creates a need to find other causes: hence the manufacturing of a problem community, a "swamp" that needs to be "drained" of the murderous extremism that all its members are on a "conveyor belt" towards – all quotes from British leaders.
Jumbled up in all this – and you can see it in Blair's piece – is a troubling conflation of "Islam" with "Islamism" and a tendency to imply that all "Islamists" are by definition violent jihadis.
Fortunately, though, tolerance really is a component of British life: that is what has prompted the flood of messages of support for British mosques, the solidarity across communities, and the anti-fascist protests that are organised to face down racist mobilisations by the EDL. Tolerance is something that makes people proud of Britain, but it is never a given; it always has to be defended – more than ever in the testing times we face today, and even when the attacks seem as superficially schoolyard as the one about the televised call to prayer.