Ashish Ghadiali,Tariq Ramadan and Moazzam Begg in studio conversation about 'The Confession', 2016. All rights reserved.Rosemary Bechler (RB): This summer you have
been on tour around Britain with showings of your documentary film, The Confession, followed by studio chats with Moazzam Begg – what drew you to
this man and this process?
Ashish Ghadiali (Ashish): I set out to make a
cinematic documentary. I felt it was important to get this story and this
character into a space where it wasn’t being cut down to 10-second soundbites.
When I asked Moazzam if he would be interested
in participating in this project, I said to him that my sense was that although
he was ubiquitous, he had become a kind of cardboard cut-out within the
framework of contemporary media, someone who was wheeled on to represent a
point of view that was already pre-packaged and formulated.
I thought it was important to give space to the
experience and to the humanity of the man in order to understand better what I
think has been a cultural shift in Britain and around the world, under the
heading of the ‘war on terror’. It
was important to… understand better what I think has been a cultural shift in
Britain and around the world, under the heading of the ‘war on terror’.
RB: Is that something that has concerned you
for a long time, Ashish?
Ashish: Yes, instantly. Because my life changed,
maybe slowly from 9/11 to 7/7, but there was a sense of something in the air.
After the July 2005 terror attacks, I was suddenly being stopped and searched
maybe once, maybe twice on the way to work, and that was upsetting because it
was very clearly racial profiling. I would go into work in situations where I
was the only non-white person in the room, and express that feeling of different
treatment, and find that there was often sympathy, but often something less
than sympathetic, a sort of growing sense that maybe it was OK that extra
precautions were being taken, and that it wasn’t the end of the world, was it?
People were scared, and they thought it was an understandable reaction. I too
understood all of that. But it was a rupture in my own sense of identity.
There I was, a very confident British citizen,
being asked by my Oxbridge-educated peers, people with ambitions to be the
establishment, to get my head around accepting this different sort of
treatment. With that acceptance, of course, they were entering a different way
of thinking that basically denies my equality. I reacted really strongly. I was
working in television at the time and my job was to develop ideas within
factual entertainment and I was the only brown face in the team. For me it
became essential that we now started to reflect on these issues that were going
on, on the ground. The idea that
this experience was my niche experience and not part of our collective
experience was damaging.
Up until that point British multiculturalism was
something that we were proud of. This was before Trevor Phillips, who was made
Chair of the Commission for Racial Equality, became a pioneer of the shakedown.
I was close to that whole thing. I used to work for one of his close friends,
the company that made the recent Trevor Phillips film about ‘what British
Muslims really think’. At the time, I remember his criticism of
multiculturalism seemed outrageous, the ambition of someone trying to work his
way deeper into the establishment. But it didn’t feel threatening. It didn’t
seem to threaten my multiculturalism, which was simply hegemonic.
After 7/7, however, one instantly entered a
different world, of living in someone else’s paranoia. I tried to push that
experience through within my work and it was immediately bounced back at me as
being ‘niche’. Token efforts not to shut it down would quickly descend into
farce. The closest I did get to expressing anything on the subject, I remember,
was talking to an Evening Standard reporter about it outside Whitechapel tube
station on the way to work. That ended up with a photo of me in the paper and a
strapline saying, “I feel like a pariah” – which then became a running
joke. The response in the workplace was
to get that, and stick it up on the wall! All in all, the experience of that
time made me distrust the media establishment as a place where I would be able
to express my voice. The idea that this experience was my niche experience and
not part of our collective experience was damaging.
At this point, one has to foreground the
fact that the BBC commissioned this film, The Confession. It would not have
got off the ground had it not been for them!
But in 2005 I quit my job in TV and left the UK,
because of my very strong reaction to this. By chance, in between the two
terrorist attacks I went on a holiday to India and there was another terrorist
attack there. But nobody suspected me of being part of the problem in India.
So up till then I had
been speaking about this issue of race in optimistic terms – that is for 25 years – as a British
Asian. It had always seemed to me that my identity was something that the
culture embraced, as represented in the novels of Hanif Kuresihi or Zadie
Smith, the works of Talvin Singh or Nitin Sawney. This was something I was very
confident about – despite the fact that there had always been a whisper that
says, “You are not the same as the white majority and they don’t think of you
as the same.” But up till then it was not a voice I gave much time to. All of a
sudden it was a takeover, a wakeup call, you know! It’s time to think about
race – it really is time for me to understand myself through the lens of race. It filled me with a great desire to understand
the experience of non-white people in the world.
And it filled me with a great desire to
understand the experience of non-white people in the world. There are many
borders dividing them and it is a fragmented world, but it is one in which I
can sit in a tourist site in Iran and until I speak, people are convinced that
I am Iranian. In Egypt or Palestine, Singapore
or India, it is the same. For ten years my experience was across all of
those spaces, and I really needed that to build up a new rooted sense of self.
That is what I had to do at the time.
To be honest, it was probably an artist’s
journey, in search of identity, much in the same terms that Moazzam Begg frames
his story about travelling out across the Islamic world in quest of his
own identity as a Muslim. And there were mirrors of the same sort of quest
undertaken by relatively privileged people that I read along the way.
At some point along that journey, I wasn’t
sure if I was coming back to the UK. I could see the way that things were
turning – like the concerted declaration of the failure of
multiculturalism – that didn’t fill me with any sense that something good was
going to come out of all this. The reports from back home were of the rise of
the EDL, of UKIP’s progress across England, and I was thinking about the
ongoing legacy of colonialism and wondering about an authentic way of living in
the world.
I went to film school in Singapore for three
years and then I started looking around for opportunities. It was about
economic opportunity as much as anything, and ambition, wanting to make the
films I wanted to make, and looking around for a place to make those films
where I wasn’t ‘niche’.
I worked in Bollywood for a year. I set up a
film unit in Jenin refugee camp. I was a peripatetic screenwriter for a while
living between Berlin and the south of Italy and working on commissions for an
Austrian producer, so there were various experiments. Eventually I came to the realization that I was longing
for Britain, wet weather, Derbyshire where I grew up.
Eventually I came to the realization that I was
longing for Britain, wet weather, Derbyshire where I grew up. So in the year
before I started this project with Moazzam Begg, I ended up living in the house
that I grew up in and clearing it out, clearing out thirty years of ‘stuff’,
and realizing how much more polarized things had become, how deeply undermined
the language of multiculturalism had been, how real the rise of UKIP was. We
didn’t know that Brexit was imminent, but we did know that there had been a
material change.
One thing that really did that for me was the
2012 Jubilee! Suddenly I lived in Royalist Central. That had never been the
case previously – so much fanfare and flag-waving took place that summer. I
felt kind of removed from it. But as I was really trying to understand that
question of identity, it also became absolutely clear to me that Britain was
my home, and that multiculturalism wasn’t just an idea, but a lived reality
for all of us. Our ability or inability to digest that is very much the
battleground of the twenty-first century.
It became very, very clear to me that my
role, my artistic journey, demanded of me that my voice express that reality.
And that actually if you looked at it with a long lens – that little blip – you
know, Robin Cook’s chicken tikka masala moment, switched off by
Cameron’s ‘failure of multiculturalism’, is simply not the story. Our ability or inability to digest diversity
is very much the battleground of the twenty-first century.
The story is ultimately the story of human
history, and the migrations of the twentieth century are really only the seeds
of a new way of living collectively, that must emerge. But the culture for that
process hasn’t yet been created, and that is our job.
RB: I have been talking to Nando Sigona
from Birmingham University about superdiversity in the UK and everywhere else. It seems remarkable, given the
rapidly evolving levels of mixture by no means confined to London, that we are
so in denial, and trapped by an ascendant, monocultural National Us.
Ashish: There is a direct line, I think, from
the rhetoric of ‘integration’ to the bombing of civilians in Syria. That kind
of liberal interventionist muscle comes from the same place as that call for
‘integration’ meaning assimilation. Nobody calls for the ‘integration’ of
Etonian Cabinet ministers – they should do! – but the sheer arrogance of that
call for you to ‘integrate’ with me – this is obviously not a viable offer, and so it is
always going to be disappointed, and so the result is always going to be
violence.
Anyway, I spent that year in the house of my
childhood, and in the summer of 2014, at exactly the same time, ISIS conquered
Mosul. Videos started to appear of British foreign fighters in the Middle East
and a new wave of hysteria rose up. And I had a different lens on it. I was now
engaging with the media as a construct and not as my reality.
Let’s be clear, the war on terror was an utter
failure. Terrorism is a much much greater problem now than it was in 2001, and
there is a fairly clear line of causality running from the responses of the
American and the British governments to the roots of the terrorism on the
ascendant now. Why this is, is a difficult thing to talk about, because we live
in an era of epic secrecy. We don’t know. And it is very important not to be
mistaken for a conspiracy theorist when dealing with this material. But it is
also really important to my bigger project that I don’t want more polarisation.
I want more collective thinking and more rationality. Nobody calls for the ‘integration’ of Etonian Cabinet
ministers – they should do!
So there are two ways of looking at it. There is
the great conspiracy theory that a bunch of neocons sat around and realised
that if they go for the oil, create chaos in the Middle East, then that is
basically an opportunity to consolidate the military industrial complex and dominate the twenty first century.
There is a second way of looking at it, which is
that in a unipolar world, asymmetrical warfare was always likely to escalate as
a strategy, and that you are dealing at some level with consciousness, and
degrees of consciousness.
On the project I was working on in the Jenin
refugee camp where I lived, the idea was to give an opportunity for self-expression
and voice to a community that had been devastated by the 2002 Operation
Defensive Shield, which was, at the time, the location of the highest concentration
of suicide bombers in the world.
In a place like that, what is it that appears to
a young teenage boy living in those conditions as a political act ? What it is
might be entirely counter-productive. It might sow the seeds for the total
decimation of his people, of his way of life, and it might feed into the
spectacle that counter-insurgency requires to justify its own excesses.
But the fear that comes from terrorism, while it
is also manufactured, is also real. And so it simply leads to a process of
escalation. This account says that there is no great mind behind it all. But
that what we are witnessing is actually a failure of mind.
So my conclusion is this. Let’s assume the
latter. Because the problem with the war on terror and the problem that it has
made dominant, is that too many people make unfounded accusations, accusations
not founded in evidence. I was
now engaging with the media as a construct and not as my reality.
Let’s assume it is the latter and that one thing
has led to another and is spiralling out of control. What do we as concerned
citizens need to worry about? What is the course of action that we need to
start pursuing ?
To my mind what we need to address is that this
is leading towards the destruction of our civil liberties and our basic
freedoms, and the rise of a new authoritarianism that is increasingly taking
over aspects of western democracy, Donald Trump not being the least of these
threats.
That new authoritarianism is seeking in all
kinds of ways to limit the space for political oppositional forms, whether it
is through trade unions, forms of freedom of expression in schools or
universities, whether it is the right of health workers to maintain the
confidence of their patients, or social workers to maintain the confidence of
their clients. All of these aspects of civilization as we know it are up for
grabs at the moment.
And so the rational attitude that I feel we need
much more of now is just to look at that and say – OK, well, first of all, is
this what we want? I believe that the majority of British citizens don’t want
to live in a world where they are less free. That this is not the arc that is
desired for the twenty first century. So, then we must ask, what is the
narrative that has been driving this? And why? And I think art might be a key
protagonist in all this.
Next week: Moazzam Begg and The Confession.
