 Good morning, everyone. I've got a bit of a cold, so apologies for that. I'm glad I have the mic. I'm delighted to be here, too. I studied here at SOAS for two years in the 90s, learning to read and write Urdu and Hindi, and I have very fond memories, and I'm also very happy that Valerie Amos has joined here, not least as with Trevor, she was a trustee of the runny meat trust, I believe, in the late 90s. This is who runny meat is. Runny meat is actually a race equality think tank. I just want to put that up front so you understand that's the sort of perspective of my presentation. I will, of course, be talking about British Muslims, but I'm going to be putting that in a wider context, I think, similarly to what you just heard from Trevor, and I think some similar findings. We are an independent think tank, and we do tend to focus on research and analysis, but as with this conference and as Trevor just has suggested, we try to link that research to practical policy recommendations in the real world. I think the first question we need to ask is what do we mean by integration? I'm going to argue that we should think of integration in terms of different domains, and I'm going to compare briefly a government, that's a government department, communities and local government produced an integration strategy last year, and I'm going to try to highlight what I mean by different domains by analyzing their strategy briefly. I think we need to think about which groups are we talking about, and I think, again, we've already heard a bit about this, but my key, I suppose, argument here is that we shouldn't just look at Muslims, nor should we only look at minorities. And I think the final question is how do we measure, and I think we don't really have an agreed answer on that one. I did want to give you summaries of the Citizenship Survey because it's the best sort of quantitative data set that we have on these sorts of questions, and in that survey, 90% of Muslims and also Hindu Sikhs and ethnic minority Christians report a strong sense of personal belonging to Britain. Muslims across a variety of ethnicities are more likely to report feeling British than, for example, Caribbean Christians. The strength of this sense of Britishness was associated with age, gender in place of birth, but also risk of racist victimization. So this is, I think, an important finding in the literature that is not just in the Citizenship Survey, but you see in EMBES, which is the Ethnic Minority British Election Study, where those groups that report an experience of racist discrimination are less likely to feel, perhaps unsurprisingly, British. The final point here is how you feel about yourself in the world is, of course, about your own personal resources and identity and how you want to navigate the world, but the sense of your identity and how it's legitimated by others and accepted by others is, of course, accepted by the responses of others in wider society. So, for example, when Tiger Woods said that he was a Cablan Asian, because he was part Caucasian, part Black, part Asian, it's not clear to me that that is indeed the way in which American society views Tiger Woods. So what do I mean by different domains? I'm going to just briefly talk about the Communities and Local Government Integration Strategy, which was in the last coalition government, and they identified, they called it one integration process, but we disaggregated it on the five areas that they talked about. And these areas were common ground, and those common ground measures were shared aspirations and values, focusing on commonalities rather than differences. Responsibility, which was a sense of mutual commitments and obligation. Social mobility, participation in empowerment, and tackling intolerance and extremism. So in a positive sense, I think the government there is recognizing that there are different elements within integration, and I think that's a positive thing. I think, unfortunately, they still did tie them all together and implied in their strategy that all groups are sort of moving positively or negatively in one direction on all these domains. We looked at some of the actual indicators that you might use from the Citizenship Survey, and I don't have time to go through all of the findings. But effectively, we did find in general positive findings for all groups on most of these domains, but we did also find differences, and those differences weren't always about ethnicity. In fact, they were about whether you are a migrant or not. So that led us to reflect, and we're still working on this, about perhaps rather than thinking of one single process of integration that's linear and that all groups are experiencing equally and at the same time and at the same rate, we should rather think of domains of integration. And some possibilities are residential, socioeconomic, participation, political, cultural, or the sort of things also that Trevor was just speaking about, and of course interpersonal. And we might think that some of these things matter more than others. I'm just going to go through some of the data on some of those measures. So I just mentioned national identity. This is the data for the census on how different ethnic groups feel about their national identity. And one of the most, I suppose, striking findings is that the groups with the highest number of Muslims, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis are most likely to identify only as British, and most of them have a very small proportion who identify as foreign, and almost all of those, of course, are born overseas. I think we have to be careful in interpreting these data. A lot of people look at this and you hear that British Muslims are more likely to affirm the British identity than white British people. And if you see the third bar down, that is indeed true. So less than 20%, 15% or so of white British people have a British identity only. But that's because most of them identify as English. That's that orange bar. So we're looking at the third bar down, the white British bar, and we see that white British people are much more likely to identify as English. Whether or not that matters, I think, is an interesting question, but it will become, I think, more interesting if and when Scotland becomes independent. Here are the data by religion. And again, you can see that there doesn't seem to be a problem in terms of Muslims identifying as British or English. This is a chart from the Centre on the Dynamics of Ethnicity at the University of Manchester. This shows more residential patterns of separation, an index of dissimilarity. And what it shows is between 1991 and 2001, these are three censuses, that for most groups there's been a decline in the level of segregation. So most groups are less segregated today than they were in the past. And here's the data on religion and you see the same finding. And this is true not simply because of black and minority ethnic people moving into suburban or rural areas. It's also the case that if you look at the decline in the numbers of black and minority ethnic people, you'll see the sort of large outgrowth of, say, Bangladeshis, for example, tower hamlets. The other element of domain of integration that, again, has already been touched upon is socio-economic. And we probably do think that whether or not a group is integrated is partly determined by how well they have opportunities in our society and indeed the government's own integration strategy highlights that. Here are the data on child poverty. You can see all groups have higher rates of child poverty. There was a rising to 50% for Pakistani children. We care about poverty partly because it's bad when people have not enough money, but I think we're particularly concerned about what is called persistent poverty. If you lose your job, you might be in poverty for a few months. But what's more concerning is where you have groups that are persistently in poverty over the course of long periods of time. And here you see that black African and Pakistani groups and indeed Bangladeshi groups and black Caribbean groups are much more likely to be in poverty persistently. This means poor in all years of that survey. So for three years in a row, they reported being poor. Here's the data on low-pay and wage inequality. I wanted to just briefly note that a lot of the wage inequality is driven by occupational segregation. And I think there's an interesting question somewhat raised by, I think already what Trevor said, you know, why do people congregate in certain kinds of jobs? And some of it may be down to choice, but I don't think all of it is. I don't think, for example, one in three Bangladeshi men in Britain particularly want to be chefs and waiters, even though that is the finding that one in three Bangladeshi men in Britain want to be chefs and waiters. But at the same time, we do find that a lot of Bangladeshi men, not just those born in Bangladesh but their children, are becoming chefs and waiters and we need to ask why that's the case. But it's not only because people are in kind of crap jobs, if we put it that way, and jobs that don't have much opportunities for progression. It's even when people are graduates, they tend to be overqualified. We've also done a briefing on Russell Group graduates where we controlled for degree choice and degree outcome and we found that black graduates from Russell Group in 2013, so not a long time ago, were more likely to be unemployed six to 12 months following graduation than their white peers. And here, I think this is actually worrying even for the white group that a fifth of our graduates are doing jobs for which they're well overqualified and arguably are not getting the same value out of their fees. And I think this also raises a question for universities, if they're going to be charging fees, should black students, should Asian students ask, are you actually giving us the same return and maybe we should pay a bit less in fees if we're going to get a little less out of our degrees? Another, I said there was another domain, well, many other domains. One other domain we might care about is political participation or participation generally. This is the number of people who are very or fairly dissatisfied with democracy in Britain. And again, I think you can interpret this in different ways, but as you can see there, Pakistani and Bangladeshi groups, those represent about two-thirds of Muslims today in Britain, are the least dissatisfied with democracy. They look like they think that democracy is working quite well. And if you were to say to me which group looks least well integrated, you might say the mixed and black Caribbean groups. Now, as I said, I think that's why you have to be somewhat careful. I think it's fair to say that that may be true, that black Caribbean and mixed groups are dissatisfied with democracy and it shows a failure of political integration into the political-making process. I think it's also, though, important to note that there's something called migrant optimism in the literature on democracy, which is that people who come from other countries come to Britain with the sort of sense that life is better here, whereas their children have higher expectations. And we shouldn't think that that's a bad thing. It's not a bad thing if the children of migrants say that the parents came from Pakistan where they maybe felt that elections were rigged or they came from Somalia where they felt that the state was not particularly successful. The fact that they have higher expectations than their parents may not be a failure of integration. It might be positive that they have dissatisfaction rates that are similar to their white peers. The other issue that you sometimes hear about is whether or not groups are willing to consider violence as a legitimate means of political protest. And here are the data again. And again, it doesn't really show that Muslim groups have any higher propensity towards thinking that violence is a legitimate form of political action. 15% of white British people think that violence is a legitimate form of political action. 15% of Pakistani people think that violence is a legitimate form and 17% of Bangladeshi. So again, it doesn't look that they're that non-integrated in terms of political values and democracy. On the distrust of police, again, it's different groups that have dissatisfaction with the station, probably not surprising if you're a young black man who's still disproportionately stopped in search. Although I think we should be recognizing that of the few good things that Theresa May has done has been to reduce the use of stop and search. Distrust politicians, you see the same pattern. I think the final kind of data slide I wanted to put up was this one simply because this moves, I think, from socioeconomic and political forms of integration to interpersonal ones. And this is the number of couples in inter-ethnic relationships. And I partly put this up because I recall seeing a school in East London asking its eight-year-olds whether or not they'd be willing to marry someone of a different ethnic background. So I thought I would look into the data in terms of seeing who does marry people from a different ethnic background. And you actually find that the white British group are the least likely to marry someone from a different ethnic background. So if we're going to use that as a measure of integration and extremism, well, it doesn't particularly look like that it's ethnic minorities who have the least integration. I think, again, we have to be careful in interpreting that. All I was trying, all I want to do with this slide is to show yes, Bangladeshis, Pakistanis, and Indians have lower rates of inter-ethnic relationships than in particular black groups. But whether or not that's a religion thing I think is open to question when you look at the fact that white British is low and also that Indian groups have such low rates there as well. I have already mentioned the fact that how I identify as a person is partly determined is important, but how others then interpret and affirm my identity is equally important. Trevor has cited the data from the British Social Attitude Survey about whether or not you'd be willing to have someone from a different ethnic minority as your boss. And I think he's right to say that while the sort of headline findings of the British Social Attitude Survey said that there was sort of equivalent levels of racism, if you dig into it, you do see a decline in prejudice on most of these measures. But the one that I think is worrying is it's not really the case for Muslims. So once you pull out the Muslim group, the percentage of white British people who would mind if a relative married a different ethnic group, it's half. Half of white British people would mind if their relative married a Muslim and it's less than a quarter for the other ethnic minority groups. Oh, my conclusion is completely garbled. Okay, so what that's supposed to say is that integration is not a uniform, linear one-way process. It has different domains. And Runnymede in particular has tended to focus more on the socio-economic and political domains, but I think it's an open question which of those domains we think are most important for crafting the kind of gracious society that Trevor referred to for the future. I think also integration is not just important for all minorities, but also the majority population. Finally, because it is something that we've written about, and in fact I think Trevor was at Runnymede when the Islamophobia report was produced, I still think that some of the discussion of Islamophobia in that report stands, particularly in terms of thinking of Islam not as a closed but as an open, in open ways, and I'd be happy to revisit that in the Q&A. But my final point I suppose is looking at integration, we shouldn't just look at British Muslims, but we should look at all the groups. And this is not simply a question of analysis, it's also a question of, I suppose, politics and civil society action. And I would encourage Muslim groups to work with other black and minority ethnic groups, and indeed those liberal groups in the white majority who are looking to actually do more effective work on integration policy. Thank you. Can I thank you for sticking to 15 minutes on the dot, and if other speakers can follow sweet, I'd be really grateful. Lots of statistics there, lots of thought-provoking information which I'm sure will open up the question and answer section. Can I now invite Usama Hassan from the Quillen Foundation to take the floor. You have his bio in front of you in the booklet. Thank you. Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Raheem. The name of God, the merciful, the compassionate. So thank you to Professor Abdul Halim, and all the team. I'm also honoured to speak here at this very important conference, and it was great to listen to Trevor Phillips, because earlier this year I was honoured to watch his documentary, his thought-provoking and perhaps controversial documentary on these issues in the company of David Goodhart at Ditchley Park. We had some very interesting conversations there. It's also nice to be on a panel with somebody called Omar, because I can always then crack a joke from a so-called dream team of Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden. This is a different dream team of Omar and Osama. Finally, just before I start, on integration, Norman Tebet, Lord Tebet, now famously had his cricket test for integration, and on the way here I learned the cricket score this morning. And I failed the cricket test, because I grew up experiencing a lot of racism in this country in the 1980s, but my sons all support England. But I can announce to you, you'll be happy or delighted or indifferent that this morning the Pakistan boulders bowled at England cheaply and won the test match in series. Right, now, I'll talk about Islam. This is a Muslim integration conference, so I will refer to Islam, of course. There are a couple of texts from the Quran and the Hadith which I think are important to promote integration, but of course there are many understandings of that term as I shall outline as well. As all the social scientists know, far better than I do. Tariq Maudoud especially, this table, if you've not seen it, I mean, I find his writing very interesting. This is his EU funded paper from 2011. He talks about four modes of integration, so he points out there's no one way to integrate. And he talks about assimilation, individualist integration, cosmopolitanism, which he also calls diversity, and talks about superdiversity, and multiculturalism, which he prefers. These are in an order for him, going from left to right, least good to best, but he accepts that there are aspects where the others may work. And he says, sometimes people call all three of these multiculturalism but there are different levels. All four in fact, some people call multiculturalism but he likes to differentiate. He also, in this table, when I put this table up, he maps them against values. I'm going to talk about values and he talks about three core values, liberty, quality, fraternity, which sound very French, but Maudoud says these are core European democratic values. And he maps policy regarding these values, objects of policy according to the different modes of integration. I won't go through that because that's his work. You can read that if you're interested. I'll certainly find it very interesting. What I'm going to concentrate on is those values. Because he says in all cases it is a backdrop of liberal democratic rights and values are operative to a large degree. And all the rest is interactions on them. So these basic rights and values which are an issue. Now I'm speaking from a Muslim perspective brought up in London and being active on the campuses for many years. There are Muslim groups and individuals in the whole discussion within Muslim groups around these values. There are people who oppose freedom who say these are all Western ideas. They say freedom and democracy, liberty are Western ideas and Muslims have to somehow reject or modify them. And sometimes similarly with the other values. I'm actually going to argue that these are understood today core Islamic values. And therefore Muslims should not have a problem with engaging fully with this discourse as I presume is the object, one of the objects of this conference. And again on that we have four types of integration. What's going on here? This is perfect timing for those who follow EastEnders. Tonight and tomorrow the other plug there's going to be a mika between these two couples. I can reveal that because they brought me into consult on this and I spent two days filming with the EastEnders cast. This is a character called Shabnam. She's played by somebody who's not Muslim. Raki Takrar is her name. This is Kush. And it's very interesting here. You have a Muslim family who have been around in EastEnders for about eight years. Nearly all the actors are not Muslim. And is that a good example of integration? Is it not? Is Citizen Khan a better one? I asked the actress here, she said she gets very little interaction from Muslim women in terms of writing in. So, my speculation would be that she's not as much her household name amongst British Muslims as they say Nadia Hussein. Or is, of course, a real Muslim, if you like winning the great British Bake Off recently. I don't know, I think that's a good example. If you're interested, do follow it tonight and tomorrow night. Or catch up because we'll be at the conference dinner, so not tonight. Right. Values. Of course, Muslims have a sacred law, which is the Sharia. And what I'm going to argue is that in the past there were different understandings of these values, which I think can be overcome easily now. But it does require a bit of theological jurisprudential work. So, for example, liberty, freedom. There is a, there is this issue about freedom of religion and expression. Trevor Phillips talked about censorship and offence. There is a famous Quranic verse of no compulsion in religion. With equality, I mean, for many people, Islam obviously is a very equal religion, a very egalitarian religion. Many people convert to Islam for that reason, being one of the reasons. Historically, there's no doubt that, for example, women and non-Muslims were treated differently to Muslim men in the Sharia. For example, Jizya and Zima for non-Muslims and Muslim personal law differentiating between men and women on many issues. And those are all part of the discussions around Sharia. And of course, you have proponents and opponents of various viewpoints in that regard. But it is an issue. In terms of fraternity, what Maudoud calls this civic unity, there was a sense for some people, or many people, that only Muslim brotherhood counted. The fraternity was only for the Muslim. That's what matters. And in fact, other religious traditions probably had that as well. You had the idea of Christendom or without Jewish friends, of course, a strong sense of religious fraternity. Now, that had political implications. Let's not forget, this is just a quick summary of that. In classical, if you like, or medieval pre-modern Islam, you had the earth split up into Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Kufr, the land of Islam and land of unbelief. And the latter was split up into lands of peace, where you had a peace treaty and lands of war. Non-Muslims, lived under the protection of Muslim authority here, only if they paid the jizya and had the status of dhimma, protected people. You also had non-Muslim visitors with a safe passage, Aman. And Muslim visitors had the same in the earth, even in lands of war. A very primitive system of a visa, if you like, but based on individual guarantee. Now, the point is that there are groups, organized groups, who still believe in this and wish to bring it back. I mean, ISIS have brought this back. Jizya and dhimma, they have brought it back. The 7-7 bombers and the murderers of Drummer Lee Rigby which is where the poppy is relevant, explicitly talked about this, lands of Islam, lands of war, etc., and many other groups do that. We're talking about British Muslims, so clearly this is an issue. I did some research on this for a report I wrote and I found some interesting things, because many people know that basic picture. But if you look at one Cherese's fatwas about Spain and North Africa, Galera is a place in the Granada, and it was a majority Muslim town taken over by Christians in the 15th century. And there was this big issue, what did the Muslims there do? And there was a scholar called Lebanon Asim. In his discussion, he talks about Jizya as not a religious construct, but as a civic one, because he said Muslims could pay Jizya to the Christian rulers and live under their protection, as long as they were not being harmed, etc. So it was fine for Muslims to live under the authority of non-Muslims, and that's the new box, I should put that in a different colour really. Then there's Ibn Atami as a famous fatwa about Mardin. There was a new Mardin conference some years ago, and there's been a lot of discussion about this fatwa. It's only one page, it's less than one page. I get my own translation in my report, which is called from them to democracy. And Ibn Atami's contribution was to add a new category here, Dar Muraqab, which is a compound or composite land of Islam or unbelief. Mardin was a town in modern day Turkey. Again, majority Muslim was taken over the Mongol armies. So again the question, how could Muslims live under this non-Muslim authority. Ibn Atami said, well, Mardin is neither a land of Islam nor a land of unbelief, it's a mixture. Which may seem an obvious answer, but it was actually groundbreaking for that time. In fact, what I found interesting was the situation of Galera happened roughly 150 years after Ibn Atami and Mardin. But the scholars in North Africa and Spain did not seem to be aware of or hadn't accepted Ibn Atami as a contribution there. And they were still talking in terms of the slightly older framework. Now that's very different to modern international relations of course, where you have equality and citizenship. Well, this is a very simplistic picture, but you have lots of nation states and of course federations or conglomerations of nation states like the EU, etc. And you have citizens nationals, you have residents with leave to stay and visitors with visas. And as I said before these are the modern equivalents of what we had centuries ago, residents people paying a special tax and people with a very simple visa or permission to travel. But this is the modern framework. How do we get from this you know from these to this, which I think is important for Muslims to take their theological and jurisprudential heritage seriously to engage with this issue. Well for me one of the obvious answers is the whole theory of Makhasa, the Sharia the universal objective of the Sharia is based on holistic reading of the Quran and so no not merely individual texts and this theory was developed by well for me it has its roots in the way of the Prophet Muhammad himself very clearly. But it was developed explicitly by people like Jewaini Ghazali Ibn Adas, Salam Qarafi, Ibn Taymi Ibn Uqayy and Shal Tabi, etc. More recent contributors have been Ibn Ashur Muhammad Hashim Kamali and Ibn Baya and that literature is very well known. You have five minutes. Thank you. I think the Makhasa of the Sharia for me clearly leads to values. The higher objectives of the sacred law can be expressed in values and so these are many. The first five are very well known from Ghazali faith, life, intellect, property, family, reputations, the protection and promotion of these things. But you see Ibn Taymi and others added others other values or higher objectives protecting communities, morality, honesty trustworthiness, etc. Rights and liberty, knowledge, education, peace and justice in international relations the love and worship of God. So this theory is actually very comprehensive. It's saying Islam and the Sharia promote all of these things and that slide looks very modern but those ideas were expressed or developed centuries ago. In particular I would say responding to Maudoud here liberty, equality, fraternity or to the French or American models. Liberty of Freedom is one of these Sharia objectives according to many authorities including Gamal Al-Banna who is the younger brother of Hassan Al-Banna the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood Gamal Al-Banna wrote about that extensively. Equality, Musawa is also arguably a Sharia objective including women and non-Muslims there is a worldwide movement by that name led by Muslim women for equality in Muslim personal law. But civic equality the sense of equality including all citizens including non-Muslims is I think very easily extendable to that. Fraternity or Uhua, Muslims know about the idea of Muslim Brotherhood with a small B but I would argue again it's a Sharia objective extended to all of humanity. We have had many Muslim universalists of course especially in the Sufi tradition but outside that as well we say well God's mercy is universal and encompasses everyone and everything and therefore there is a global Uhua or fraternity of humanity and I think ideas like that are very important to to underpin this discussion. So I've said that, that's my brief conclusion I've just got some quotes to finish off which is Liberty, Equality and Fraternity and other kind of modern Europe democratic values are arguably core Islamic values they're not European or Western they are part of the human tradition if you like. And so Muslims should have no problem really engaging with this kind of discourse integration discourse including all the variations that Maudoud and others talk about whilst remaining faithful to their our religious tradition. Now this is not a new conclusion. I'm just going to finish now with a few quotes over the last couple of centuries and let you read them, I'm not going to read these out but this is from the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II and I think he's moving towards that influenced by the French Revolution just some decades earlier possibly. In 1856 the Ottomans abolished Jizya and Dhimmah so here they're talking about equality, civic equality based on religion. There's Muhammad Ali Johar who's buried in Al Aqsa mosque the site, you'll have seen it. Though he's gone to Jerusalem, Muhammad Ali Johar President of Indian National Congress 1923 he talks about the dream of the United Faith of India he mentioned the United States of America but talks about the United Faith of India again the universalist approach to these things. Muhammad Ali Jinn are famously I've mentioned India so I've got to mention Pakistan especially with the cricket relevance but there, this is his famous speech, Qadi Azab Muhammad Ali Jinn we're all citizens equal citizens of one state with a civic aspect is not equalised if you like the religious differences, you can have religious difference but the religions co-operate in the public space basically what he's saying. Here's Santour who's work I strongly recommend he says the Ottoman declaration of regulation may be seen as the first Islamic human rights declaration in the modern sense and he says the UDHR was supported by Turkish scholar of Islamic law in 1948 who argued it was consistent with Islamic principles and was universal. Finally Sheikh Abdullah bin Bayer with contemporary one of the leading theologians and jurists of today and he speaks about citizenship in his books by Fatwa. Again I've given a longer translation of what he writes about this in my paper from the murder democracy but again he comments on Habermas and endorses this idea of civic society founded on the sharing of basic values this accords with the understanding of Islam about human coexistence for Muslim there should be no harm in it but rather we should co-operate and take part Thank you very much. Thank you. We're now moving to David Goodheart who's from the integration hub and he's going to be addressing you on what does integration look like in a liberal society why does it matter and is there a special Muslim issue with integration? So nothing at all I must learn how to do these presentation things they are better for the audience I think. Anyway thank you very much Yifath and thank you Uzama. What you forgot to mention about the defeated England cricket team is that it does have three British South Asians playing for it at the moment and indeed it has two Muslims playing for it which means that Muslims are grossly over-represented in the England cricket team at the moment. Interestingly it's not actually the highest number of ethnic minority Brits who have played for England. That was five in the January the second test in 1999 against the Australians in Australia. Anyway cricket anoraks we can talk about racing cricket later. As Trevor mentioned earlier I'm the director of the integration hub which is a website do go and visit it if you don't know it's integration hub.net That's what should be up there integration hub.net What we've done I did it when I was at Demos although the hub is now independent of Demos is basically pulled together all of the relevant information on issues relating to ethnic minority integration segregation divided into five different chapters. We have a blog we very much encourage people to look at the material comment as both on the material on the website but also as things happen in the real world and new research comes out events dear boy events. Anyway I'm going to talk about integration in a liberal society very hard to define a much disputed concept subjective and hard to measure the public conversation about these issues tends to grasp at passing events to declare Britain either hopelessly divided when a British born Muslim performs a terrorist act somewhere or it swings to the other extreme and regards this as one big happy family when for example the charming British Bangladeshi Nadia Hussein won the great British Bake Off I think most people most of us do feel ambivalent about the whole idea of integration in some ways we accept that people tend to feel more comfortable amongst people that they have been raised amongst peoples whose language and cultural references and so on they easily understand and yet on the other hand I think we also grasp that a good society cannot consist of lots of inward looking tribes that parallel lives people who have little mutual regard for others is not the basis of a good society despite all these caveats about it being hard to define I think as Trevor said earlier I think it is reasonable to see convergence in life chances and to a lesser extent in lived experience between the largest ethnic groups as central to the idea of integration in modern Britain this does not mean that everyone should be converging on lifestyle norms set by the white British majority in any case in contemporary society those norms vary very widely it may indeed be easy to recognize integration by its opposite in the most segregated places and it should certainly be a cause of concern if some groups are diverging too far especially in the harder quantifiable outcomes in economic life and educational outcomes and of course upward mobility for minorities is much tougher if they are not connected to mainstream networks I think that is common sense I think recent decades have seen significant advances as we have seen from previous speakers in the openness of British society and the decline of overt discrimination against minorities but in some other respects I think integration has become if anything more problematic more difficult perhaps the greater liberalism and individualism of British society means there are fewer national landmarks of shared allegiance to rally around the scale and speed of recent immigration has also increased I think minority concentration in some areas making it easier to live separate from the mainstream often reinforced by modern media globalization the internet and so on and of course we also have greater choice in schools and other public services these days which makes it less likely that people will have shared experiences some degree of ethnic clustering is clearly the norm especially when minority groups like political mass Polish people in Boston Lincolnshire for example or where group institutions such as mosques, halal shops and madrasas for Muslims draw a minority together one of the great policy questions of our times is how much separation is compatible with an open and healthily mixed society it's a question that British state has not been much interested in answering at least until quite recently unlike France Britain recognises the existence and significance of ethnic groups which is why we have the data to talk with some confidence about ethnic group outcomes but it is not on the whole regarded it as part of its role to promote ethnic mixing policy over recent decades has been rather one of a benign laissez-faire rather than a more interventionist integrationism although that may be starting to change partly thanks to the response to Islamic extremism but why apart from the historically contingent or at least we hope historically contingent issue of extremism do we worry about integration at all are we not all just individual citizens well yes of course we are but there is such a thing as society too I was at a conference recently on the refugee crisis and there are lots of academics people working for NGOs government officials and it was interesting the way a lot of the people in the room were talking about society and they were talking like generals moving divisions around the map people talked about the youth boom in the West Balkans of Africa and the ageing societies in Northern Europe wouldn't it be sensible if we just got to move this group and plonk them in this society anyway I was rather surprised by this really extreme form of individualism I believe there is such a thing as society societies are not just random collections of individuals who happen to live in physical proximity and into which millions of people from elsewhere can be easily transplanted successful societies are based on habits of cooperation, familiarity and trust and on bonds of language history and culture and if our European societies so attractive to millions of refugees are to continue flourishing they need to retain some sense of mutual regard between anonymous citizens which means keeping influence to levels that allow people to be absorbed into that hard to define thing called a national culture or way of life so what do we know from the integration hub about what's actually happening as regards ethnic mixing in modern Britain well the numbers some of the numbers have been touched on already if you look just at England or England and Wales there has been a pretty dramatic increase in the ethnic minority population in the last 20-25 years the minority population was only about 7% in the mid 90s and it's now if you just look at England anyway now probably 22-23% if you look at the UK as a whole the numbers are smaller the proportions are smaller because Scotland has Scotland and Northern Ireland and white have a diluting effect barriers to integration are broadly of three kinds factors such as poor education limited grasp of English and ignorance of cultural norms which generally fade with time other barriers are resistance to integration from the minority itself and resistance to integration from the majority but integration as Trevor said it's not an instinctive thing it's a learned behaviour and it's not just something that happens different groups bring different attributes cultural traits and indeed strategies to the whole business of integration Kerry Peach one of the most eminent academics in the field has described an Irish strategy which is essentially one of assimilation and a Jewish strategy which is about combining upward mobility with cultural traditions successful South Asians have emulated the Jewish strategy so before coming here today I had a quick flick through the integration hub looking for the good stories and also looking for the more worrying stories so I'm just going to run through some of the things that I think are evidence of the integration story working and it's left five minutes well let me hurry up I'm on the plus side one very basic fact the majority of minority Britons speak English and think of themselves as British or indeed English Scottish Welsh there's been quite a significant growth of mixed race households in England it's one in eight households of more than one person there's more than one ethnicity in it we've seen as Omar pointed out a decline, a gentle decline in the index of dissimilarity that concept invented by academics to measure residential clustering and dispersal there has been as Trevor pointed out there's been great success in terms of upward mobility in certain minorities and indeed the higher proportion of ethnic minority Brits now go to university than white British people and indeed 10% of Bangladeshi A level students is an interesting stat 10% of Bangladeshi A level students now go to Russell group universities which is exactly the same number as the white British indeed a lot of the a lot of the things that we talk about in the integration hub are now what one might call glass ceiling issues for minorities which is itself a sign of progress I think on the minus side it's true there is the index of dissimilarity is declining the point that that misses something that the academic Eric Kaufman has pointed out is that what we're seeing is more mixing amongst ethnic minorities themselves and more separation between ethnic minorities taken as a whole and the white British taken as a whole I mean just to give you one rather depressing statistic Eric Kaufman did a study of a ward study of the 2011 census in which he found 42% I think it is of visible minority Brits live in wards where the white British are a minority in some cases a very small minority had risen from only 25% in 2001 as Trevor said schools tend to be more segregated than neighborhoods they serve ethnic a majority of ethnic minority Brits now go to majority minority schools there are particular issues to do with as I said earlier to do when you have high levels of immigration and high concentrations it's much easier to live separately and there's a particularity I think to do with short-term flows this is obviously particularly associated with European immigration Eastern European immigration what do you do about people who really don't want to become part of the us that people who one might call commuter immigrants there's a whole issue of media globalization as I mentioned earlier travel it's so much easier to retain contact with countries of origin or ancestral countries and but as this is a conference about Muslim integration or about integration in a Muslim context I think it is worth just briefly addressing the question is there a special issue with Muslim integration in Britain I think the short answer to that is yes the main Muslim groups in Britain, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Somali tend to live more separately they're more likely to speak a language other than English at home they're least likely to marry out women are much less likely to work than most other minority groups and in the main Muslim still cleave to traditional norms that diverge significantly from an increasingly liberal mainspring especially when it comes to religious piety sexuality and gender roles Islamic extremism has understandably provided the focus of most government thinking and talking about integration segregation is used in recent months and years but I think there are also some more positive signs here which suggest that Muslims are just taking a bit longer than say Hindu and Sikh South Asians to adapt to British society surveys for example just tell us that most adult Muslims still agree with the proposition that men should go out to work and women should stay at home but younger Muslim women now reject that view so the kind of the processes of of adaption are taking place I've got a brief section on what to do how am I doing on time have I overrun I have alright in that case I'll raise those things in the question thank you I'd now like to invite Christopher Bagley from the University of Southampton who is going to address you on the meaning of integration in British and Dutch cultures the topic which I want to talk to you about is a very big one it's a 50 year review of two countries Britain and the Netherlands I'm not going to speak to all of those issues my colleague Dr. Nadir Al Rafay I have written a long paper 12,000 words which hopefully you will be able to answer this electronically if you want to follow up these issues now I want to begin with a quotation from one of my intellectual heroes Tarek Ramadan multicultural society is a fact there's no being for or against it this basic truth must be highlighted before engaging it over multiculturalism integration or citizenship whether we want it or not our western societies are culturally diverse and means must be sought to bring greater harmony to the multicultural citizenship discussed by the philosopher Charles Taylor or the sociologist Tarek Madoud now the Dutch plural society existed in an ideal form in up to about 1975 and then the pillars of society which guaranteed the rights of different religious groups began to crumble at the same time British society developed a form of multicultural pluralism and it was based on a principle set forth by a home secretary Trevor Phillips mentioned this largely to reject it but I want to retain this model and I'll quote it for you integration of different groups within society should be defined not as a flattening process of assimilation but of equal opportunity accompanied by cultural diversity in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance now in this integration model there is an implicit social contract a mutual agreement between different cultural groups to respect and uphold each other's rights and freedoms for cultural, religious and linguistic integrity in the our paper we make comments on traditional Islamic society the concept of pluralism is an Islamic concept comes from the Quran and Islamic societies practice pluralism that they guaranteed the rights of Jews and Christian minorities and on payment of a basic income tax they were guaranteed their basic rights and freedoms of religion and furthermore they didn't have to fight they didn't have to serve in the armed forces Christians in contrast have been profoundly intolerant of religious minorities Jews and now of Muslims the Islamic minorities in Britain have been described as the new Jews they are a scapegoated group who are now seen in highly irrational terms the demands for integration are in fact demands for assimilation and assimilation at an inferior level it means they must give up their alien practices it's a form of cultural oppression now I want to move to the issues of education citizenship education in British schools citizenship education is a national curriculum topic which was introduced in the British school curriculum in the year 2000 and Dr. Elraffi and I evaluated how this was working in a sample of schools in the west of England ten schools five of which were Muslim foundations so all the pupils there were Muslim and five schools in areas which had a high Muslim minority or majority and by means of a qualitative and quantitative study we evaluated the pupils aged 14 to 16 were absorbing the messages of the citizenship education curriculum and we found that the pupils from Muslim homes were more likely to absorb the citizenship education messages than were the mainstream students which was interesting and pleasing finding I'll just quote you from one of the interviews a Muslim student observed a good citizen is someone who helps their community people and the environment he is someone who socializes with others and befriends others a bad citizen would be someone who is reserved and doesn't take part in community activities and we give many more of the quotations and evaluations in the long paper so what we're proposing is that not only do Muslim pupils absorb the messages of citizenship from the curriculum to a greater degree than mainstream students they bring into the school Islamic values from their family and their mosque which make them particularly likely to follow a good citizen route and if we look at the the Hadith of the Blessed Prophet we can see where this these values come from so I'll quote you a well known Hadith charity is incumbent upon every human limb every day upon which the sun rises to bring about the reconciliation between two contestants is charity helping a person to mount his animal or to load his baggage onto it is charity a good word is charity to move obstacles in the street is charity smiling upon the face of your brother is charity so what I'm arguing is that Islam as a culture embodies these values of good citizenship which are inherent in being a Muslim thank you now I'll finish by another quote from Muslim westerners should think of themselves as gifts as well as questions to their fellow citizens they are the gifts because they carry with them other prospects other cultures and other memories that are a wealth which they nurture in their own society and they offer to the societies in which they find themselves they must be aware of and consider confidently what they are and in what and in what they bring to western societies so Terry Ramadan argues that is not simply a question of integration not simply a question of fitting in it's a question of being a Muslim we have our own culture which we're confident about which we offer to our community in very positive ways as good citizens thank you can I thank all the speakers on behalf of the Soviet University we're very short of time so I'm told that I can only take three questions so if you put your hand up if you've got a question and if you want to address it to one of the speakers please say who you would like to respond to the question if you could stand up and identify yourself thank you thank you my question is for Omar Khan and it was about your slide which talked about civic identification and in particular the way that different people and communities see the words British English and Scottish and to what extent do different groups see these as racial identities or as civic identities that's a very good question I think it's a tough question obviously in Scotland they've been trying to redefine Scottishness in civic terms and they've been relatively explicit the SMP and they do have as you probably know some Pakistani representatives both MSPs but I think this is the challenge I think for Englishness I don't think it's inherent in any national identity that it must be ethnicized but I do think that Britishness has been useful for so many decades partly because it already contains within it notions of positive and negative notions of history that go beyond an ethnicized form I remember giving a speech in Poland that basically saying you need to make Polishness more like Britishness and the response reasonably from the Polish audience was well it's a lot easier when Britishness already encompasses these multiple identities but I don't think that means we can't do the work on Englishness I just think it means we probably have to be a bit more self conscious about it and I think that's that does go against I think the way we normally think about these things that we'll just muddle along and things will get better over time and there is I agree with David to an extent that there's a natural process here but I think the natural process might be too slow to do something more proactive around recalibrating Englishness and as I say I don't think it's a necessity but I think if you look at the way ethnic minorities think about Englishness they black people Asian people Muslims are uncomfortable calling themselves English Muslims English black English people Thank you can we have the mic come down to here to the gentleman with the poppy do you mind standing up and identifying yourself and who you'd like to answer your question Thank you hello I'm Philip Wood and I'm at Argo Khan University Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilizations and this is a question I think probably for Osama and I was struck by Trevor Phillips comment that life chances and preferences need to be randomly related to race or religion that's his definition of integration and I was thinking if integration involves a case of mutual trust or a compromise cultural exchange I feel and this draws on what all the speakers have said this is probably best exemplified in marriage especially marriage across the boundaries of religion or across the boundaries of ethnicity so if we have an integrated Muslim community it's a community where lots of Muslims are married to non-Muslims and where their children choose their religion I've been reading the questions and answers of Ahmed Ibn Hamal sort of histories of the the Shuruduma the declarations on the behavior of non-Muslims in Abbasid Baghdad and I was struck by how much of it seems to be about the prevention of creolization the prevention of everyday cultural contacts and so my question to Osama is what jurisprudential change has there been has the engagement and involvement of Muslims in non-Muslim context changed the way they've been thinking about into marriage marriage with non-Muslims in terms of jurisprudence Thank you very much for that in my long paper from the Meta-Democracy I give other examples from that period where there was this strong almost anti-Jewish and Christian approach so for example basic rights were respected but it's explicit in the text that new churches and synagogues cannot be built existing ones can be kept and repaired and all that kind of thing these are serious issues which we need to address when it comes to marriage that's on the increase I've served as an Imam for 30 years and I've been conducting Nikas Islamic weddings for over 20 years over the last 4 or 5 years more than 90% of the Nikas I do now are interfaith marriages where Muslims are marrying people are not Muslim I actually do very few Muslim couples now and the experience changes things B'tul-al-Toma runs a new Muslim project has been doing so for 20 or 30 years and she once said that about 50% of conversions in her view conversions to Islam were for marriage and often the convert would become more royal than the queen more religious than the Muslim partner if you like but in other cases they would leave after many years and it would cause tension in the marriage because the conversion was really for the sake of marriage and often not out of genuine faith B'tul-al-Toma also was instrumental in getting an international fatwa issued by the European Council for Fatwa and Research and then endorsed by individual scholars like Amdallah bin Bayer and others again which was something she was seeing often middle-aged couples, British white English Christian background converted to Islam and traditional Muslims were telling her her marriage was now invalid, she had to leave her husband and often she had several kids and it would break the entire family and it was a Sheikh Abdullah al-Juday who was based in Lid who actually did the research and he says he thought there was a simple answer there's no way that this can be allowed and the marriage would indeed be invalid but he found to his surprise that we have in the tradition in the Hadith cases like this from the time of Sayyidina Omar Ali and others where they allowed that marriage to continue for the sake of the family unit etc and therefore the European Council issued this fatwa that in such a case the Muslim woman who traditionally would not be allowed to marry a non-Muslim man could indeed stay with her husband because the maqasid come into play the higher values are about family values love, compassion and all the rest of it so there's been an increasing movement there the obvious next question is can Muslim women marry non-Muslim men from the outset Sheikh Abdullah bin Bayer, Sheikh Hamza Yusuf European Council have asked them explicitly and they say no but if the woman converts to Islam within an existing marriage that's okay but she cannot marry of her own accord but I have spoken to other Jewish in Britain in the US, in France and across Europe who actually do allow that kind of marriage as well based on the changing circumstances so thank you for that, I agree to an important social issue I think that's a topic for another day I'll take my last question from the lady over there, thank you Hi I'm Rabi Amalik I'm a psychotherapist and I do a lot of work with the Muslim community I found the discussion a little frustrating in terms of the superficiality in thinking about integration and my comments were directed to Osama and David because actually I think Do you have a question? Yeah it is a question because I thought the examples you gave were quite telling or interesting because for me the question of integration is interesting at the point of conflict or tension and I think we've skirted over that a little bit, you both alluded to it partly when you mentioned the example of Easter Enders where the actors playing the Muslim figures were all non-Muslims I think that's very interesting and also with the example of the English cricket team because what you didn't mention was that one of the Muslim members of the English cricket team also was banned from wearing a band supporting Palestinians and that was a real example I think of tension around integration so I think we're skirting over some of those issues I think both of those underlying things about the place of Muslims in British society and I think one of the key things at the heart of this is that there's a real lack of recognition of Islam in a respectful way and that is partly the reaction that you're seeing in Muslims because there's a lack of respect of Islam is actually having something to offer in terms of values or the quote that Chris referred to from Tharik Ramadan as a gift partly too and there's a reaction to that and I think we've avoided some of those points of tension David, shall I come to you first? Sure Yes, I mean I think integration does take place partly through conflict and conflict is in many ways a good thing here I mean the fact that second and third generation minorities have a greater confidence and make greater claims on the society perhaps than the first generation who feel more differential and so you can see these patterns 20 or 30 years after initial waves of immigration of people from African-American backgrounds you get the Brixton riots then another 20, 30 years later you get riots in the northern Midtowns with people mainly Pakistani background and these you might say I hope we're not going to have another wave of riots but you might say these are actually signs of positive things in some ways signs of making a claim on society that the first generation felt inhibited about doing but I don't agree with what you say about Islam being disrespected in British society I don't think that is true at all I think there is great awareness towards the Muslim minority which is itself highly differentiated I mean there is no Muslim in the abstract everybody comes from particular places and it happens that most British Muslims unlike say France tend to come from relatively poor parts of poor countries the only thing that is is we make up 60-65% of the British Muslim population and have been the dominant sort of mark on British Muslim community it isn't surprising that you have these this data that points to relative poverty amongst Muslim groups I mean it's to do with history where you come from and so on and great strides are being made I think one interesting development is that Bangladeshis seem to be departing somewhat in terms of outcomes from Pakistanis they have somewhat improved outcomes both educationally and in terms of economic outcomes is it a pattern we've seen in the last five or ten years and I think that it's partly because of a London effect particularly in relation to education London schools have been doing a lot better than elsewhere in the country Bangladeshis are disproportionately found in London I think it may also be to do with the fact that Pakistanis are still more likely to have trans-continental marriages about half of Pakistani marriages involve bringing somebody in from Pakistan which tends to be on the natural integrative process so I think it is happening British society is much more open than it was there are obviously particular problems related to the fact that Muslims tend to feature in the news negatively because of terrorism because of grooming and so on but also as I said earlier Muslims do tend to live somewhat more separately in other minority groups and I think that explains to some extent the great awareness that the white British majority have towards Muslims and they do towards others Thank you Thank you for that question Rabia I do apologise for not getting more to grips on some of those issues I could certainly talk about them but given the first panel session of a sensitive conference I didn't want to upset the cart too much Please do We're here for Thank you On your specific question I think these things take time to change as David has said I remember growing up from a Pakistani family in London the Asian media for example Asian programmes on the BBC, the radio were dominated by people of Indian background Pakistan is hugely outnumbered Indians in this country but in London I think it's the other way around and that's one of the reasons for Indian people of Hindu background and Sikh background we're getting into the media for example and I think that's one of the legacies is EastEnders where you have the Muslim couple Muslim family largely played by people who are not Muslim although there are one or two Muslim actors or actresses there also but of course there are changes Citizen Khan, the new season has started played by a British Pakistani Adil Ray very funny and very popular except amongst it and British Pakistanis and he says it was the number one complaint about programme for a couple of years by British Pakistani Muslims giving Adil Ray a lot of flak for engaging in a bit of comedy which I think shows where we are and finally sometimes as David said we should avoid kind of victimhood looking for victimhood where there isn't Jack Straw whatever you think of him he said years ago Islam is a mainstream religion I think all British leaders accept Islam as a mainstream religion in this country and the Mowin Ali case with the cricket my understanding is he wasn't banned there was a controversy around his free Gaza wristbands during last summer with the Gaza war and the test matches but actually he wasn't banned and the England cricket team allowed him to wear that so is that the case that's my understanding I'm really sorry I'm going to have to cut the Q&A slightly short because I think