Simon Fanshawe Blog

The Guardian,
Wednesday March 5 2008

For very good reason, there is much soul searching and hand-wringing about local councils and councillors. The recent Councillors Commission was debated at a Local Government Association conference last week. And on Friday, London councils launched what was inevitably described as an “X Factor search” to find the councillors of the future in the capital.

Behind all this lies the uncomfortable truth that fewer and fewer people want to become councillors or vote in council elections. Work done recently by Andrew Collinge, at Ipsos Mori, indicated that only 35% of people trust local councillors to tell the truth and only 32% think that they “make a real effort to listen to the views of local people”, whereas 85% of councillors think they do.

This is a conversation I have had in two halves with a young Muslim woman. The first half was at a conference in front of an audience of youth workers. The second was on the phone last week. Like most of us I know few practising Muslims. Which is hardly surprising. After all they constitute only 3% of the population. She has profoundly opened my mind about her faith.
SF If we were on the radio and I said to the audience that you were wearing the hijab; they wouldn’t see in their minds who I see in front of me now. (This is because she is wearing a bright pink hijab, a white jacket, pink flowing skirt and jewelled slippers)
IJ I know. My friends and I call out selves the Hijabi-Barbies
SF That’s the first Muslim joke I have ever heard.
IJ Yes, it’s been a bit dull since the 16th century
SF And that’s the second
What does the hijab mean to you?
IJ I can’t remember a moment when I decided to wear it. I often say it grew over my head. As I got older, and I know this sounds stupid, I realised how much we are judged by how we look. I hear boys saying, “she’s a real minger” about some girl when I know she’s really sweet and “she’s fit” about some girl who is just horrible. If you believe in a merciful God then everybody is beautiful. To call someone ugly is condemning a creation of God. I know I am gorgeous, that I have a beautiful body. It’s the bit of me that is clever and caring that you can’t see. The hijab in a way makes you naked.
SF Do you have lots of different coloured hijabs?
IJ I think I have more hijabs than knickers. Sometimes I think that’s going against what I am saying. But I don’t claim to be a perfect Muslim. I rationalise that I am living in a western country, so do in Rome and all that. It’s my way of bridging the gap. If I am sitting on a train, I am far less threatening to someone sitting next to me than someone covered from head to toe.
SF You’re melding your traditions with Britain?
IJ This kind of melding has been going on for centuries with Muslims.
SF What is your relationship with the Muslims we so often see in the news, ‘Beeston’, if you like?
IJ I feel towards them the same as I feel towards the BNP. I recognise that we share some things. With them I recognise that we have our faith in common. With the BNP we live in the same country and watch the same TV programmes. But both groups are making my life really different.
SF How?
IJ One group is making me into something I am not. When the radicals are aggressive about this country and the way of life I feel very difficult. I have made this my country and I would die for it. Their actions are limiting me.
SF I sense that you might find it difficult to criticise other Muslims in public?
IJ Lots of Muslims want to change Muslim behaviour. But part of me still feels extremely defensive. When these debates happen in public I feel pulled in two directions. There is a certain amount of friction in public which is damaging to Muslims when we are so misrepresented in the media. But I know that when I say this to you, you’re going to write it down. It is only 2% of my concerns but it always gets far more attention than it deserves. I wish more people would just say that there are millions of different Muslims. Because all of a sudden we became the same thing – associated with sects in Pakistan. I don’t know what a Madrassa is!
SF Do you find it difficult to criticise your leaders in public?
IJ What they have done is important. Getting Muslim organisations into the mainstream is a way of bridging the gap. At the same time do they represent me? They sure as hell don’t sound like they do.
SF Now you’ve graduated from SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies) what do you want to do?
IJ I want to work for an NGO. I am starting looking for jobs now. But I went to a recruitment agency and they said that I should make some of the stuff on my CV, voluntary work etc, look less Muslim. So I’ve changed things like the International Forum for Islamic Dialogue to IFID. I don’t want to be unemployed for ever!
SF When I write this up how shall I refer to you?
IJ I think as Ms I Jawad. I have a funny thing about seeing my name written down. I’ll finally be Isra Jawad when I write “The Hijabi Barbies, the Muslim update of the Bridget Jones diaries”.

I went to a vegetarian restaurant the other day. (Bear with me on this.) The food was terrific. But more than that, Halli Restaurant somehow summed up the idea of a plural city, a symbol of a very modern take on diversity.

So the Bishop gets of for actually hurting somebody’s life and the three foul mouthed, aggressive Muslims go to gaol despite the fact that they just shouted nasty things and offended everyone. Shouldn’t the bishop go to prison and the Muslims just be told off for abusing other people’s sensibilities?

I have been talking to young people. And it scared me. They were basically lovely. Four lads from North London. They are all 14 and have the innocent posturing of the almost young man plus of course the bum fluff and the creaky voice. And they fight after school. Not each other. But big set piece rucks involving fifty or so boys. They come from one estate and their opponents from another. I am not going to say where they’re from. It doesn’t actually matter, except that it may put them in, if not danger, certainly potentially some difficulty. They were Asian. That again doesn’t matter. I only say it to dispel the wrong conclusion that this violence is somehow ethnically inspired or generated. The author of the most recent report on gangs in London, Professor John Pitts, who was also there at this conference, makes it very clear that “impetus towards gang membership is determined by the social predicament of gang members rather than their race or ethnicity”. And my four youngsters are not gang members. Not yet. Might they be? I hope not. They came to me via the Leap Project’s Quarrel Shop, where young people learn “mediation, communication and conflict resolution skills”. So there’s hope.

Pat Stewart is remarkable. She takes for granted that someone has to do what she does and it might as well be her. She set up a project in Gorton in Manchester called On The Streets (OTS). I made a Radio Four programme about it last autumn. It’s just a terrific project. Yet today it has no regular funding. It’s ears are full of the praise of every agency you can lay your hands on. The Council press office boats, “Manchester City Council is impressed by the work undertaken by On The Streets” and then goes on proudly to trumpet that they have approved funding for “almost £27,000”. Oh yippee. At the last count there were 369 young people who attended OTS projects, 3000 times. That’s £73 a young person.

Everyone is talking about manners in Britain. Naturally there should be a queue. And I want to talk about manners. But after you, of course. Nice, warm cuddly things they are. Everyone wants them. There’s even a National Day of Courtesy on…… (??). But everyone is too scared to enforce them. And they need enforcing; they don’t just come about through natural grace. They work because there is a social sanction, even if it’s not spoken. Despite the evident benefit to our general sense of well being, and the self-interest in simply getting what you want a great deal more easily if you are polite, we do not seem to behave in a graceful and generous way to each other freely. But we have a crisis of authority. We have outsourced it to asbos, the police, teachers, the council. Anybody but us. We have become scared of enforcing rules. The left has gone all wibbly woo about cultural relativism and how you can’t impose out values on others? And the right is still trying to enforce rules that no one agrees with any more.

When I ring Shaun he is checking the fire alarms at the Tyneside Cyrenians building. He’s their maintenance man. Not so long ago, if I’d rung him he’d probably have been drunk. He drank to pass the time. He was never an alcoholic, just a chaotic drinker. “I could take it or leave it. But most of the time I’d take it”, he says ruefully now. His is a classic story. For no particular reason he “fell by the wayside’ after school and for seven years drank and got into trouble. His parents threw him out. He slept rough, lived in hostels and generally failed to get it together. Eventually he went back to live with his dad and one night, after drinking, crashed his dad’s car. His dad threw him out again. It was the wake-up all. He’s not sure why, but since then, with the exception of the odd pint on a Friday night, he’s been teetotal. Now with a partner, Lisa and two kids, Ben, 2, and little Shaun, 6 months, he says he hasn’t got time to drink. It’ll be three years in September that he’s been the maintenance man.

This journey started when I met Brian and Amy at a conference. The plan was that I interview them in front of an audience of support workers. It was a gathering brought together by Support Action Net, which is a framework for organisations working with vulnerable people that are dedicated to getting closer to their service users’ social and emotional aspirations. These organisations want to relate to the clients they work with through their sense of self; through their passions, interests and abilities rather than their problems.

Over the months I have written about many people whose resilience, intelligence, quirkiness or ordinariness tell us a story about public service – the best and the worst of it. At the core of all these tales is a belief that in working to improve people’s lives we owe it to each other to be as imaginative, as innovative, as humane and just as brilliant as we can. To engage with the world to make it a better place and, let’s face it, brighter, sunnier and more fun to be alive.