LONDON,
December 16 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – Four out
of five British Muslims have experienced discrimination in the
wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, according
to the results of a survey by the Islamic Human Rights Commission
(IHRC).
Some
80 percent of the country's 1.8 million Muslims say they have been
discriminated against because of their faith compared to 45 percent in
2000 and 35 percent in 1999, the IHRC said Thursday, December 16.
This
means the number of British Muslims which faced discrimination has
nearly doubled in the past four years, Reuters said.
The
report, called “Social Discrimination: Across the Muslim Divide”,
lists the results of a survey of 1,200 British Muslims along with
individual interviews and case studies, according to Agence
France-Presse (AFP).
A
Wake-up Call
It
was “a wake-up call” for the government, which must take immediate
action, IHRC spokesman Arzu Merali told AFP.
“This
report reveals that prejudice against Muslims pervades all aspects of
society and has become normal and is even considered justifiable in
social circles,” he said.
“This
is a wake-up call for Britain. The British government cannot continue
to ignore the depth and nature of anti-Muslim prejudice in the UK.”
Muslim
men are now just as likely as women to experience prejudice -- a
significant change which the IHRC blamed on an increase in the number
of police and security checks carried out on Muslim men since the
September 11 attacks in 2001, Reuters said.
White
British Muslims report more discrimination than any other ethnic
group, suggesting Britons are intolerant of apostates who revert to
Islam.
“What's
happened, post 9/11, is that some very deeply rooted prejudices --
things that weren't articulated in the public realm -- have found
expression,” Merali, who is also one of the authors of the report,
told Reuters.
Eight
percent of the 1,200 Muslims questioned in the survey said they
experienced some sort of discrimination every day.
Another
8 percent said it was a weekly problem, 8 percent described it as
monthly and 55 percent said they had been discriminated against “on
some occasions”.
Only
15 percent said they had never experienced discrimination on the basis
of their faith.
Eighty
percent of Muslim women complained of prejudice compared to 78 percent
of men. In previous IHRC surveys the gender difference has been much
more pronounced.
“The
anti-terrorism laws are profiling and targeting Muslim men,” Merali
said.
“Our
case studies suggest nearly every Muslim man living in an urban area,
particularly in London, has either been stopped and searched or knows
someone who has.”
Equally
Visible
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“This is a wake-up call for Britain,” Merali said. (Courtesy of inminds Web site)
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In
the past, she said, women were more readily identifiable as Muslims
because of their dress and headscarves.
Now,
however, Muslim men are equally visible -- partly because the public
has got used to seeing turbaned, bearded men like Osama bin Laden on
their television sets.
Britain's
Muslims have long complained of an upsurge in abuse since the
September 11 attacks and the so-called war on terror, in which London
has played a leading role.
Britain’s
Open Society Institute said in a report Monday, November 22, that
various forms of Islamophobia and racial discrimination, on the up
swing since the 9/11 attacks, were
alienating the sizable Muslim community in Britain.
The
government has vowed to bring in legislation to outlaw incitement to
hatred on religious grounds. At present, such laws only exist to
protect people on the basis of their color, race, gender or ethnic
origin.
The
IHRC,
a research body and lobby group, urged the government to do more to
promote positive images of Islam.
The
Islamic Human Rights Commission, which was set up in 1997, is an
independent, not-for-profit, campaign, research and advocacy
organization based in London.
According
to its website, the organization fosters “links and work in
partnership with different organizations from Muslim and non-Muslim
backgrounds, to campaign for justice for all peoples regardless of
their racial, confessional or political background.”
Their
work includes submitting reports to governments and international
organizations, writing articles, monitoring the media, cataloguing war
crimes, producing research papers, taking on discrimination cases and
so on.
