Multiculturalism has always been an embattled idea, but the battle has
grown fiercer of late. In this, as in so many other things, it is
terrorism that is setting the agenda, goading us and forcing us to
respond - terrorism, whose goal it is to turn the differences between us
into divisions and then to use those divisions as justifications.

No question about it: it’s harder to celebrate the virtues of
polyculture when even Belgian women are being persuaded by Belgians of
North African descent to blow up themselves and other people.

Comedians, among others, have been trying to defuse - wrong verb -
people’s fears by facing up to them: “My name’s Shazia Mirza, or at
least that’s what it says on my pilot’s license.” But it will take more
than comedy to calm things down.

Britain, the most determinedly “multiculturist” of European nations, is
at the heart of the debate. According to some opinion polls, the British
people avowed their continued support for multiculturalism even in the
immediate aftermath of the July 7 bombings. Many commentators, however,
have been less affirmative.

David Goodhart, editor of Prospect magazine, asks the old philosophical
question, “Who is my brother?” and suggests that an overly diverse
society may become an unsustainable one. Britain’s first black
archbishop, the Rt. Rev. John Sentamu, accuses multiculturalism of being
bad for English national identity. And the British government has
announced that new citizens will have to pass a “Britishness test” from
now on. A passport will be a kind of driver’s licence proving that
you’ve learned the new rules of the nationalist road.

At the other end of the spectrum, Karen Chouhan of the 1990 Trust, a
“black-led” human-rights organization, insists that “we need to move
forward with a serious debate about how far we have to go in tackling
race discrimination in every corner of society, not move it back by
forcing everyone to be more (white) British”.

And Bhikhu Parekh redefines multiculturalism as the belief that “no
culture is perfect or represents the best life, and that it can
therefore benefit from a critical dialogue with other cultures...
Britain is and should remain a vibrant and democratic multicultural
society that must combine respect for diversity with shared common values”.

It’s impossible for someone like myself, whose life was transformed by
an act of migration, to be entirely objective about the value of such
acts. I have spent much of my writing life celebrating the potential for
creativity and renewal of the cultural encounters and frictions that
have become commonplace in our much-transplanted world.

Then again, as people keep pointing out, I have a second axe to grind,
because the Satanic Verses controversy was a pivotal moment in the
forging of a British Muslim identity and political agenda. I did not
fail to note the ironies: a secular work of art energized powerful
communalist, anti-secularist forces, “Muslim” instead of “Asian”. And,
yes, as a result the argument about multiculturalism for me has become
an internal debate, a quarrel in the self.

Nor am I alone. The melange of culture is in us all, with its
irreconcilable contradictions. In our swollen, polyglot cities - “the
locus classicus of incompatible realities” one of the characters in The
Satanic Verses calls them - we are all cultural mestizos, and the
argument within rages to some degree in us all.

So it is important to make a distinction between multifaceted culture
and multiculturalism. In the age of mass migration and the internet,
cultural plurality is an irreversible fact, like globalization. Like it
or dislike it, it’s where we live, and the dream of a pure monoculture
is at best an unattainable, nostalgic fantasy, and at worst a
life-threatening menace - when ideas of racial purity, religious purity
or cultural purity turn into programmes of “ethnic cleansing”, for
example, or when Hindu fanatics in India attack the “inauthenticity” of
Indian Muslim experience, or when Islamic ideologues drive young people
to die in the service of “pure” faith, unadulterated by compassion or doubt.

“Purity” is a slogan that leads to segregations and explosions. Let us
have no more of it. A little more impurity, please, a little less
cleanliness, a little more dirt. We’ll all sleep easier in our beds.

Multiculturalism, however, has all too often become mere cultural
relativism, a much less defensible proposition, under cover of which
much that is reactionary and oppressive - of women, for example - can be
justified.

The British multiculturalist idea of different cultures peacefully
coexisting under the umbrella of a vaguely defined pax Britannica was
seriously undermined by the July 7 bombers and the disaffected ghetto
culture from which they sprang. Of the other available social models,
the one-size-fits-all homogenizing of “full assimilation” seems not only
undesirable but unachievable, and what remains is the “core values”
approach to which Parekh alludes, and of which the “Britishness test”
is, at least as currently proposed, a grotesque comic parody.

When we, as individuals, pick and mix cultural elements for ourselves,
we do not do so indiscriminately, but according to our natures.
Societies, too, must retain the ability to discriminate, to reject as
well as to accept, to value some things above others, and to insist on
the acceptance of those values by all their members. This is the
question of our time: how does a fractured community of multiple
cultures decide what values it must share in order to cohere, and how
can it insist on those values even when they clash with some citizens’
traditions and beliefs?

The beginnings of an answer may be found by asking the question the
other way around: What does a society owe to its citizens? The French
riots demonstrate a stark truth. If people do not feel included in the
national idea, their alienation will eventually turn to rage. Chouhan
and others are right to insist that issues of social justice, racism and
deprivation need urgently to be addressed. If we are to build a plural
society on the foundation of what unites us, we must face up to what
divides.

But the questions of core freedoms and primary loyalties can’t be
ducked. No society, no matter how tolerant, can expect to thrive if its
citizens don’t prize what their citizenship means - if, when asked what
they stand for as Frenchmen, as Indians, as Americans, as Britons, they
cannot give a clear reply.