Britain’s debate about Muslim integration often suffers from a basic confusion. We talk as though integration and becoming a liberal are the same thing, when they are not.
A person can be fully integrated into British society — speak fluent English, work, pay taxes and participate in civic life — while still holding conservative religious views that many liberals dislike. Yet those views themselves are frequently treated as evidence of failed integration.
That is a mistake.
Too often, the discussion drifts away from practical questions like language, employment and education and towards a broader expectation that minority communities should gradually adopt mainstream liberal attitudes on everything from sexuality to gender roles. Integration begins to mean not participation in society but ideological convergence with it.
But a liberal society is not supposed to work like that. Liberalism is meant to create space for people to live differently from one another, provided they obey the law and respect the rights of others. If the state starts treating socially conservative beliefs as inherently suspect, it risks turning integration into assimilation by another name.
At the centre of liberalism is freedom of association. People are supposed to be free to organise their lives around shared moral, religious and cultural beliefs, even when those beliefs are unfashionable or unpopular. That principle cannot only apply to lifestyles the professional classes happen to approve of.
Of course, there are lots of difficult questions here. Religious communities, like all communities, can exert social pressure. Families pressure people. Friendship groups pressure people. Workplaces pressure people. Human beings are social creatures, and no society is completely free from informal coercion. Some rare and niche practices are also not only controversial, but inadmissible. But the answer cannot be to give the state unlimited authority to police private belief and community life. A genuinely liberal system should focus on protecting individual rights and ensuring people have meaningful freedom to leave communities if they choose to.
One country that approaches this issue rather differently is South Africa. Despite its many political problems, South Africa has historically taken a far more hands-off approach to religious conservatism. Conservative Muslim organisations are generally free to preach and practise their beliefs, often in ways many Western liberals would strongly disagree with, provided they remain within the law. Some South African madrassas — broadly speaking, Muslim educational institutions — operate, teach and give verdicts which are very conservative by society’s standards. One of them, Darul Uloom Zakariyya, even calls photography sinful and advocates for religious gender separation. At the same time, they face no calls from the broader population for them to be shut down, let alone for their teachers to be deported.
The South African approach is simpler: obey the law, and the state largely leaves you alone.
That does not mean South Africa is some kind of utopia. The country plainly faces a plethora of other problems, but religious discord is not one of them. A South African take on liberal seems to accept that a society can contain deep moral disagreement without treating every disagreement as a political threat.
By contrast, British debates increasingly blur the line between protecting liberal democracy and enforcing liberal culture. Concerns about English-language ability, educational attainment or economic participation are legitimate and important. But these issues are often mixed together with broader anxieties about moral values, creating the impression that Muslims are being criticised not simply for failing to integrate, but for failing to become culturally liberal enough.
Many Muslims in Britain already feel they are viewed with suspicion regardless of how integrated they are in practical terms. A family may work, vote, speak English, contribute economically and obey the law, yet still find themselves regarded as alien because they hold conservative religious views.
There is also an inconsistency in how Britain talks about integration more broadly. Many communities in Britain retain strong internal identities, languages and social networks. Eastern Europeans, Hindus, Orthodox Jews and others often maintain distinct cultural lives without attracting much national anxiety. Muslim communities, by contrast, are frequently discussed as though visible religious conservatism is itself evidence of a failure of loyalty or belonging.
None of this means harmful practices should be tolerated. Where laws are broken or individual rights are violated, the state must intervene. But there is an important difference between preventing harm and trying to engineer a culturally uniform society.
A more confident liberalism would understand that pluralism means tolerating ways of life we may not personally agree with. In fact, that is the entire point of liberalism. A society does not prove its commitment to freedom by tolerating only lifestyles that mirror elite opinion.
Britain should aim for integration. People should be encouraged to learn English, participate economically and engage in civic life. But expecting every community to eventually arrive at the same social attitudes is unrealistic and, at least from an honest liberal viewpoint, undesirable.
Original photo of a Muslim woman photographed from a London bus by Lawrence Krowdeed.