British Muslims were historically less demonized than Caribbean immigrants before the 1990s

Evidence

Although it is true that, as Rehana Ahmed has written, “the British Muslim has become a cipher for the excesses of multiculturalism,” it is important to understand that it was not always so. The end of the European empires saw the beginnings of a movement of increasing numbers of people from former colonies to the metropolitan centers of Europe in search of employment opportunities. In the post–Second World War era, South Asians, many of them Muslim, found jobs in Britain’s factories and textile mills, often in industrial cities such as Bradford, Birmingham, and Leicester. As Sukhdev Sandhu says, they “lived scattered and largely respectable lives … [and] were demonised far less than Caribbean immigrants, who were routinely depicted as drains on the taxpayer’s coffers and red-blooded menaces to society.” Even so, racism still blighted these South Asian migrants’ lives and opportunities, and they were routinely discriminated against, particularly in their places of work. … Ambalavaner Sivanandan has described how although a “racial division of labour” kept the new communities apart for a while, a commonality of discriminatory experiences ultimately created “a mosaic of unities and organisations [that] would resolve itself into a more holistic, albeit shifting, pattern of black unity and black struggle.” — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 150

Categorization

• XREF: Contextualizes the fear-reinforcing novels in your reading list by showing the pre-Islamophobia baseline in Britain — the shift Hamid and Naqvi narrate.
• DEFINE: Establishes that ‘British Muslim’ was not always the ‘cipher for multiculturalism’ it is now — the historical ground against which both contesting and reinforcing fictions operate.