Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: Please don't make us out to be angels

'Islam destroyed the Zoroastrian faith in Persia, and when the Prophet's troops took Medina, the Jews there were enslaved'

British Muslims are not devils; nor are they angels. They are simply human with all the flaws, talents, terrors and hopes of other human beings. Since the Seventies oil crisis they have been represented mostly as barbarians, terrorists, rioters (a new image added since the disturbances in Oldham and Bradford this summer) or uneducated peasants who still live in the 7th century.

Bombings by Palestinians in the Eighties, the Satanic Verses inferno, then the Gulf War and a train of anti-heroes (in western eyes) such as Ayatollah Khomeini, Gaddafi, and Sadam Hussein have long fed and sustained the stereotypes. And these are not only the views of the uneducated. The Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntingdon, Willy Claes, the former secretary general of Nato, Fay Weldon, and the defence correspondent Clare Hollingworth, all believe the world conflict today is between Islamic and "Western" values.

The fact that most Islamic states are scandalously inept and inhumane and the undoubted fanaticism, oppression and bad leadership among some Muslims in this country makes it hard to argue against these views. The result is that millions of Muslims world-wide, including those who seek peace, and who are generous, educated, creative and progressive all stand condemned.

This must be why the BBC devoted the last fortnight to positive programmes about British Islam. The corporation does this from time to time, providing an over-rich feast at the end of long years of enforced fasts, usually when complaints about exclusion and misrepresentation get too loud to ignore. Muslims inside and outside the BBC have been fighting for three years for this to happen. Black Britons get such concessions too. It is questionable whether this is a proper substitute for an ongoing incorporation of these British voices, but that is another argument.

A number of programmes revealed the lives and thoughts of British Muslims and examined their experiences of Islamophobia which, as Home Office research suggests, is a very real problem now in this country. Some women who decide to wear the hejab have lost their jobs and other Muslims are openly discriminated against without redress because we have no protection against religious prejudice.

We saw the ordinary lives of British Muslims. The most effective of these was a documentary showing what goes on inside one British mosque where, besides prayers, family counselling, divorce arrangements and other issues are handled. A small committed group of young Muslim footballers was filmed. It was endearing to see the men all praying on the fields, eating kebabs and talking about how they had no desire to get pissed in pubs after games.

Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen and Diarmuid Gavin were tamed and drained by a sassy young Muslim woman who wanted them to transform her suburban home into something which was not "just clichés about Morocco" but about her kind of living and breathing western Islam. Jools Holland presented a range of Islamic musicians – Africans, African Americans, Pakistanis such as the late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and one of our own most extraordinary musical talents, Najma Akhtar, who has performed at Ronnie Scott's. Most British Muslims will, I imagine, feel temporarily satisfied. White Britons too have been genuinely astonished to see how little they knew about Islam and Muslims.

The problem with any such redemptive venture, however, is that there is a terrible reluctance to engage with anything controversial or to reveal the dark sides which we all know exist. Muslims were turned into angelic people who were only ever victims, never violent or unfair themselves.

It is true that the message of Islam spread peacefully along trade routes but that is one part of the story. Military conquest is the other. The history programmes, well made though they were, dangerously glossed over the coercion, the forced conversions which are also part of the expansion of the Islamic Empire. In some places and periods, such as in enlightened Muslim Spain from 711 to 1492, Christians and Jews lived in harmony. But Islam destroyed the Zoroastrian faith in Persia, and when Prophet Mohamed's troops took over Medina, Jews in that oasis were enslaved. As one Muslim scholar said to me this week: "I was very pleased that the good aspects of Islam were shown. But to keep out our faults, that is very worrying. We must reflect on our shortcomings past and present, otherwise we are being treated as children." Note that she did not want her name mentioned.

Contemporary life, too, is more complex than we were given to believe. It is determined by both structural inequality suffered disproportionately by British Muslim communities and problems from within. Young Muslim women are doing very well and coming up, but a programme last week on the BBC (not part of the feelgood series) showed how many are still not allowed to go to college or to have a say in who they marry. It would have been good to have a discussion among Muslim scholars about how modern Muslims are forgetting (to their cost) some civilising principles of Islam. The concept of ijma, making decisions through mutual consultation, for example, is a central value. So why does authoritarianism define so much of what is happening in communities and countries?

Extremely important philosophical debates about Allah, free will and determinism are needed, says the prolific writer Zia Sardar. He argues that Islam spread and survived (when it was not using the sword) by diversifying, debating, assimilating and developing while holding to the eternal tenets and principles of the faith. Paranoia and ossification will not help Muslims to face the challenging future.

Islam has long been a part of Europe and was much admired too for its intellectual tradition, aesthetics and goods. Samuel Johnson thought Christians and Muslims were civilised and all others were barbarians. Muslims read the Greeks and western scholars learnt from Muslims. Instead of showing the connections, the programmes were crudely competitive arguing, as discredited Afro-centrists in the US do, that the truly great advances were all made by Muslims and only Muslims.

My final worry is that this series assumed that British Muslims have no connection with other faiths or ethnic groups and now claim only a single, purified, glorified identity. This depressing dislocation, evident among some fundamentalists since the Rushdie crisis, can only harm us all. You see the separatist tendencies in universities and the streets. Again the BBC could have had a studio discussion between young Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus to talk this through.

We Muslims must rediscover a sense of civic citizenship instead of an angry religious one which trusts no one and nothing outside a narrowly understood Islam. The people of Sarajevo are celebrating the slow return of this civic identity this week with a major festival. If they can do this after the horror they experienced so recently, we British Muslims can do so too.

y.alibhaibrownb@independent.co.uk