UNDERSTANDING INTER-BRASIAN CONFLICT

Abstract

The phenomenon of Sikh and Muslim conflict has been largely analysed in anthropological and sociological works in terms of a product of angry youth or ethnic hatred or religious passions. This paper explores the main ways in which the increasing tensions between Sikhs and Muslims have been articulated in the landscape of postcolonial Britain. It investigates the most prominent explanations provided both in academic and popular literature to understand the various causes seen to fuel this type of conflict, that is ethno-religious causes, multicultural issues and as the symptom of youth delinquency. The paper offers a critique of such accounts and moves towards an ontological understanding of conflict, that is, to elaborate the central role of conflict and its relationship to the political as the site for contestation between ‘friends and enemies’. This reading of Inter-BrAsian conflict enables us to open up a new space to re-evaluate the nature of Sikh and Muslim tensions within the diasporic context.

Notes

BrAsian is a term used to ‘designate members of settler communities which articulates a significant part of their identity in terms of South Asian heritage’ (Sayyid 2006, 5). See Ali, Kalra, and Sayyid (2006).

The claim that some of the founders of Sikhism including Guru Nanak were actually Muslims flies in the face of Sikh assertions that these founding figures were neither Muslim nor Hindu. Attempts to recover an authentic Muslim or an authentic Hindu identity of the founders of Sikhism is to fall into the trap of essentialism which reduces Sikhism in ‘essence’ to being nothing more than a variant of either Hinduism or Islam or a melange of the two.

Bhatt understands conflict between Muslims and Hindus as communalism which minimises the political aspects of these conflicts by translating them into effects of primordial identities. See Paul Brass' (2003) work for the deliberate and political nature of the so-called ‘communal’ conflicts that plague contemporary India.

For further elaboration see Ali (2002).

For elaboration, see one of the few academic studies that focuses directly on the Sikh-Muslim conflict: Moliner (2007).

It is not entirely surprising with the ending of the Cold War that there has been increased scholarly scrutiny of the phenomenon of ethnic conflict since it can be argued that the end of the Cold War and the impact of globalisation have led to the erosion of the Westphalian order which led to the emergence of ‘sub-national’ groupings. Since the end of the Cold War, conflict within states has become a far more common occurrence rather than conflict between states, as Saxton (2005, 88) articulates, ‘the post-Cold War period has seen both an explosion of ethnic and nationalist conflict behavior and the sophistication of explanations of that behavior’. Data collected by the International Peace Research Institute in Oslo and the Department of Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University show that between 1946 and 2001, there were approximately 50 ethnic conflicts with more than 25 people killed per year (Wolff 2006, 10). Michael Mann lists that from 2003, 36 ethnic and religious conflicts were taking place, ranging from Rwanda to Cyprus, furthermore, in over half of these cases substantial killing was involved (Mann 2006, 2). See Sayyid (2000) for details on globalisation and the undermining of the Westphalian state.

Such literature includes Horowitz (1985); Esman (1977); and Schneckener and Wolff (2004).

See Mandair (2006) for further elaboration.

Such case studies include Palestinians and Israelis, Bosnians and Serbs and Turks and Kurds, to name but a few. See Horowitz (1985) and Esman (1977) for elaboration.

See for example Anthias (1998) for such argumentation.

For example newspaper reports following the Bradford riots (2001) and various television documentaries following the 7/7 bombings in London including Channel 4's Dispatches, ‘Young, Angry and Muslim’ (October 2005).

See Ahmad (2006) for a critique of this pathologisation. This can clearly be seen as being beholden to the ‘Immigrant Imaginary’ that is a series of discursive representations based around the ontological and temporal distinction between host and immigrant. See Sayyid (2004) and Sayyid and Hesse (2006).

For example various mainstream media accounts following the riots of 2001 targeted Muslim youth (males) as the ‘folk devil’ in which such activity was seen as a cultural or ethnic trope.

The ‘immigrant imaginary’ is an analytical device and is beholden to Orientalist and Indological ways of thinking about non-Western social phenomena. It continually attempts to replace political motivations and agency with cultural, biological and other mechanistic accounts, thus the immigrant imaginary fixes in the colonial gaze the experiences of ex-colonial subjects relocated in the metropole. See Sayyid and Hesse (2006).

This anthropological gaze is both academic, for example the work of Werbner 1990 and Ballard 1994, and also popular, as seen in portrayals of young BrAsians on television, in newspapers and on film which continue to reproduce this gaze, for example representations of BrAsian families in soaps such as Eastenders and Channel 4's first series of Skins, and docudramas such as Yasmin, also broadcast on Channel 4. In addition ministerial interventions and public debate are often exclusively conducted in such a way that social problems are anthropologised; such topics often include the rise of religious fundamentalism and women's oppression.

See Cohen (1973) for elaboration of the Mods and Rockers case study, in which no reference to ‘whiteness’ was used to explain the so-called violence, rather reasons pointed instead to bored youth.

For more details see Kundnani (2002).

It has to be pointed out that Islam is a proselytising faith, thus conversion is not just specific to Sikhs, but rather open-ended to include other groups as well.

Of course objects by definition lack subjectivity therefore a collision or a crash cannot transform their identity, see Laclau and Mouffe (1985, 30–40).

As our interest is in Sikh representations of the Sikh-Muslim conflict the primary constructions of identity that we are concerned with are those articulated only by Sikhs. These constructions are based on the elaboration of an ‘Us and Them’, therefore our concerns are about the Sikh constructions of Sikhness and the Sikh constructions of Muslimness. There is no attempt to locate an authentic Muslim subjectivity in this discourse, nor is it necessary for our purposes.