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Policy discourse around 'community cohesion' has displaced liberal multiculturalist and anti-racist approaches with a much narrower focus on the promotion of 'British values' and, for minority communities, through a 'faith' agenda. We argue that these developments derive from the predominance of the doctrine of communitarianism within the contemporary policy terrain, influencing both New Labour and the Conservatives. The convergence of this with neoliberal social and economic imperatives has created a discourse of 'conditional citizenship' for Muslim communities particularly. There is a major policy contradiction where faith based approaches are promoted on one hand, but, in the context of transnational Islamist terror, lead to whole Muslim communities being pathologised as 'insufficiently British' on the other. We discuss the 'Trojan Horse schools' affair in Birmingham in 2014 as an example of this. We conclude in calling for an urgent refocussing of the debate toward secular approaches in policy, alongside looking at the specific economic and social conditions that we argue are the root cause of breakdowns in community cohesion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to critically examine the emergence of contemporary religious fundamentalisms and how they have been able to acquire influence in a way that has opened new ‘fault lines’ within multiculturalist public policy discourse. Specifically, the paper is interested in understanding the curiously paradoxical place of religion and faith based groupings in the contemporary multicultural polity, and the confusion, and in some instances conflicts, this has caused amongst the Left. This is illustrated through an extended examination of the Shabina Begum case concerning a Muslim schoolgirl and her demands to wear the jilbab, a specific religious headscarf, to school. It is argued that, in part, these ideological fault lines have resulted from an uncritical embrace by some progressives of ideas associated with postmodernist thinking; in particular the uncritical assertion of virtues of anti-universalism and cultural relativism. This then leaves an urgent task for progressives to think through some alternatives based on a re-articulation of a new political discourse of egalitarianism which is unashamedly universalist and secular. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]