I have just finished reading with fascination Ed Husain’s autobiography The Islamist which describes his life as a member of Hizb ut Tahrir in Britain. It is fascinating on many levels, not least of which is that he was born, bred and radicalised in the Tower Hamlets area of London in the1980s and 1990s, the place in London where I live and where, in the late 1990s I organised an international festival of Bangladeshi culture. At the time, and its difficult now to imagine this, this festival of Muslim culture carried no overt political “charge” whatsoever either for us as event organisers or for our funders. We were presenting international art in a community context. Times have of course changed. Now the same event would inevitably be seen as a social-political exercise and probably eligible for funding via the UK’s Prevention of Violent Extremism Fund (sic!), a local authority managed grant programme that aims to do exactly what its title indicates.

As part of the festival we organised several music events for young DJs and MCs at a local community centre: a centre which Husain reveals was a hot-bed of radical Islamist youth activities. None of this was apparent to us. We set up a Video Box in which filmmaker Rahul Amin taped interviews with the young people: nearly all of them descried themselves as British Muslims, not British Asians – this was the first time I had heard “Muslim” used as a cultural identity in Britain. (The Bangladesh Festival’s website is still alive at http://www.artsworldwide.org.uk/index2.html although Arts Worldwide is no more – although ironically I have often thought that someone ought to reinvent it for the 21st Century!)

Husain’s book is also fascinating for me because he describes in passing the clashes between the homophobic Islamists and the British gay rights groups OutRage! and Stonewall, organisations which I was involved in during the early 1990s. I was “on the other side” of some of these campaigns. He describes sexuality (in all its varieties) as problematic for Islamists and non-Islamists alike. He points out the irony that when he was a teenage radical, girls who wore hijab as a sign of modesty actually became more desirable to other boy Islamists because they were “good Muslims”. Later in the book, while working for the British Council in Saudi Arabia, he describes how shocked he is by the undercurrent of sexual tension which strict Wahabbi society generates, and even implies that the angry adolescent young men of Tower Hamlets and Jeddah are driven to extremist attitudes by frustrated physical desire. “Among Arab men, Islam is always judged by the conduct of women” he says (p259) – and one would have to add that this is also true of the West as a whole which focuses so much on the wearing of hijab as a sign of “otherness”.

Husain has been criticised for the book, from Muslim and non-Muslim commentators alike. In particular his experience of British Islamism is felt to be at least ten years out of date. After the terror attacks of 9/11 Husain became disillusioned with political Islam, left the organisations he had been active in, and went in search of a spiritual enlightenment in the Arab world. He and his wife moved to Syria and Saudi Arabia to learn Arabic while working with for the British Council. In Syria, a country regarded by “the West” as being a promoter of Islamic terrorism, Husain found a form of Islam closer to his own outlook, while in Saudi, a close ally of America and the West, he found the hard line Wahhabist doctrine distasteful. The Saudi state has demolished various historical monuments and strictly polices such sites as the Tomb of the Prophet to prevent idolatry. Even “Mother’s Day” is banned in Saudi, he tells us, while in Syria it is “observed by most people”. He finds the contrasts between the two Muslim cultures so harsh that he rejects the Islamist ideal of a single Islamic State as impossible to achieve and directs Muslims to focus their energy on reforming the existing Muslim states. He also calls for a spiritual rebirth as a way of countering Islamism: for him the political form of Islam which he knew has no spiritual depth and that the people involved in it do not even know how to pray properly. While on holiday in Turkey he discovers the writings and philosophy of Jalal Al-Din Rumi and the Sufis and this opens his mind to an understanding of the spiritual and personal relationship between Muslims and their God, a profound and for him humanising experience which Islamists lack.

Through the last few pages of the book he turns his attention to the “West” and warns the British government that they must ban Hizb ut Tahrir and others of their ilk. He is even wary of (my local Member of Parliament) George Galloway’s anti-Iraqi war Respect Party, and the relatively mild Muslim Council of Britain is branded by him as crypto-Islamists. He lambastes liberals who cannot bring themselves to proscribe Islamist organisations. In his youth he played on the same frailty of the left while a student pressing for and winning concessions to “Muslim rights” from the concerned College authorities that made the Hizb ut Tahrir’s recruitment campaign easier to achieve. Now he urges them to resist the Islamists, for the government to act against them, etc – it is all a bit – well – McCarthyite. (Pardon me for being a Western liberal.)

But his central point, that one must separate Islamism (political Islam) from the views of the majority of Muslim people, is relevant, especially in Britain and after the attacks of 7 and 21 July 2005 in London and the recent attack on Glasgow Airport. Husain directs some of the residual anger of his adolescence at the media and the western governments who do not or cannot make this separation. Reading this book made me reflect on what I thought I was doing in the late 1990s organising a festival of Muslim culture. I wasn’t involved in the “reduction of extremism” at all – five years before I was engaged in a head-on campaign against homophobia in Islam. Why didn’t I connect the two? And it made me reflect on what our (meaning UK) arts community are doing now.

Husain’s comments seem to go to the heart of interculturalism: I know I often moan in this blog about the British lack of comprehension on this point, but it is worth assessing the UK’s cultural sector’s response to the points Husain raises. Places like China and Brazil are top of the international agenda for ACE – and top of the agenda for the UK government too. A while ago, Christopher Fraying, Chair of the Arts Council, floated the strange “amphibian” idea of an “artist-led cultural foreign policy” and then seemed to suggest that it should be directed at China and Brazil. But what about Pakistan? Or Bangladesh? Or any of the other former British colonial countries? The local is global in this respect: the Reduction of Violent Extremism Fund is a locally managed budget tackling a global issue. What is the response of the Arts Council? What about its own international strategy? More simply – has it increased its funding to arts organisations working with Muslim communities in Britain since 7 July 2005?

Significantly the Foreign Office and the British Council have just re-focused their work to increase activity between Britain and the Middle East. Meanwhile our shiny new Prime Minister talks about the need to win hearts and minds at home and is starting a debate on what is “Britishness”. How are the arts community responding to this?

Arts Worldwide, which was shut down in late 2000 partly because its artistic director, Anne Hunt, was tired by the lack of interest from UK funders in its work (ironically), had a very simple aim – to reconnect UK migrant communities to the best contemporary art that their origin culture had to offer and to extend the awareness of the wider population about the cultures of UK resident communities. An organisation which in a small way managed to help transform how international arts were presented in late 20th Century UK sounds like the blueprint for a 21st Century organisation. The question is whether ACE and others can find the necessary level of “interest” to play a role in developing organisations in the Muslim community so that they are equipped to address these issues on a global and intercultural level. And whether ACE can shake off its current love affair with China and the Olympics (in Beijing and London) and divert some resources closer to home. Where are the “British Muslims” who we recorded in 1999 now? Presumably they are now adults: what would they say now if we re-interviewed them? I wonder if anybody is planning to.

I’ll leave off with an example: the theatre company Khayaal. Under funded and struggling to make productions, Khayaal’s work is a case study to answer Husain’s fears that a generation of young Muslims are growing up without an essential connection to the mystic and personal in their religion. Khayaal’s show The Truth About Your Father, which I saw in Tower Hamlets a few months ago is the story of a mother explaining to her (unseen) son why his father became a suicide bomber. The words “suicide bomber” are not used by her. In stead the mother helps the son to understand by telling him traditional stories from Rumi and others. The script is allusive and being a non-Muslim much of it passed me by. But it was clear that the majority Muslim audience I saw it with were impressed and moved, and intrigued that the traditional stories could still have a modern resonance.

Khayaal is apparently the only “professional Muslim theatre company” in Britain (a country of 60 million people and about 1 million Muslims) specifically working with traditional Muslim literature in this way. Now there’s a thought. www.khayaal.co.uk