Reality encourages plurality?

The title of this contribution is fraught with counter arguments and many contentions, which is why I humbly ask you to remember it is a question not a statement. As with most of my contributions my intention is to allow people to think, ponder, not necessarily logically, sometimes laterally. Humanity is anything but logical.

The Muslim community is divided along cultural and theological lines. This is important. In the UK you have different Muslim representational groups claiming to be representative of the Muslim populous in the UK of which some have been formed along cultural lines. This is not to take away the positive work that they may do, but simply to highlight that their very existence along cultural lines may either indicate a degree of prejudice against other groups or possibly be the result of unattended criticisms which cause people to initiate further groups using people who are familiar to them, not necessarily personally, but either by language or heritage.

Britain has nearly 2 million Muslims, 50% of whom are under 25, making up the youngest religious group and are increasingly educated as well as being very diverse in their approach to Islam. Divisions between Sunni and Shia is just the beginning, there exists far more divisions within Sunni Islam in the UK albeit not as theologically different as is between the Sunni and Shia. Different Muslims having different degrees of tolerances when it comes to interaction with the opposite gender, dress sense, socialising and even attitudes towards secularism.

It is because of this diversity that FOSIS, one of the largest young Muslim representative bodies in the UK, has evolved an extremely intelligent democratic process and is open to working and interacting across gender roles and are able to accommodate the different attitudes of Muslim students in various universities without compromising their faith. This is something that is definitely not applauded nor is appreciated enough, simply because you do not really realise how diverse Muslims are until you start interacting with them. Their longevity and their successes despite this, is probably the reason why members remain so attached to them.

The nature of society as it is, should it be intelligent and informed, will demand the right to elect their leaders, the leader in turn will ensure that their policies can be absorbed by the majority of the electorate, one way or another. Even in the case of the BNP they have needed to become more subtle in order to win over an electorate. Though the electorate may be slightly duped, working on subtlety does not help their current fundamental racist policies have longevity, not without changing themselves to become palatable to the electorate or getting on the back of a social threat that may be polarising the community. In this case it has been terrorism which the BNP have used to target Muslims with its policies; once upon a time it was the Jewish people.

Taking a subtle approach will in turn attract those who are more lenient in their views which will no doubt affect the internal dynamics within the party and thereby cause them to evolve slightly, for the better. Though in the case of the BNP “for the better” has been a slow process but a definite one when considering the appointment of a brown faced Sikh, though anti-Muslim, campaigner. This radical change, which has been to their membership criteria, was not a result of internal party dynamics but something that was enforced onto them externally which has ironically forced them to accept the reality of the plurality of society.

We cannot ignore social forces; to what extent do you think Muslims can be influenced by a plural society?