CAIRO, May 16, 2006 (IslamOnline.net) – A government-backed study has concluded that the Muslim minority in Britain faces some of the most acute conditions of multiple deprivation, which a leading Muslim activist blamed on Downing Street for only paying lip service to Muslim social woes.

"This is not the first study to demonstrate that British Muslims are living in the poorest situation among the other religious minorities in the country," Anas Al-Tikriti, the former president of the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB), told IslamOnline.net on Tuesday, May 16, over the phone from London.

"This is the second study or research of its kind we have seen over the past three years," he added.

"The problem is firstly what is being done by the government to alleviate this problem," said Tikriti, now Chief Executive of The Cordoba Foundation, a research organization working with the decision-making bodies in Britain and Europe to promote dialogue.

The report, which was released on Sunday, May 14, revealed Muslims were more likely than any other faith group to be jobless and living in poor conditions.

The study, conducted by university researchers in Birmingham, Derby, Oxford and Warwick, said 14% of Muslims aged over 25 were unemployed, compared with the national unemployment rate of 4%.

Commissioned to review the prospects of faith communities in England, it also found Muslims had poorer levels of education and were more vulnerable to long-term illness.

Britain is home to a sizable Muslim minority estimated at some 1.8 million people.

Tikriti criticized the government for linking terror to the impoverished living conditions of Muslims in the European country.

"The government wants to promote the idea that basically the issue of extremism and terrorism is emerging form poor communities, bad housing and schools and such," he said.

"But it is dangerous to link between terror and poverty because it is simplifying not the problem."

The Muslim activist explained that the people who committed the 7/7 attacks hailed from well-off families and mainstream society.

"They were not living at all in impoverished environment but we were told that one of them was a musician and another a sportsman; as well as they didn't go to bad schools."

A total of 56 people died and more than 700 were injured when four suicide bombers detonated explosives packed in rucksacks on three rush-hour underground trains and a city bus last summer.

"The bombers themselves said that the are going to do what they did because of Palestine, Iraq and so on…they said that their motivation was our government involvement with issues overseas."

Investigations into the terrorist bombings found that the four were motivated by the Iraq war and not by religious fervor.

Tikriti said the government should treat the alarming poverty and unemployment rates among Muslims as a social phenomenon.

"The issue of poor education, housing services and such is a phenomenon in modern British society and are not confined to Muslims," he said.

"We want this kind of report to be taken in isolation of any kind of claim that it is linked or it causes extremism or terrorism because if we do that we will be solving three problems: unemployment and social deprivation, secondly the problem of terror and extremism and thirdly the problem of foreign policy."

The activist asserted that Muslims as well as the government do have a shared responsibility in improving the living conditions of British Muslims.

"First, we as British citizens need to make sure that we demand our right and fulfill our responsibility to the full," he said.

"This entails lobbying our councilors and local councils and the national government in order to change the policies regarding a variety of issues which influence not only the Muslim community but wide sectors in British society.

Tikriti regretted that there are sectors within the Muslim minority who "for some reasons are influenced by a sort of ghetto mentality."

This, he believes, "makes them think that they must live next to other Muslims and go to the same schools and hospitals other Muslims go."

He said rather than spreading throughout society, some Muslims have become enclosed and almost segregated in some parts of England.

"But this is not a phenomenon of British Muslims throughout the country, though it does exist in one or two regions."

Tikriti, however, said the government needs to look at this as evidence on existing Islamophobia and religious discrimination.

"It means that various local governments offer poor services to communities in which Muslims reside in large numbers," he said.