Angela Rayner, the Deputy Prime Minister, has set up a new working group tasked with providing the Government with an updated definition of ‘Islamophobia’. If previous efforts in this area are any indication, the new definition could have dire consequences for free speech in the UK.
In a move the Deputy Prime Minster called a “crucial step” towards tackling the “unacceptable rise” in anti-Muslim hate crime, the Government created the new working group to advise the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) on combatting the “discrimination and hatred” faced by British Muslims.
The group is comprised of what the Government calls “representatives from Muslim communities”, as well as independent experts and academics. More importantly, the chair of the group is former Tory Attorney General Dominic Grieve. As he is neither an academic nor quite a representative of Muslim communities, Grieve must be one of the “independent experts”. He has some claim to this title due to his previous experience of leading the Citizens’ UK Commission on Islam, Participation and Public Life, which sought to increase communications between Muslim and non-Muslim communities.
Perhaps more relevant to his new position, Grieve took part in a previous an all-party parliamentary group (APPG) on British Muslims, whose report on Islamophobia was published in 2019. This report was rejected by the government of the time for being too broad, and with good reason. For example, the authors state that “the pervasive and structured discrimination faced by British Muslims such as hate crimes, barriers to public services, and differential and educational outcomes facing Muslims” are “products of Islamophobia”. Moreover, the report explains that the term Islamophobia is “not just theoretically sound, but also practically convenient” because “criticisms directed against Muslims often entail (at least implicitly) criticisms against Islam and criticisms directed against Islam are often simply tools for criticising Muslims.”
With such an approach, it is hardly surprising that that the report ended up producing a definition of Islamophobia as “a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness”. Although not the principal author of the report, Dominic Grieve described its conclusion as “an important contribution to the debate as to how Islamophobia can best be addressed.” He also added that the report was “well researched and can give us all food both for thought and positive action”.
Not everyone was as pleased with the APPG report’s conclusion as Dominic Grieve. Humanists UK and Faith to Faithless expressed concern that APPG definition cannot adequately distinguish between prejudice and genuine criticisms of certain religious ideas and practices. Similarly, the Network for Sikh Organisations (NSO) worried that the definition would hamper the “ability to freely discuss religion” and “speak openly about historical truths”. The group added that adopting the definition into law would risk creating “a government hierarchy for different faiths”.
These criticisms did not prevent Labour from adopting the APPG definition as part of the Party’s Islamophobia Policy and its Code of Conduct in March 2019. Around the same time, the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, also announced that City Hall was adopting the same definition. The mayor even urged the government and other public bodies to “show their commitment to tackling hate crime and the spread of far-right messaging” by implementing the wording of the APPG’s definition.
Existing legislation already prohibits attacks and discrimination against individuals based on protected characteristics, such as race or religion. Yet the APPG definition of Islamophobia expands the concept to include “expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness”. The vagueness of these terms could easily lead to the prohibition of criticisms of Islamic practices and beliefs, even if these include no racial or ethnic animosity.
As the think tank Civitas wrote in an open letter to the then Home Secretary Sajid Javid, the “conflation of race and religion […] expands the definition [of Islamophobia] beyond anti-Muslim hatred to include ‘illegitimate’ criticism of the Islamic religion”.
If the working group recommends that the APPG definition be adopted into law or regulatory frameworks, it could have dire consequences for free speech and academic freedom. Perfectly legitimate criticisms of Islam as a set of ideas could become legally entangled with hate speech and other criminal acts.
Of course, the authors of the original APPG report insisted that the definition was not intended to infringe free speech, and the current working group will surely say the same when they release their findings. However, these assurances – no matter how genuinely expressed – ring hollow in the light of the content of the report, its conclusion, and previous experience with other definitions.
CAF has previously reported on the negative impact of the adoption by a majority of UK universities of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism. The definition improperly includes certain criticisms of Israel as instances of antisemitism and has led to dozens of academics being unjustly accused of bigotry.
The APPG definition has the potential to cause similar problems in higher education by failing to distinguish between hatred of Muslims as people and legitimate criticisms of Islam as a religion. After all, who is to decide what constitutes “expressions of Muslimness”? Presumably, it will be more self-appointed “representatives” of the community.
We call on the Government to reject any recommendations to adopt the APPG definition of Islamophobia and instead rely on the existing legal framework to protect people of all religions.