Introduction

This chapter provides an introduction to the development of the Community Cohesion policy in Britain. Since this policy is so intricately implicated with other political agendas the story developed below adopts an eclectically broad approach so that Community Cohesion can be understood within its wider context. As will become apparent, Community Cohesion as a policy is quite specifically linked with the experience of Muslim communities in Britain and to their relation with wider society. The impetus for the development of Community Cohesion came from a number of civil disturbances in northern English towns in 2001. These disturbances were linked to Muslim populations in these towns and the political response to the events centred very much on prevailing majority views about the fit of these communities with mainstream society in Britain. Therefore, the ways in which the Muslim communities came to be defined, and the ways in which the Community Cohesion agenda developed, has to be understood within the wider context of the history of British ethnic relations. This chapter therefore begins by placing the development of Community Cohesion within the context of British ethnic relations. This will of necessity be a brief and truncated account that will serve to make visible some of the threads that will be apparent in the unfolding story of the relationship between Community Cohesion and the Prevent agendas.

Among the issues discussed is the early history of ‘race riots’ and the response to them, as the response to the 1981 riots and the subsequent Scarman Report have a significant role in framing the response to the more recent events. Similarly the Rushdie Affair is discussed as a critical defining moment in the development of non-Muslim/Muslim relations in Britain. This revealed a great deal about the European/liberal response to an assertion of Muslim, faith-based, concerns. These events did a great deal to stimulate the transitions in self-identity among British Muslim communities while also feeding into the development of Islamophobia, a development discussed more fully in Chapter Four. The growth of a distinctive Islamic sensibility within the South Asian communities in Britain, and the majority population's response to that, has been central to the identity politics that permeate through the discourse of Community Cohesion.