I n the current climate of Islamophobia, I wonder how many British people are aware of a series of films made in the early 1960s, which were expressly designed to encourage people from Arab countries to come to Britain to work or study. The four films, all in Arabic, were made on behalf of the Foreign Office, and all begin with a mosque skyline and melodic chants of “Allahu Akbar”, the start of the Muslim call to prayer. They are unapologetically religious, eager to show Arabic-speaking Muslims how welcoming Britain is, how Islamic institutions exist in Britain to cater to their cultural and religious traditions, as a friendly home from home.
Two of the four films are set in London, one in Manchester, the other in Cardiff. The cheerful Egyptian presenter drives from place to place in his Ford Anglia, interviewing local Muslims in their mosques, their offices and their homes. Most of the people we are introduced to are men, but a handful are women, including a Christian convert to Islam, now the proud mother of 10 children, after 16 years of marriage to a Yemeni man in Cardiff. The presenter cuts to the mayor of Cardiff to ask how the Muslim community has integrated. “Very well,” she replies, “they are an integral part of the city. They are accepted as friends amongst the rest of the community.”
In London the presenter does a tour of the city’s universities, including Soas and the London School of Economics, where an Iraqi student marvels that his experience is like living in “an international society”. The British government shows “an interest in widening cultural boundaries” that he has observed over the five years he has lived in London.
At the Saudi Arabia embassy a Saudi official describes the British people as “polite and patient, with such a big respect for order as to make it almost sacred”. A scholar at the Islamic Cultural Centre by Regent’s Park explains that King George VI gave this land to the Muslim community in 1944, and that a mosque will be built there once the community has gathered enough donations.
In Manchester, sometimes dubbed the “Cosmopolitan Cottonopolis”, the presenter enthuses about the city as “one of the biggest trading centres in the world”, where commerce runs in people’s veins. Footage shows people at prayer inside mosques, and young children being taught the Qur’an, before moving on to a library where the presenter is allowed to turn the pages of the “biggest written version of the Holy Qur’an in the world”. Seated on a park bench, an elderly local Englishman tells him: “My father’s doctor, even 30 years ago, came from Iraq. They’ve always been with us.” Next comes a Yemeni halal butcher who learned his skills in Liverpool, and a wealthy Syrian businessman in Manchester’s cotton trade. To this day, the overwhelming majority of Manchester’s 5,000-strong Syrian community is involved in the textile industry, especially in cotton and yarn.
The films were designed solely for showing abroad and were probably never seen in the UK at the time. The reason I know about them is because a Syrian cotton merchant I interviewed in Manchester sent me the link to them. I watched them as part of the research for my book about a textile merchant from Homs who came to Bradford in the early 1980s as an economic migrant, bought a failing mill and built up a global trade in broadcloth while other Yorkshire mills closed down.
Yet despite such success stories, today more than a third of the UK population believes Islam is a threat to the British way of life, according to a report by the anti-fascist group Hope not Hate. Islamophobia in 2018, according to their findings, replaced immigration as the main factor behind the rise of the far right. In addition, half of Brexit voters in the 2016 referendum and nearly half of Conservative voters in the 2017 general election said that Islam was not compatible with Britishness.
What went so wrong? It would be easy to lay the blame solely at the door of Isis and its terrorist acts. But the “hostile environment” presided over by Theresa May and David Cameron since 2010, years before Isis declared its caliphate in Raqqa in 2014, also has much to answer for. The 1960s films were produced in the period following the Suez crisis, as part of an initiative to improve strained relations between Britain and the Arabic-speaking world. If the British government’s policy since 2010 had been to create an inclusive, multicultural society rather than a hostile, nationalistic one, many of today’s political and societal dilemmas might have been avoided.
• Diana Darke is a Syria specialist and a Middle East cultural expert. Her latest book is The Merchant of Syria