Muslims, Trust and Cultural Dialogue

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Recent high-profile interventions by politicians in the West declaring the failure of multiculturalism have had, as their very thinly disguised context, mistrust in those Muslim communities that have been growing in Western Europe and the United States since the end of the colonial era. While a certain amount of expediency and projection may be read into such utterances, the sense that multiculturalism has been a flawed experiment - and the idea that unintegrated Muslims are evidence of this - has become a truism of much journalism and media coverage too. Important work, particularly in the social sciences, is ongoing to identify the domestic and international factors leading to Muslim alienation within Western society. Thus far, however, political, cultural and philosophical questions of trust - how it is built, how it operates and how it can be undermined - have largely been overlooked in favour of a rush to judgement and a clamour for decisive action of one kind or another. This multidisciplinary project will serve to rectify this oversight by analysing the conditions of trust and mistrust in a number of areas of social and cultural life. As such, it will help to nuance and further the Global Uncertainties core interest in ideologies and beliefs. It takes the form of a network of scholars, non-academic partners and stakeholders, under the direction of Dr Peter Morey of the University of East London, who will come together to explore questions of trust and trust building in politics and society, culture and the arts, and business and finance. The geographical focus is on Britain and the United States, where thorny questions about the place of ethnic and cultural minority groups have taken on an added (and sometimes vitriolic) urgency, although the variety of diasporic communities that make up Muslim minorities in these countries mean that we will also engage with cultural practices and values born in South Asia and and the Arab world too. Through workshops, roundtable discussions, scholarly publications, exhibitions, video material and the Internet, we will build a platform for the latest thinking on intercultural trust, both at the theoretical and intellectual levels, and in everyday practices. An interactive website will be the first port of call for information, discussion, disseminating findings and archiving events. In addition, we will be building a web collection on Muslims and intercultural trust with the British Library which, taken together with the other outputs, will form a solid and evolving empirical and theoretical basis for understanding how trust is understood and enacted in contemporary multicultural societies.Muslims, Trust and Cultural Dialogue is committed to understanding how existing practices in a variety of cultural arenas enact dialogue and negotiation between groups in ways that can help us move beyond misunderstanding and negative stereotyping. It aims to provide a foundation of thoroughly researched knowledge that can then be used to build and shape dialogue at the level of community organisations and policy making. We will make significant interventions in public debates about intercultural dialogue and questions of trust: to explore how trust is created and how it can be nurtured as well as undermined; to empower groups utilising the various mechanisms of civic engagement; and to provide those engaged in political and social policy-making with a better understanding of how their activities affect others and how trust and dialogue can make them more effective.