Nazir Ali no-go backlash

Predictably, though without any visible authority, some Muslim leaders are calling  for Bishop Nazir Ali to resign after his remarks about "no go areas" colonized by Islam in Britain.  Equally predictably, the Daily Mail has found the Chairman of the Muslim Forum to write in support.  Meanwhile Archbishop Cranmer's blog reports that a British blogger called "Lionheart" (modelling himself on the Crusader king, no doubt) is theatened with arrest for objecting to British Islam,  and doughtily says
   "Even if Lionheart is a deluded idiot, political extremist or a raving lunatic, it is concerning that he should be threatened with arrest for his writings. In an important judgement on a case dealing with religious freedom of speech in the High Court on 23rd July 1999, Lord Justice Sedley quoted Socrates and two famous Quakers when he declared: "The irritating, the contentious, the eccentric, the heretical, the unwelcome and provocative have a right to be heard."
    The cross Blogistan sticks in its tuppenceworth too -  but does make the generally lacking point that the Bish has not actually named any no-go areas, and that nobody so far has found one.  Startling, though, is the claim that Nazir-Ali is "biting the hand that feeds him...if  it were not for multiculturalism, the idea of an Asian bishop of a southern English bishopric, let alone a Black archbishop of York - the second highest-ranking clergyman in the whole church - would be unthinkable"   What?  Race, surely, is not equivalent to culture? 

Comments

[Dr. Irene Lancaster FRSA]

Dear Libby

There are plenty of no-go areas in Britain, including in the very areas of Greater Manchester which the Bishop and the MP for Salford must know extremely well.

It's all documented here:

http://irenelancaster.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/01/the-dignified-b.html

Then there was also the case of John Reid, when Home Secretary, being told by a Muslim that he should not enter a particular area of East London.

Even the Today programme and John Humphrey got cross about that one. Didn't John Humphrey suggest that the guy leave for Saudi Arabia or some such place if he didn't like it in England?

[Babbling Brook]

In the Readers' Comments pertaining to the Sunday Telegraph article reporting Bishop Nazir-Ali's warnings, the following towns, cities and boroughs were listed by readers as being, in part, 'no-go' or Moslem enclaves, and many experiences therein related by non-moslems:

Rusholme, Aylesbury,Birmingham, Manchester, Stepney, Bradford, Reading, Slough, Glasgow, Dewsbury, Oldham, Coventry, Blackburn, Burnley, Accrington, Walthamstow, Tower Hamlets and Keighley. Significantly, many commenters remarked that this has been the case for years, but is never mentioned in the press.

[Yusuf Smith (Blogistan)]

Dr Irene Lancaster is misquoting or misconstruing what Omar Brooks said to John Reid. He was not attempting to establish a "no-go" area at all, and knew full well that the area was mixed. His comment was more to the effect of "how dare you show your face around here given what your men have done?".

As for my comment about John Sentamu, I do think that people of different races have benefited from multiculturalism, since it implies a tolerance and appreciation of different peoples and their cultures. Race is not identical to culture, but most Black people trace their ancestry very recently back to the Carribean or Africa and do have a distinct culture (not only their music, but those who are religious are often not Anglican but are more likely to be Nonconformist), even if it has rubbed off on local white culture as well (no, this is not a bad thing). John Sentamu is from Africa himself, and the idea of a 'provincial', non-white clergyman becoming Archbishop of York in the pre-multicultural era of the British Empire would have been unthinkable. Perhaps I should have said African rather than Black; a Black British clergyman of Carribean origin might well have stood more chance than an African or Pakistani clergyman in the past.

[rgrey]

This latest bout of religious infighting is depressingly familiar.

Not content with falling out among themselves over the ordination of gays and women, or over the direction of their theological colleges (eg Wycliffe), Anglicans are now falling out with Muslims over multiculturalism and segregation, having fallen out with the Jews last year over calls for boycotts of companies like Caterpillar.

The Bishop of Rochester has been afforded the use of a national newspaper to call for a Christian resurgence to counter Islamic influence, a simple case of shouting “my god's better than your god” in the manner of a primary school playground dispute, and in so doing has upset many of his fellow Christians as well as Muslims.

If this is the way an established church behaves, with all the privileges that position conveys, then it's no wonder people call for disestablishment and the secularisation of public institutions like the House of Lords, our schools - where single-faith establishments have been acknowledged by the Government as huge contributors to our segregated communities - and the workplace, which surely has better things to do to facilitate the country’s economic growth than deal with religious zealots determined to wear crosses, silver rings, bangles or whatever at work.

[Roderick McGahon]

Hi,

"Lord Justice Sedley quoted Socrates and two famous Quakers when he declared: "The irritating, the contentious, the eccentric, the heretical, the unwelcome and provocative have a right to be heard."

I wonder did he by any chance have
in mind, the great and prophetic Enoch Powell and the hordes of Indians, Pakistanis and Jamaicans,
and thousands of Triad members, across Britain and Ireland,
in the Britain of his time, from whom many Go areas have sprung that have never said No!!!!

I wonder what will happen if they all become Muslim?

[Henry V111]

What an imbalanced, one-sided piece of rubbish. There are loads of no-go areas for muslims. There are parts of the North East, South East, North Wales, and the South Coast where a muslim or a person of colour(weird when white is also a colour), gets frowned upon and some times attacked.

[RW]

Babbling Brook, although she clearly lives outide the UK herself, feels free to say who should live here or not and how they should live. To make things utterly clear, Rusholme, which she calls a 'no go area', is inside Manchester, which she also calls a 'no go area'. So, logically speaking there is no need to mention Rusholme as it is a subset of Manchester, which presumably the Brook does not realize. The rest of her 'knowledge' is of a similar standard. As a Mancunian, i was born a blond-haired blue-eyed Catholic, and attended my (rather posh and high-achieving ) Catholic school (mainly full of Catholics of Irish, Polish, Ukrainian and Italian descent) in Rusholme (where a great number of people of South Asian descent, both Muslims and Hindus live). We very much enjoyed our years there and in the surrounding area and were not in the least frightened. I have to say that all the rest of the Babbler's pronouncement are, well, a load of babbling bunkum. Given that Manchester is a city with a very large and varied population of a number of different ethnic groups, I find it hard to see how she can argue it could ever be a 'no go area' because of a tiny number of Muslims living there. In reality, as anyone from Manchester knows, the ethnic minorities, or to be really frank, the ethnic minorities with brown and black skins, in the city have endured a great deal of violence from the 'soi-disant' natives of the UK (who are often also just white-skinned ethnic minorities in fact). Once again here, the realities are being turned on their head.