British Muslim Cultural Expressions in the Age of Prevent

In this presentation, I examine how British Muslim cultural expressions have responded to national counter-terrorism policies and discourses, which address Muslim communities, defined now as a suspect community, through a form of racial and neoliberal governmentality. Between 2007 and 2011, Muslim community-based cultural and artistic events have received substantial funding from the governments’ Preventing Violent Extremism Program (Prevent). The promotion of cultural expressions was meant to shape morally responsible and moderate Muslims community members, but also, broadly, to promoting moderate forms of Islam. The revisions of the Prevent Program in 2011 led to the cutting of funding to Muslim cultural activities. Bigger emphasis was put on non-violent extremism, understood in terms of challenges to ‘Fundamental British Values’ as well as any articulation of politicized Islam. Especially for Muslim artists who were politically engaged this meant that they were increasingly under scrutiny.

This paper traces how successive Prevent policies and their underlying assumptions have created a discursive context in which certain Muslim cultural expressions are permitted or even promoted, while others, notably those critical of the local or global war on Terror are actively silenced or made less likely to emerge. While the art practitioners are limited and shaped by Prevent discourses and its imperatives, notably in the demand to prove moderation and Britishness, I also reveal how they harness beliefs in the power of arts to pose uncomfortable questions, Islamic understandings of creativity and beauty, and diasporic solidarities to offer new possibilities to think an ethics of citizenship.