Planned Monument To Muslim British Soldiers Ignites Wider Political Debate
A new monument will recognize the hundreds of thousands of Muslims who fought for Britain under the Commonwealth banner.
The British government announced that $1.2 million (1 million GBP) would be allocated to erecting the monument.
“Whatever your faith or color or class, this country will never forget the sacrifices made for our future,” said Jeremy Hunt, a politician serving as chancellor of the Exchequer, a senior minister representing the crown within the British government.
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The recent announcement is part of a growing effort to share a more inclusive view of the Commonwealth. In recent years, there have seen a number of monuments meant to provide a more inclusive view of British history. This year, the Commonwealth of Nations may elect the first-ever Muslim in the history of that organization.
The announcement has sparked a social media uproar from critics on both the left and right who saw the move as a sop from the ruling Conservative Party to court Muslim voters ahead of a general election expected later this year.
Sajid Javid, a member of the British Parliament who is Muslim and a former cabinet secretary, has been part of a group that has long advocated memorial be built in the National Memorial Arboretum.
“The war memorial was well overdue in circumstances where the contribution of war horses and dogs had been commemorated,” said Zaid M. Belbagi, associate member of the National Muslim War Memorial Trust, “but not the sacrifices of the some 2 million Muslims that fought on behalf of the allies. it was the earnest wish of the late Lord Mohammed Sheikh that this memorial be erected, not only as a reminder but as an educational trust to promote the role of British Muslims in society.”
At the local level, a number of British cities have unveiled statues and monuments to Sikh, Muslim and Hindu soldiers.
The British city of Leicester unveiled a new statue to Sikh soldiers in 2022. In 2018, an earlier mural to Sikh soldiers had been vandalized. Some 83,000 Sikhs died in both world wars. This representation has expanded to other areas of public life. A scene in the film 2019 Oscar-winning film “1917” features a Sikh soldier. A monument in Brixton unveiled in 2017 was the first to African and Caribbean soldiers, with many of the former having been Muslim.
The earlier monuments to mark Hindu, Muslim and Sikh soldiers within England occurred while the fighting of World War I still raged on.
The Muslim Burial Ground was commissioned in 1915 near Britain’s first purpose-built mosque in Woking. The burial ground was commissioned in response to German propaganda criticizing the treatment of Muslim soldiers and is today a peace garden. A permanent memorial was built in 1921, near coastal Brighton, to denote the site where Hindu and Sikh soldiers were cremated during the war in keeping with their religious beliefs.
This year, the Commonwealth of Nations is set to name a new secretary general at an election. Many are wondering if a Muslim will be named secretary general for the first time. The Commonwealth of Nations includes over a dozen member states of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. Of the four countries with largest Muslim populations in the world, only Indonesia is not a member of the Commonwealth.
The Commonwealth is a voluntary association of 56 nations that are home to 2.5 billion people. Of these, 33 members are small states. Due to the rotation process, the next secretary general will likely be from Africa.
Among the leading contenders this year are Ghana’s Ayorkor Botchwey and Gambia’s Foreign Minister Mamadou Tangara.
“There is a new era of inclusivity in the Commonwealth that hopes to inspire a new era of cooperation on equal terms between the Global North and Global South,” said Christine Odera a former Commonwealth secretariat employee working on peace and security issues, “in that spirit the election of a skilled leader who also happens to be Muslim like Tanggara makes sense.”
Joseph Hammond is a former Fulbright fellow in Malawi and a journalist who has reported extensively from Africa, Eurasia and the Middle East. Hammond is also part of the Interfaith Dialogue on Violent Extremism (iDove) at the African Union. He speaks enough Spanish and Arabic to discuss boxing, a sport he treasures.