Introduction

This chapter considers whether the rise of faith identities poses a challenge to multiculturalism as a settlement within the public realm. It also looks at the relationship between faith and the policy agenda for ‘community cohesion’, which has emerged from a critical engagement with multiculturalism. The chapter hosts a ‘policy conversation’ between three people who are currently active in civil society and governance, and have a long and varied experience in working on faith and diversity. The chapter captures the views of those who are actually shaping policy and practice on faith in the public realm. It is interactive and deliberative and finds new reflections and creative syntheses.

The contributors

Maqsood Ahmed OBE is Senior Adviser on Muslim Communities in the Preventing Extremism Unit at the Department of Communities and Local Government (DCLG). He is engaged in Muslim–Jewish interfaith dialogue and in capacity-building for faith groups in the public realm. Ted Cantle CBE is Professor at the Institute of Community Cohesion, and Associate Director of the local government Improvement and Development Agency. He was appointed in August 2001 by the Home Secretary to lead the review of the causes of the urban disturbances that year in Northern England. The ‘Cantle Report’ was responsible for the initial development of the ‘community cohesion’ policy agenda (Cantle, 2001). Dilwar Hussain is Head of Policy Research at the Islamic Foundation, Leicestershire. He was a Commissioner at the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) (2006-07) and was active in the Preventing Extremism Together working groups set up by the Home Office after the London bombings of 7 July 2005. He also served on the Archbishop of Canterbury's Commission on Urban Life and Faith (2005-06) (CULF, 2006).

The issues

Tariq Modood (2007, p 2) defines multiculturalism as ‘the recognition of group difference within the public sphere of laws, policies, democratic discourses and the terms of citizenship and national identity’. It is not about difference per se, but refers specifically to culturally derived, or culturally embedded, differences (Parekh, 2006, p 3). Although these differences are not necessarily ethnic or ‘racial’ in character, multiculturalism in Britain has become associated with issues of racial equality. Indeed, as Modood (2007, p 5) puts it, multiculturalism has come to represent ‘the political accommodation of minorities formed by immigration’.