NYT: Many Muslims in Britain Feel Torn Between Competing Identities

[DeepModem Mom]

Many Muslims in Britain Tell of Feeling Torn Between Competing Identities
By SARAH LYALL and IAN FISHER
Published: August 13, 2006

....British policies in Afghanistan and Iraq, and now in Lebanon, are just the most recent in a long list of grievances — cultural, economic and political — among Muslims here. For a few, that has manifested itself in extremism and violence. For many others, it has meant a sharpening of a continuing struggle between two competing identities.

In a recent poll of Muslims in 13 countries conducted by the Pew Global Attitudes Project, 81 percent of those surveyed in Britain said they considered themselves Muslims first and Britons second. That contrasts with Spain, where 69 percent of those surveyed considered themselves Muslims first and Spaniards second; Germany, where the comparable number is 66 percent, and even Jordan, with 67 percent.

Britain has never aspired to be a melting pot, and even second- and third-generation immigrants in England are likely to identify themselves — and, more significantly, be identified by the English — as belonging to their family’s country of origin....

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For Muslims, with their adherence to religion in a country that is aggressively secular and their feelings of brotherhood with Muslims in the Middle East, the feelings of alienation are particularly acute....

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Those who study Muslims in England say the current generation of young people — those whose fathers moved here in the 1960’s to work in the textile mills in the Midlands and the north — is more inclined to be at odds with British society.

Many of the first wave of immigrants were from rural Pakistan, spoke poor English and never integrated much. But the generation that is coming of age now is caught between the traditionalism of their parents and the Western ideas they have been born in to, and the result can be toxic....

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/13/world/europe/13muslims.html

[JI7]

1. Europe has never really been good when it comes to race, ethnic religious

differences.

in that area even with all the problems we have, the United States is far better. partly because it is a land of immigrants.