On Muslim Integration

In a Radio New Zealand programme Asian Report, Muslim Women’s Camp, broadcast on the 4^th of October 2011, a 13 year old girl makes what to my ears is an extraordinary statement, “I’m from India and I was born here.”

I am sure my attitude is commonplace when my national identity is questioned, to describe myself as, “I am a New Zealander, born in England but have lived here fifty-two years.”  My primary identity is as a New Zealander, notwithstanding having been born overseas. Yet here is an NZ-born girl who considers her primary identity to be Indian.

This programme was useful in highlighting other issues of New Zealand Muslims as they attempt to integrate without assimilating, to become New Zealanders while holding onto a culture, society and religion which are antithetical to so much that mainstream New Zealanders unwittingly take for granted.

The camp participants wear hijabs when in public.  Yet one of the leaders says, “It’s about connecting the youth to the land so that they feel because they are here, they are Kiwi Muslims, they are New Zealanders and recognising that this is their land as well as knowing the traditions… We are teaching them the history of New Zealand knowing what it is and allowing them to see themselves as part of this community.” Yet keeping themselves apart.

The girl quoted above, and others on the programme, make themselves identifiably Muslim by the way they speak.  There is, in England, and no doubt in all countries with high levels of Muslim immigration, a trend to a Muslim accent which the TV character Ali G reifies.  It is an overlay on the regional accent, yet common to all regional accents when spoken by Muslims.  I’ve seen little research on this and its origins, though I suspect it may be faux Arabic via Middle Eastern imams who are contracted to mosques in the United Kingdom and elsewhere.  Having frequently heard such speech on BBC news and documentaries, it seems to operate on the level of a patois without a vocabulary, in contrast with, say, that of a Jewish or Black enclave.  Put another way, its culture is not living or creative; it is simply one of vocalised identity.

The accent stems in part from the shibbolethic pronunciation of ‘Muslim’ by Muslims.  The ‘u’ is a sound not heard in NZ or native English, lying midway between ‘moon’ and ‘mud’, whereas the English / New Zealand pronunciation is as in the latter.  Other words with a similar ‘u’ sound to ‘mud’ are changed in the same direction.  An example from this broadcast is ‘culture’, and this may be due to a high use of the word in terms of their identity.  While I’ve not seen this commented on, G K Chesterton made mention of it in The Flying Inn of 1914: 

It was fully four minutes before she could understand a word the man was saying: he spoke English with so extraordinary an accent that she supposed at first that he was talking in his own Oriental tongue.  All the noises of that articulation were odd; the most marked was an extreme prolongation of the short “u” into “oo” as in “poo-oot” for “put”.

It is interesting then, to hear this accent develop in New Zealand, making it a worthwhile pursuit for a phonetician. 

Muslim Women’s Camp was brief, just eleven minutes, but carried insights into NZ Muslim’s attitudes to integration which are unlikely to be commented on elsewhere.  The reason for this will be difficult to understand for people whose culture and sense of history has been diluted to the point where they no longer recognise it.  To them, ‘all people are basically the same,” without realising that their underlying assumption is “like me.”  They could not be more wrong.