BBC NEWS | UK | Younger Muslims 'more political' Young Muslims are much more likely than their parents to be attracted to political forms of Islam, a think tank survey has suggested.

Support for Sharia law, Islamic schools and wearing the veil is much stronger among younger Muslims, a poll for the centre-right Policy Exchange found.

This, of course, is absolutely no surprise to anyone who knows anything about social cognition and group identity. In fact, this is the predicted outcome of a situation where a covert stigma is attached to a whole group. Tariq Ali wrote about this four years ago. It is a much more subtle and complex version of Black Americans using the word ‘nigger’ or feminists using the word ‘cunt’. What is much more interesting (if not at all surprising) is how oblivious the mainstream society is of the pressures put on these groups (non-muslims about muslims, whites about blacks, men about women) and the limited avenues for expression of feelings about these pressures.

"The emergence of a strong Muslim identity in Britain is, in part, a result of multicultural policies implemented since the 1980s, which have emphasised difference at the expense of shared national identity."Conservative leader David Cameron said the poll was extremely worrying.

“It shows the extent to which multiculturalism has failed, because what the poll showed is that these young people feel more separated from Britain than their parents did,” he told BBC News.

This is, interestingly, both wrong and right. The multicultural policies as implemented have indeed failed but not because they are wrong in substance but because they face intractable frames of expectation about normality. Words about valuing difference were not backed up by reality in which difference leads to equality. The result for the young Muslims is cognitive dissonance (whatever that is). On one hand, they are told to value their culture and on the other all signals they receive from outside their community undermine that value. (The same thing has happened with class warfare. Whereas up to about the 1950s working class people would fight for fair living conditions and opportunities of advancements, the 1960s extended the romanticism of working class and brought in the expectation of equality of moral worth, which was not encoded into the symbolic structures of personal valuation but only in the surface of the discourse.) In much too simple, but useful terms, both of these policies led to a creation of a new middle class which was never allowed to join fully with the existing middle class but remained symbolically impoverished (or ostracized). And, as we know, this kind of middle class is the most likely to start revolutions or blow themselves up in planes and buildings.

The problem with Cameron’s statements (particularly as expressed in full in the BBC Radio 4 interview) is that they are relying on the assumption that what is wrong is the ideology behind multiculturalism while the issue is the lack of any real implementation of multiculturalism. (It is possible that some of its inherent paradoxes might make that impossible but that is a different debate.) The social arrangements in Britain (and the Western world in general) are not those of multicultural cooperation but multicultural cohabitation and toleration.

This illustrates the problem rather nicely. The assumption is that multiculturalism means that there will be lots of people like us (white middle classes) who will just eat some slightly different food and put on different garb on special occasion to make our ‘living space’ more ‘colorful and interesting’, as long as we are in no way inconvenienced. Whereas, it is the Islamists who have it right. All matters of group identity are political and Muslim youths have no other outlet for their political expression but radicalism. Every time “Muslim leaders” condemn violence in general before they say anything else, they are denying their young generation’s hope to identity. They would be much more effective if they were brining radical politics to the negotiating table and letting the white middle classes know that they must be willing to be much more challenged by the differences than being denied a pot roast on a Sunday. There’s a good chance that more radical talk would lead to less radical action.