Sadiq Khan, The Elected London Mayor. Moslem or Not - So What?

Photo source: NewsZone365

Labour’s Sadiq Khan, a progressive minority whose father was a bus driver from Pakistan, has been elected mayor of London. He decisively beat his Conservative rival Zac Goldsmith, a son of a billionaire, after what was seen as one of the most rancorous British electoral contests in recent years.

Even before Khan’s victory was formally announced many senior Tories criticized Goldsmith for his tactics, which involved trying to associate Khan with extremism by focusing on Islamists he has shared platforms with in the past.

His election as Mayor of London made him the first actively affiliated Muslim to become mayor of a major Western capital and gave him the largest personal mandate in British electoral history. His victory ends eight years of Conservative control of City Hall.

On his victory speech, he praised London for resisting Goldsmith’s scaremongering: "This election was not without controversy and I’m so proud that London has today chosen hope over fear and unity over division. I hope that we will never be offered such a stark choice again. Fear does not make us safer, it only makes us weaker, and the politics of fear is simply not welcome in our city."

Now here goes my two cents :

I am not posting this to boast about his religious identity. Religions are inevitably part of our culture, whichever you chose or were made to believe. I can understand that it can be one of the things that shape us, as a believer or non believer. But I am not going to join the troops of people who frame Sadiq Khan's victory as a moment that indicates the resurrection of a so called Islamic renaissance. Two things : That is NOT what's happening and definitely NOT how this event should be portrayed, in my opinion. Although Sadiq and his team managed to turn the table and made used of the personal attacks against his religious identity and cultural upbringing to garner sympathy from the voters - which worked out pretty well. However racists you might actually are on the inside, in today's society, harassing minorities with negative stereotypes is considered despicable and unacceptable and the consequences to foster or back up this attitude could be very damaging to your own political career.

But please don't tell your kids or the less informed people that "There is a Moslem man that just beat a Christian in London Mayor election."

That is an ignorance-coated oversimplification, the same mental engine behind the association of Islam with terrorism, stereotyping all Moslems in the world as uneducated barbaric radical fools.

Aren't we all bored to hear people say, "Well, he did this heinous thing in the name of God, he's a Moslem - well, no wonder" or "Look, someone did a great thing and he's a Moslem, Alhamdulillah, the time has come for the world to know that Islam is great"

These comments are standing on a strikingly different ground in the spectrum, one is all the way far on the right side and one on the other. But they do have one thing in common : they promote lazy thinking. It forces people to conjure up some kind of correlation between achievement and faith; instead of advising them to judge people rather based on their merit.

On one side, people want others to stop generalizing them. But on the other side, they also let themselves to gravitate towards "this is my people" way of thinking which generates sense of exclusivity.

People can be good or bad for many different reasons, it is a silly oversimplification to say that your religious standpoint alone could sustain the mental endurance which is the sine qua non of the pursuit of your life's objective - whatever that is. There are things like greed, ego, pride, ethics, politics, pressure, parenting, expectation, self interest, conscience, compassion that could drive one's failure and success.

What we must remember of Sadiq Khan are his work ethics, his years of track record in politics and his services as a human rights solicitor. I can't disagree though that having a minority representative (be it a Moslem, LGBT or certain ethnic background) in the office would set a very positive political precedent.

But if you want to have an easy talk to your children about the news pertaining to London mayor election. Tell them, a story of a bright independent child, brought up by working class parents, working odd jobs from delivering newspaper to labouring on a building site while in school, studying hard to get his academic credentials, fighting for the human rights of the forgotten and the underdogs; and just recently, majority of Londoners have chosen him to be their mayor.

Who won this battle again? A progressive mindset and strong work ethics that his hard working parents passed down to him.