Why Muslims must guard against the satisfactions of complaint
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1646996,00.html
At the second Guardian forum, a pervasive, and understandable, sense of
frustration was lifted by words of tough love
Madeleine Bunting
Monday November 21, 2005
The Guardian
A year on from the Guardian's first experiment in bringing together
young Muslims for an evening of discussion, we did it again. The mood
of the forum, held last week, had shifted in unexpected ways; there was
less anger from the 60-odd participants from across the UK, but what
had replaced it was, perhaps, even more worrying - a pervasive sense of
frustration. Much of it is targeted at the government, but some is also
directed at the Muslim community itself - why can't it make itself
heard? Why can't it address its problems of poverty and educational
underachievement? And the persistent questions about representation:
who claims to speak for "the community" and why? The self-criticism
among this group of largely university-educated Muslims is never far
from the surface.
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