Early British antiracism already fused cultural and identity-politics demands.

Evidence

Malik’s book offers one of the sharpest analyses of the rise of a kind of separatism spawned by the fetishization of cultural and religious identity by governments as a way to address social diversity. His account of special pleading and the rise of an “offense culture,” where cultural sensitivities are supposedly sacrosanct and to be protected from criticism or satire, is largely persuasive. However, for all its stridency and commitment, his book From Fatwa to Jihad has three main problems. First, the antiracism that Malik lauds and laments was predicated strongly on a form of identity politics (as the wholesale translation of American strategies, reflected in the very existence of a British “Black Panther” group in the 1970s, demonstrates). Other accounts with less-selective recall make this clear, as when Sivanandan acknowledges of early immigrant industrial disputes that “quite a few of these strikes also involved ‘cultural’ questions, such as the right to take time off for religious festivals, the right to break off for daily prayer (among Moslems [sic]), the right of Sikh busmen to wear turbans instead of official headgear.” Malik’s objection seems more to do with the religious turn in identity politics than with defining identity markers per se. Second, for all the assertion, there is no proven link between multiculturalism and radical violence of either the intercommunity or terrorist varieties. The idea that something as vague as multiculturalism led people to espouse separation and violence seems a false cause: no evidence is given for why this should be the outcome. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 158

Categorization

• XREF: Grounds Malik’s anti-Islamist polemic in actual British labor history; connects to reading Sharp’s/the UK race-relations debates behind Naqvi and Hamid’s reception. — connects to: Early British struggles won exceptional rights that later struggles re-purposed toward class and citizenship — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 363