Muslims, Trust and Cultural Dialogue

Recent high-profile interventions by politicians in the West declaring the failure of multiculturalism have had, as their very thinly disguised context, mistrust in those Muslim communities that have been growing in Western Europe and the United States since the end of the colonial era. While a certain amount of expediency and projection may be read into such utterances, the sense that multiculturalism has been a flawed experiment - and the idea that unintegrated Muslims are evidence of this - has become a truism of much journalism and media coverage too.

Important work, particularly in the social sciences, is ongoing to identify the domestic and international factors leading to Muslim alienation within Western society. Thus far, however, political, cultural and philosophical questions of trust - how it is built, how it operates and how it can be undermined - have largely been overlooked in favour of a rush to judgement and a clamour for decisive action of one kind or another. This multidisciplinary project will serve to rectify this oversight by analysing the conditions of trust and mistrust in a number of areas of social and cultural life. As such, it will help to nuance and further the Global Uncertainties core interest in ideologies and beliefs. It takes the form of a network of scholars, non-academic partners and stakeholders, under the direction of Dr Peter Morey of the University of East London, who will come together to explore questions of trust and trust building in politics and society, culture and the arts, and business and finance. The geographical focus is on Britain and the United States, where thorny questions about the place of ethnic and cultural minority groups have taken on an added (and sometimes vitriolic) urgency, although the variety of diasporic communities that make up Muslim minorities in these countries mean that we will also engage with cultural practices and values born in South Asia and and the Arab world too. Through workshops, roundtable discussions, scholarly publications, exhibitions, video material and the Internet, we will build a platform for the latest thinking on intercultural trust, both at the theoretical and intellectual levels, and in everyday practices. An interactive website will be the first port of call for information, discussion, disseminating findings and archiving events. In addition, we will be building a web collection on Muslims and intercultural trust with the British Library which, taken together with the other outputs, will form a solid and evolving empirical and theoretical basis for understanding how trust is understood and enacted in contemporary multicultural societies.

Muslims, Trust and Cultural Dialogue is committed to understanding how existing practices in a variety of cultural arenas enact dialogue and negotiation between groups in ways that can help us move beyond misunderstanding and negative stereotyping. It aims to provide a foundation of thoroughly researched knowledge that can then be used to build and shape dialogue at the level of community organisations and policy making. We will make significant interventions in public debates about intercultural dialogue and questions of trust: to explore how trust is created and how it can be nurtured as well as undermined; to empower groups utilising the various mechanisms of civic engagement; and to provide those engaged in political and social policy-making with a better understanding of how their activities affect others and how trust and dialogue can make them more effective.

I have chosen to identify impact in part by correlating potential beneficiaries with the constituencies addressed by the project partners and planned events. For example, the Dialogue Society, with whom I am organising three roundtable sessions, is an established charity that has a remit to advance social cohesion by connecting communities. It is well connected in government and business and its work includes discussion forums, courses, capacity building publications and outreach. The proceedings of these roundtable events will be part of the Society's manuals for community organisations. Thus, our work will reach those end users - a combination of individuals and organisations - that commonly access and benefit from the Dialogue Society's work.

Likewise, my collaboration with Engage will draw on their links with British Muslims and local communities. Engage is dedicated to improving the rates of civic participation, media involvement and political engagement by British Muslims. We will be drawing on this experience in setting the agenda for our conferences and seminars, and by working with Engage to produce the action packs on Islamic Finance which will be distributed to mosques, community groups and businesses in the London area, with the possibility of a broader geographical roll out later. These will be of interest to all those, whether in the public, private or third sector, who see potential in the establishment of parallel financial protocols in accord with Islamic principles: something of a growth area in the contemporary financial world.

In addition I will be participating in a short documentary film and discussion on the Islam Channel's 'Politics and Media' show on the project theme of trust and cultural dialogue. The Islam Channel's mission is to act as an interface between Muslims and non-Muslims to remove misconceptions and challenge stereotyping. The channel is available globally and on the Internet, and is broadcast to a hundred and thirty two countries around the world. This collaboration is likely to be key to the project effecting a global impact footprint.

The newly formed Centre for the Study of Pakistan at SOAS is a key partner in this project, organising seminars, providing central London venues, and participating in the photographic exhibition and its attendant events. It is a focal point for research and teaching on Pakistan from a range of disciplinary perspectives. With Pakistan often identified as a key area of 'global uncertainty' and its diasporic populations subject to ever more stringent scrutiny, the participation of the Centre will stimulate interest among expatriate Pakistanis and those with professional, economic or strategic interests in the region. (For example, contact has already been made with Gemma Thompson from the FCO's Community Engagement Unit, who has expressed an interest in the work.)

Access to policy makers and government agencies is a key part of the plan for impact. As well as the Dialogue Society, our efforts in this regard will be helped by our partnership with the Muslim Institute (through their new quarterly publication, Critical Muslim, for which I write). Critical Muslim aims to become the preeminent publication taking a critically interrogative approach to Muslim matters. Its high profile editor, Ziauddin Sardar is well-known as a polymath and influential communicator, with a significant international following.

Finally, impact on a wide range of users will be guaranteed by the interactive website, which will archive events, disseminate findings and provide an interactive discussion forum. The website will be preserved in the British Library's Web Archive to which we will be adding a number of other websites, building, for the first time, a collated set of online resources about Muslims, trust and dialogue in perpetuity for all kinds of users.