What do you think?
Rate this book
The Making of Anti-Muslim Protest
Activism in any social movement group is, as Deborah Gould observes, a project of collective ‘world-making’. It is about changing the world out there by influencing policy and public opinion, but is also about the way it transforms the lives of participants – activists generate new identities, cultures, social ties, rich and varied emotional experiences and interpretations of the world around them. Movements are more likely to be able to attract and sustain support when as projects of collective world-making they feel compelling to activists and would-be activists. In this book Busher explores what has made activism in the English Defence League (EDL), an anti-Muslim protest movement that has staged demonstrations across the UK since 2009, so compelling to those who have chosen to march under its banner. Based on sixteen months of overt observation with grassroots activists, he explores how people became involved with the group; how they forged and intensified belief in the EDL cause; how they negotiated accusations that they were just another racist, far right group; and how grassroots EDL activism began to unravel during the course of 2011 but did not do so altogether. Providing a fresh insight as to how contemporary anti-minority protest movements work on the inside, this book will be of interest to students, scholars and activists working in the areas of British politics, extremism, social movements, community relations and current affairs more generally.
196 pages, Hardcover
First published July 13, 2013
6 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
April 11, 2016
It’s a sunny spring day in 2011 and Joel Busher is at an English Defence League demonstration in Chadwell Heath, Essex. The activists meet in a pub, where beer is drunk. When they’re told to form up, a lot of them slip to the toilet first. As they march in protest at the building of a Muslim community centre, there’s singing and chanting. An Asian man gets yelled at. Someone hands out leaflets while wearing a pig’s-head mask. Then:
...small groups of women from black and minority ethnic communities looked on with concern etched on their faces, and a family of Asian origin peered nervously from behind net curtains as a group of young EDL activists pointed and chanted at them until a local EDL organiser intervened: ‘No! No! Stop! They’re Sikhs! We like Sikhs!’
Do they? Is there something about the EDL that no-one quite spotted at the time?
The EDL came to prominence from 2009 onwards, chiefly as a group demonstrating against what they saw as creeping Islamicisation. It wasn’t an attractive picture, conjuring up images of shaven-headed thugs in blouson jackets, waving cans of Special Brew and yelling threats. Was that the reality? And if so, was it the whole reality? Or was there something more complex going on? And if so, what does it tell us about modern Britain (and perhaps Europe)?
To try to understand, Joel Busher spent much of 2011 and part of 2012 attending EDL meetings and demonstrations, interviewing activists and joining them on social media. He wasn’t a demonstrator. He is an academic, and his The Making of Anti-Muslim Protest: Grassroots Activism in the English Defence League sets out to understand who the EDL were, how their members came into the movement and how they interacted with each other once there. The book isn’t journalism. Anyone reading this for a “frank exposé” with lots of racist violence will be disappointed. So will anyone seeking to have their prejudices confirmed about the white working class. This is a serious research work, and is shrewd and illuminating.
Busher is a sociologist, and approached his work with an academic framework. Two pillars of this seem to be of special importance. The first was to look at the EDL in terms of ‘world-building’. The latter is a concept developed by American researcher Deborah Gould in a much-praised 2009 work on AIDS activism in the US. Crudely stated, it analyses how activists come together behind a single, possibly quite narrow, cause, and together proceed to construct a broader worldview and social networks, the one reinforcing the other. This concept is of great interest in looking at how social movements in general construct themselves.
But it is the second concept that I found of special interest. This is the way Busher has teased out why his interviewees became involved in the EDL. He could of course have asked them, and sometimes did. But motives, he says, “are often furnished ‘after the act’. ...in groups such as the EDL, justifying their participation becomes part of their day-to-day lives [and this] makes it particularly difficult to explore ... motivations post hoc.” He adds later that “when asked directly about why they had become involved in the EDL, they usually reeled off various lengthy commentaries about what they saw as the cultural and security threats posed to their country, culture or way of life ...or about how ‘ordinary English people’ were being ignored by the political elite. ...However, once I started asking activists to narrate their journeys into the EDL step by step, a more complex picture began to emerge.”
Thus he interviews Terry, who “was a staunch anti-royalist, loved and played blues music, and often dipped into Marxist economic and social theories when explaining his arguments about the global diffusion and threat of Islam. ...He had been involved in revolutionary socialist politics during his early adult life – something he had fallen into when, after going to listen to Tony Benn speaking at Brixton Town Hall.” Busher brackets Terry with a whole group that had “swerved” across to the EDL, having often been involved with anti-fascist and anti-racist groups (involvements that they used to refute suggestions that they and the EDL were racist or fascist). Busher thinks that about 5% of the EDL activists were of this type. He adds that another 25-30% were people who had been involved in some other form of social activism, such as support to veterans’ charities, but also animal welfare groups or union activism, which seem like less likely precursors to EDL activity.
Then there is the “English connection”. Thus one older activist described having had an interest in English heritage and local history and was one of several who, says Busher, wanted “to claim and celebrate [their] national identity.” The perception that this English identity is patronised or denigrated by a liberal establishment seems to be key to the growth of the new right. One suspects that these are feelings that are often not articulated by the majority, or are expressed through (for example) a love of classic Jaguars or steam trains. When they do achieve political expression, it can be negative.
This does not mean that the EDL are a bunch of Trots and steam enthusiasts. Busher did his fieldwork mainly in the south of England and is aware that activists in the north would have been different. He is also clear that, even in the south, many EDL activists had come in through their association with football hooliganism. (This has been traced in more detail in another book, Hsiao-Hung Pai’s Angry White People, which looks at the EDL’s origins in Luton.) Busher thinks about 30-40% of EDL activists, including their leadership at the beginning, came from the football violence scene. It may also be that the nastier members of the movement avoided him. He did sometimes see the shaven-headed thugs on demonstrations. Neither does Busher evade the fact that there was a certain casual bigotry about some members of the EDL.
Even so, he is struck that there is a more complex picture than one might suppose. Some people even tell him they have joined the EDL because they can thus oppose militant Islam without getting mixed up with right-wing thugs. Also, the EDL for a long time had a Jewish group, not something one associates with fascists. (Busher records an especially bizarre occasion when EDL leader Tommy Robinson was supposed not to attend a demonstration as he was subject to a banning order. He attended anyway, disguised as a rabbi.)
However, the main concept on which Busher has based his analysis – Gould’s “world-building” – is also important. He is not always explicit about what it means or where it has taken him. However, a recurrent theme through the book is the way in which activists’ beliefs, lifestyles and relationship reinforce another. If one wants to look at how people get involved with groups like the EDL, he argues, one needs not to focus just on “anger, hatred, resentment and indignation”. We may learn more from looking at the social interactions within the group; how they feel pride and shame in having (for example) looked after each other on a demonstration, or made sacrifices to go leafletting in the evening. These interactions also extend to the way EDL members share information. A very interesting area he looks at is the use of social media and how activists swap links and news on (say) Facebook. When an activist says that they are “doing their research”, they are looking at a variety of sources that may include nasty right-wing militant sites or blogs, but also include mainstream media – papers like the Daily Mail, to be sure, but also relatively radical writers (such as the late Christopher Hitchens) who have attacked what they see as Islamofascism. Busher thinks it is a mistake to see the mainstream media discourse as irrelevant to anti-Muslim prejudice.
What is important for Busher, however, is the way these interactions, and the web of common assumptions they create – “world-making” – tells us more about the EDL than “simply pathologising activists as angry, white, damaged and vulnerable men seeking to protect their social status and reassert their compromised masculinity... [or seeing] such groups as somehow springing forth from generalised anxieties about how the country is changing, perceptions of declining economic and cultural opportunities, declining trust in the political elite and so forth.”
Is he right about this? That distrust of the elite, and anxiety about unasked-for cultural change, are both clearly drivers for anti-minority activism. There is plenty of evidence for that in this book (the nostalgia some activists have for an older England, the horror of mosques springing up, their fury at Cameron’s 2011 attacks on the EDL). If one follows Busher’s world-making argument to its ultimate conclusion, one might decide that people acquire prejudice not directly from these drivers, but solely from each other – surely a dangerous conclusion. But I don’t think Busher would go that far. Neither do I think he discounts the political drivers behind right-wing activism. He simply wishes us to understand the people he met, rather than, as he says, “pathologising” them. That does not imply acceptance of their prejudices on Busher’s part; he is very clear about that at several points in the book. What he has done is to seek to understand.
He has done a good job of it. This research will have required tact, patience and an open mind. He describes, for example, heading home from a march with a bunch of demonstrators. “We pulled into a pub/truck stop, the activists all clad in their EDL hoodies, only to find that it was run by a Muslim family. There was much debate ...One activist opined that he preferred not to [eat] because he suspected that they would spit in the food, another argued that people shouldn’t buy food from them because it was ‘like giving money to the enemy’, but most people, keen to ...soak up the alcohol, ignored them both and got stuck into [the] burgers.” Busher is also frank about some of the prejudices of some of the EDL members and their effect on him: “Some activists said and did things that I found deeply unpleasant and sometimes disturbing – miming shooting at Muslim women, slipping into racist caricatures about ‘muzz-rats’, chanting defamatory slogans about Allah and so on and so forth,” he says. Yet he was able to put aside his own concern and, by listening, unravel the roots of EDL activism in a remarkable way – not least because he formed relationships with some activists that were at least cordial, even if he did not share their views.
This book is (burgers apart) firmly rooted in academic discourse; this may put some readers off. It shouldn’t, because Busher writes well and although the general reader isn’t the intended audience, they’ll find it perfectly readable. What they may baulk at is the book’s cover price. This is a pity, because this excellent book is very timely. Busher presents the movement and its members without preconceptions, and this is essential; it must be understood if its influence is to be challenged. The EDL has faded somewhat since 2011, but the broader far right has not; in mainland Europe, especially, it has started to take on much nastier forms than the EDL. The latter, officially at least, never subscribed to racism or to any form of fascism. Others do. We need to understand the politics of division more than ever.
The publisher kindly supplied an e-book for review purposes.
...small groups of women from black and minority ethnic communities looked on with concern etched on their faces, and a family of Asian origin peered nervously from behind net curtains as a group of young EDL activists pointed and chanted at them until a local EDL organiser intervened: ‘No! No! Stop! They’re Sikhs! We like Sikhs!’
Do they? Is there something about the EDL that no-one quite spotted at the time?
The EDL came to prominence from 2009 onwards, chiefly as a group demonstrating against what they saw as creeping Islamicisation. It wasn’t an attractive picture, conjuring up images of shaven-headed thugs in blouson jackets, waving cans of Special Brew and yelling threats. Was that the reality? And if so, was it the whole reality? Or was there something more complex going on? And if so, what does it tell us about modern Britain (and perhaps Europe)?
To try to understand, Joel Busher spent much of 2011 and part of 2012 attending EDL meetings and demonstrations, interviewing activists and joining them on social media. He wasn’t a demonstrator. He is an academic, and his The Making of Anti-Muslim Protest: Grassroots Activism in the English Defence League sets out to understand who the EDL were, how their members came into the movement and how they interacted with each other once there. The book isn’t journalism. Anyone reading this for a “frank exposé” with lots of racist violence will be disappointed. So will anyone seeking to have their prejudices confirmed about the white working class. This is a serious research work, and is shrewd and illuminating.
Busher is a sociologist, and approached his work with an academic framework. Two pillars of this seem to be of special importance. The first was to look at the EDL in terms of ‘world-building’. The latter is a concept developed by American researcher Deborah Gould in a much-praised 2009 work on AIDS activism in the US. Crudely stated, it analyses how activists come together behind a single, possibly quite narrow, cause, and together proceed to construct a broader worldview and social networks, the one reinforcing the other. This concept is of great interest in looking at how social movements in general construct themselves.
But it is the second concept that I found of special interest. This is the way Busher has teased out why his interviewees became involved in the EDL. He could of course have asked them, and sometimes did. But motives, he says, “are often furnished ‘after the act’. ...in groups such as the EDL, justifying their participation becomes part of their day-to-day lives [and this] makes it particularly difficult to explore ... motivations post hoc.” He adds later that “when asked directly about why they had become involved in the EDL, they usually reeled off various lengthy commentaries about what they saw as the cultural and security threats posed to their country, culture or way of life ...or about how ‘ordinary English people’ were being ignored by the political elite. ...However, once I started asking activists to narrate their journeys into the EDL step by step, a more complex picture began to emerge.”
Thus he interviews Terry, who “was a staunch anti-royalist, loved and played blues music, and often dipped into Marxist economic and social theories when explaining his arguments about the global diffusion and threat of Islam. ...He had been involved in revolutionary socialist politics during his early adult life – something he had fallen into when, after going to listen to Tony Benn speaking at Brixton Town Hall.” Busher brackets Terry with a whole group that had “swerved” across to the EDL, having often been involved with anti-fascist and anti-racist groups (involvements that they used to refute suggestions that they and the EDL were racist or fascist). Busher thinks that about 5% of the EDL activists were of this type. He adds that another 25-30% were people who had been involved in some other form of social activism, such as support to veterans’ charities, but also animal welfare groups or union activism, which seem like less likely precursors to EDL activity.
Then there is the “English connection”. Thus one older activist described having had an interest in English heritage and local history and was one of several who, says Busher, wanted “to claim and celebrate [their] national identity.” The perception that this English identity is patronised or denigrated by a liberal establishment seems to be key to the growth of the new right. One suspects that these are feelings that are often not articulated by the majority, or are expressed through (for example) a love of classic Jaguars or steam trains. When they do achieve political expression, it can be negative.
This does not mean that the EDL are a bunch of Trots and steam enthusiasts. Busher did his fieldwork mainly in the south of England and is aware that activists in the north would have been different. He is also clear that, even in the south, many EDL activists had come in through their association with football hooliganism. (This has been traced in more detail in another book, Hsiao-Hung Pai’s Angry White People, which looks at the EDL’s origins in Luton.) Busher thinks about 30-40% of EDL activists, including their leadership at the beginning, came from the football violence scene. It may also be that the nastier members of the movement avoided him. He did sometimes see the shaven-headed thugs on demonstrations. Neither does Busher evade the fact that there was a certain casual bigotry about some members of the EDL.
Even so, he is struck that there is a more complex picture than one might suppose. Some people even tell him they have joined the EDL because they can thus oppose militant Islam without getting mixed up with right-wing thugs. Also, the EDL for a long time had a Jewish group, not something one associates with fascists. (Busher records an especially bizarre occasion when EDL leader Tommy Robinson was supposed not to attend a demonstration as he was subject to a banning order. He attended anyway, disguised as a rabbi.)
However, the main concept on which Busher has based his analysis – Gould’s “world-building” – is also important. He is not always explicit about what it means or where it has taken him. However, a recurrent theme through the book is the way in which activists’ beliefs, lifestyles and relationship reinforce another. If one wants to look at how people get involved with groups like the EDL, he argues, one needs not to focus just on “anger, hatred, resentment and indignation”. We may learn more from looking at the social interactions within the group; how they feel pride and shame in having (for example) looked after each other on a demonstration, or made sacrifices to go leafletting in the evening. These interactions also extend to the way EDL members share information. A very interesting area he looks at is the use of social media and how activists swap links and news on (say) Facebook. When an activist says that they are “doing their research”, they are looking at a variety of sources that may include nasty right-wing militant sites or blogs, but also include mainstream media – papers like the Daily Mail, to be sure, but also relatively radical writers (such as the late Christopher Hitchens) who have attacked what they see as Islamofascism. Busher thinks it is a mistake to see the mainstream media discourse as irrelevant to anti-Muslim prejudice.
What is important for Busher, however, is the way these interactions, and the web of common assumptions they create – “world-making” – tells us more about the EDL than “simply pathologising activists as angry, white, damaged and vulnerable men seeking to protect their social status and reassert their compromised masculinity... [or seeing] such groups as somehow springing forth from generalised anxieties about how the country is changing, perceptions of declining economic and cultural opportunities, declining trust in the political elite and so forth.”
Is he right about this? That distrust of the elite, and anxiety about unasked-for cultural change, are both clearly drivers for anti-minority activism. There is plenty of evidence for that in this book (the nostalgia some activists have for an older England, the horror of mosques springing up, their fury at Cameron’s 2011 attacks on the EDL). If one follows Busher’s world-making argument to its ultimate conclusion, one might decide that people acquire prejudice not directly from these drivers, but solely from each other – surely a dangerous conclusion. But I don’t think Busher would go that far. Neither do I think he discounts the political drivers behind right-wing activism. He simply wishes us to understand the people he met, rather than, as he says, “pathologising” them. That does not imply acceptance of their prejudices on Busher’s part; he is very clear about that at several points in the book. What he has done is to seek to understand.
He has done a good job of it. This research will have required tact, patience and an open mind. He describes, for example, heading home from a march with a bunch of demonstrators. “We pulled into a pub/truck stop, the activists all clad in their EDL hoodies, only to find that it was run by a Muslim family. There was much debate ...One activist opined that he preferred not to [eat] because he suspected that they would spit in the food, another argued that people shouldn’t buy food from them because it was ‘like giving money to the enemy’, but most people, keen to ...soak up the alcohol, ignored them both and got stuck into [the] burgers.” Busher is also frank about some of the prejudices of some of the EDL members and their effect on him: “Some activists said and did things that I found deeply unpleasant and sometimes disturbing – miming shooting at Muslim women, slipping into racist caricatures about ‘muzz-rats’, chanting defamatory slogans about Allah and so on and so forth,” he says. Yet he was able to put aside his own concern and, by listening, unravel the roots of EDL activism in a remarkable way – not least because he formed relationships with some activists that were at least cordial, even if he did not share their views.
This book is (burgers apart) firmly rooted in academic discourse; this may put some readers off. It shouldn’t, because Busher writes well and although the general reader isn’t the intended audience, they’ll find it perfectly readable. What they may baulk at is the book’s cover price. This is a pity, because this excellent book is very timely. Busher presents the movement and its members without preconceptions, and this is essential; it must be understood if its influence is to be challenged. The EDL has faded somewhat since 2011, but the broader far right has not; in mainland Europe, especially, it has started to take on much nastier forms than the EDL. The latter, officially at least, never subscribed to racism or to any form of fascism. Others do. We need to understand the politics of division more than ever.
The publisher kindly supplied an e-book for review purposes.
Displaying 1 of 1 review