Page - 102 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 02/01

102 | Elham Manea www.jrfm.eu 2016, 2/1, 91–110 is unable to see this part of her. If she wears the veil, then she must be a believer. It goes without saying that her belief, or rather her lack thereof, is a secret she keeps to herself within her community. On top of that, she is a lesbian. Her sexual orientation is another secret that she has to guard, lest it become known and cause a scandal with dire consequences. Leila does not fit within any of the cultural or ethnic categories to which she might automatically be assigned, neither within her community, which im- poses its values on its members, nor within the larger society, which sees her in terms of a garment that covers her hair. She is a complex person with various identities, yet all we see as we look at her is a religious identity that she does not believe in. On an individual level, then, an ethnic or a religious category often cannot describe a person for two reasons: (1) each person has various identities, and (2) being associated with a religious group does not automatically make one religious or part of that group. Moreover, on a group level, a minority is not homogenous. Consider the Muslim community (singular) in Britain. In the 1960s its members formed what were termed “South Asian communities” (plural). They included waves of migrants from Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. Within these national groupings, they were still seen as di- verse, with different religious denominations and linguistic, regional, and ethnic backgrounds. At that time, as many interviewees told me, one would have been hard pressed to find a woman wearing a veil, let alone a burqa. The members of these communities identified themselves by their nationalities and sometimes by region- al origins, such as being from Mirpur, a district and one of the largest cities in Paki- stan’s Kashmir region. They may have practised their religion, but doing so did not frame their interaction with the world. It was not the mantle in which they wrapped themselves. Their religion was not the identity they stressed. From the 1970s, an intel- lectual shift took place, paving the way for the construction of the Muslim identity (singular).38 On one hand, as Kenan Malik, a left-leaning Indian-born English thinker, notes, the left helped to introduce the politics of difference and group rights. The old radical left, Malik tells us, slowly lost its faith in secular universalism and Enlightenment ideas of rationalism and humanism and instead began talking about multiculturalism and group rights, decrying these Enlightenment ideas as “Eurocentric”, part of the Euro- American project imposed on other people. For decades, the left had argued that eve- ryone should be equal whatever their racial, ethnic, religious, or cultural differences; now the left pushed the idea that different people should be treated differently pre- cisely because of such differences.39 On the other hand, the British state played a crucial part in translating this ideologi- cal shift into reality, by introducing multicultural policies at the local and national lev- els. Urban riots and unrest during the 1970s and 1980s raised concerns about how to 38 This part is adapted from Manea, forthcoming 2016, chapter 3. 39 Malik 2009, xix; Malik 2013, 19.