‘To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.’
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Muslims, or, more politely put, the Muslim communities, are described and most often referred to as a monolithic block.
Well they – we – are not.
British Muslims come in many forms. Some are black, some two-thirds are various shades of brown, many are oriental and, yes, some are even white. They originate from all corners of the world, including the continent of Africa and the European mainland, with ancestry which traces back to ancient civilizations in South and Central Asia and Persia; some are simply descendants of your bog-standard Anglo-Saxon.
Some are old, but most are young: a third are under the age of fifteen. They are male, female and transgender; they are straight, gay and bisexual. They are monogamous, polygamous, and some, like the rest of the population, simply sleep around.
Some wear clothing that shrouds from head to toe whilst others insist their ankles are always bare. Many believe that knee-length is modest enough, whilst some are daring enough to flash a little of thigh. Some wear a nikaab (full face veil), some a hijab (headscarf), some a dupatta Benazir Bhutto style; some prefer a bandana or even a half-shaved head. Some show neck, others tease with a little glimpse of cleavage, and some let it all hang out.
They shop at Tesco, Sainsbury, Asda, watch for deals at Lidl and Netto; the posh ones even go to Waitrose, whilst the busy and tech-savvy use Ocado. Some even buy their meat there, whilst others insist on Mr Ali, the halal butcher, and a few won’t eat their chickens until they know for sure they’ve been killed the ‘good way’ by slaughtering them on the quiet in their back garden. Some only trust their brother the kosher butcher to guarantee halal. They love a good bargain, are fans of BOGOF; the young adore the voucher websites, and the elders still prefer the old-fashioned way: ‘I know someone who can do it cheaper.’
They choose private schools and grammar schools and fight like mad for good state-school places. Some get fed up with bad schools and start free schools and faith schools and some even home school. Some attend the mosque five times a day, others once a day, some only on Fridays and some only as a tourist when they visit exotic Muslim lands abroad.
Some use the Christmas break to go on pilgrimage to Mecca because the Saudi weather is at its best; others throw the biggest Christmas parties – tree, crackers and all – and those who don’t celebrate Christmas still have turkey over the festive period. Many use Easter to justify ditching the ‘no chocolate’ diet, some even give up coffee for Lent in solidarity with their Christian brothers and sisters, and those who don’t do any of the above still love a great bonfire and fireworks, we are as fascinated with explosives as the rest of Britain.
Some are writers and campaigners for free speech, others just read. Some read half a dozen languages, most read at least two, and a very small number can’t read at all.
Most speak up to three languages and listen to music in many more. Some act, play instruments, sing and dance. Some denounce fun, and some, like most Brits, have two left feet.
Most worry about job prospects, the housing ladder and finding a compatible other. They use dating sites – singlemuslim.com does a roaring trade – some rely on friends and family to arrange a match. They fall in love, they marry, they divorce. Some are divorce lawyers and judges, some accountants, and lots are doctors, and those that aren’t wish they were. They make pizzas better than the Italians, stir-fry better than the Chinese and sell Bengali food as Indian; one even baked a cake for Her Majesty the Queen. They drive taxis and tubes and buses, they collect your bins and they sweep the streets. They teach your kids, they cure the sick, they fix your teeth, they bank your money and fix your central heating. They police our streets, they gather intelligence both at home and abroad to keep us safe,1 and for over a hundred years they’ve been giving their blood and sweat in our armies to defend the values we all hold dear.
They are boy-band heartthrobs and excel in Great British Bake Offs; they run faster than the world and win Olympic golds; they are football heroes and cricket legends; they are elected members of parliament and members of their Lordships’ house, and one of them is the most influential person in London, our main man, the mayor.
Yes, they are everywhere, all 3 million of them and counting.
And of this 3 million, less than a tenth of 1 per cent over my lifetime have wanted to cause us, all of us, some really serious harm.2
They, the Muslims, are individuals with individual cares, concerns, issues and moans, individuals with individual views and politics who, like people in most communities, spend more time on focusing on differences between themselves than on differences between themselves and others.
Yet rarely a day goes by without a so-called expert on a news channel telling us who ‘the Muslims’ are and what ‘Muslims’ are thinking.
Indulge me and allow me to give you an insider’s track.
We are hard to define because we are so diverse. But there are ‘types’, and I have taken my descriptions from real people, real communities.
Some Muslims have taken the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as their inspiration. They’ve wrapped a towel around their heads, some quite literally, and assumed that if we can’t see them, they can’t see us. Separation and isolation are seen as the only way to preserve Islamic morality, ethics and lifestyles. Isolation is the first line of defence against assimilation. I grew up in a community in Savile Town where many believed this: that as long as we kept ourselves to ourselves and kept our heads down we could potentially live, work and pray without having much contact with the morally bankrupt world of the non-Muslim.
Some from these communities venture out to work, indeed have risen in lucrative professions, but always return to the bosom of the small, closed community, and many, despite their improved financial circumstances, raise their children in more isolated circumstances than their own upbringings, opting for faith schools for their children having attended state schools themselves and favouring jubbas for their kids having grown up in jeans.
We Muslims (like followers of other faiths) have our moralizing, self-righteous lot too. They have an unshakeable belief that they are the chosen ones, irrespective of their conduct or behaviour, and display a cultural and religious superiority that the EDL would relate to. Indeed they are so right that to them most fellow Muslims are beyond the pale. These Trunchbull-like characters live on sanctimonious island and talk consistently of Islamic virtues but possess few.
Then there are those who have ventured out to the suburbs and emulate the urban middle class: nice home, nice cars, nice holidays and, most importantly, nice schools. They enjoy friends from a variety of backgrounds, hold diverse dinner parties and feel comfortably British until the media, the government or even a well-meaning friend tars them with the same brush as some terrorist, at which point they are reminded that they are not ‘us’ they are still ‘them’.
Then there are those who decided many moons ago that, irrespective of where they lived, they would reach out, play their part in wider society, run charities, become governors of schools (although Trojan Horse3 proved that that backfired for some), volunteer and become beacons of interfaith work. Many engage daily in this predominantly pro bono world, though sadly in recent times many have been seen as suspect simply for engaging in democratic life.
There are also those who have either left the faith or have at least stopped hanging out with the Muslims. They hide or reject their Muslimness. Some simply walk away, whilst others take great effort to tell everyone they meet that they are not practising, non-believing. Some go further and vilify the faith and the community; some actually refer to themselves as ex-Muslims to make super sure that their new-found identity is completely clear to the ‘non-Muslims’. Some of these have sadly had some individual bad experience with Islam and Muslims and deal with that experience by imposing it on the whole faith and community of faithful. Some of these are fêted by the media and policy-makers.4
But all of these are, mostly, like the rest of our fellow citizens, trying to earn a crust, bring their kids up well and survive in an environment of rising house prices, global competition for jobs and expanding waistlines.
Most of us dread breaking news, Panorama and Dispatches exposés and front-page headlines in the Daily Mail.
Most in private tell inappropriate Muslim jokes, the types that would send the politically correct brigade into a tailspin; lots still call themselves Muslim but can’t necessarily recall when they last hit the prayer mat, and, as is often the case with religious types, those who shout the loudest about what they know often know very little.
And, yes, some are very devout, pious and deeply thoughtful, although there is no correlation between these types and lengths of beards or headscarfs. And some are very, very conservative, rejecting musical instruments like the Church of Christ,5 wearing clothes that seem to belong to foreign lands, like Haredi Jews, holding deeply illiberal views on homosexuality like some Evangelical Christians and Baptists,6 and having the potential to be deeply sectarian, like supporters of the two Old Firm Clubs, Celtic and Rangers.
Most of us simply want to get on with our lives. We love Britain; it’s where most were born and the only home we know, and we continue to choose it as a home even though with British passports we could pretty much live anywhere in the world. We enjoy our faith and the principles, practices, culture and community it inspires. We haven’t quite worked out how we’ve managed to get into this mess where we have become the bogeymen of the far right, the media and government. Most of us are like rabbits caught in headlights, staring, waiting, frozen, still not sure how to react. We just want to wake up to a news day which is not another bad-news day about bad Muslims; we want the government to engage with us on issues that matter to our daily lives like schools, the NHS and property prices; we want to stop being held collectively responsible for the actions of terrorists across the globe and want someone to switch off the bright, glaring, ginormous LED spotlight that seems to follow us everywhere.
So with all our differences there is one thing we agree on: it really annoys us when we are collectively and individually held responsible for each, every and any individual around the world who just happened to be born into or has adopted the same religion that we were born into.
Most Brits, thankfully, are unlikely to ever experience terrorism, but most Brits are very likely to meet fellow Brits who are Muslim. Among them may be your doctor: British Muslim doctors number in the thousands, the terrorists are in the hundreds, and yet the ad hoc life-takers are used to define British Muslims, not the daily life-savers. If the prism through which individuals, society and policy-makers view British Muslims is set by a terrorist act, if we see our Muslims not as the diverse, complex and varied lot that they are, with the same concerns, anxieties and joys as the rest of us, if we see them as somehow responsible for the actions of terrorists rather than as likely as the rest of us to be victims of them, then we are telling 3 million people that they are part of the problem. And that makes the challenge of fighting the real issue of terrorism more problematic.
To face the challenge together we need to understand them, ‘the Muslims’, who they are, and ‘us’, who we are, and how both fit in to the mosaic that is modern-day Britain.
The Muslims are not new to Britain, nor Britain to them. And although Muslim migration to Britain in any significant way is just over half a century old, an awareness of Islam has been in Britain almost since the inception of the faith in Arabia in the sixth century.
By the early eighth century Islam was already in Europe, eventually ruling most of modern-day Spain, Portugal, parts of France and Italy, Malta and Gibraltar. Tariq ibn Ziyad, the Berber Muslim general who to this day gives his name to Gibraltar – Jabal Tariq, the rock of Tariq – assisted by the dispossessed sons of the recently deceased Visigothic King of Spain, Vitiza, and Spanish Jews who had been persecuted under Christian rule, quickly took territory in Europe and established Muslim rule under the Umayyad caliphate. The Muslims were definitely coming, and had it not been for Charles Martel, a French general who defeated them at the Battle of Tours in 732 near Poitiers, a place less than 350 miles from Dover, we may well have become the United Islamic Kingdom some 1,300 years ago.
This ‘hero of the age’ and ‘champion of the Cross against the Crescent’, a Frenchman, saved the English from the Muslims, and they, led by the Black Prince, Edward, Prince of Wales, chose to ignore this favour some 600 years later by defeating the French in the same spot in the Battle of Poitiers (1356) during the Hundred Years War between the English and the French.7 Now, if the good but not always well-briefed folk of Pegida UK have suddenly freaked out because they’ve just worked out how close we came to being ‘taken over’ by ‘the Muslims’, let me add to your nightmare.
The Anglo-Saxon King Offa of Mercia, who ruled most of modern-day England from Northumberland to Dover, including East Anglia, during his reign from 757 to 796, commissioned a gold coin bearing the Islamic declaration of faith, ‘There is no God but Allah alone’.8 And in 1213, King John of England dispatched the country’s first diplomatic mission to Morocco to make contact with Morocco’s Sultan Mohamed Ennassir. King John, having been excommunicated by the then Pope, hoped he could secure the Sultan and the Almohad dynasty’s support to quash internal uprisings and threats of invasions from other Europeans. According to some sources, in return for an alliance against France and support against his enemies within England, King John offered to convert to Islam and turn England into a Muslim state. The offer was refused and ironically precipitated the Magna Carta, the oft-quoted basis of British values and the settlement of power-sharing in the UK.9 And in 1588, acknowledging the growing strength of the Ottoman Empire in Europe and with Protestant England at war with Catholic Europe, Queen Elizabeth I offered to enter an alliance with the then Ottoman Caliph, Murad III. Both disliked the idolatry of the Catholic Church and had a shared enemy in Hapsburg Spain and both saw the benefits of trade from strong and preferential trade links. Elizabethan England became enchanted with all things Islam. With spices, dried fruits and exotic nuts, with fabrics, jewellery, carpets and ceramics from Persia and modern-day Morocco and Turkey becoming fashionable must-haves for the well-heeled.10
It was during this time that a ragtag of Muslim adventurers, political outcasts and traders started to make journeys to these shores. Some settled, others passed through but left a mark on British homes, dinner tables, fashion and that great Muslim favourite, personal grooming and hygiene. The first Turkish bath opened in London in 1679, whilst Sake Dean Mahomed, an Indian Muslim who came to England in 1784 with Captain Baker of the East India Regiment, took halal hygiene to a whole new level when he was appointed ‘Shampooing Surgeon to his Majesty George 4th’.11
And more recently Queen Victoria, whose loyal subjects included many millions of Muslims in what is modern-day India, Pakistan and Bangladesh and who granted the then Ottoman Sultan Abdul Aziz the Order of the Garter, developed a keen interest in Islam through her close and trusted relationship with her munshi, her valued and respected servant, Abdul Karim from Agra. She supported him in bringing his extended family to England, had a cottage, named Karim Cottage, built especially for them at Balmoral and arranged for meat to be slaughtered for him according to the Islamic tradition. Indeed the monarch’s over-reliance on and interest in the ways of her munshi raised eyebrows and concerns in her court.12
Despite these ‘near misses’, with us potentially becoming an Islamic nation, some Brits over time were quite taken with Islam and in small numbers from about the sixteenth century started converting. John Nelson was recorded as the first Englishman to become a Muslim, having converted some time during the mid 1500s.13 A 1641 document refers to ‘a sect of Mahomatens’ being ‘discovered here in London’.14 Further conversions came in the mid 1600s, and 1649 saw the first English version of the Qur’an, by Alexander Ross.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there were a number of high-profile converts to Islam amongst the English upper classes, including Edward Montagu, who served as a member of parliament and was the son of the British ambassador to Turkey. Indeed, some of these converts attempted to spread the faith amongst their countrymen and women. Academics, politicians, mayors and aristocrats found in this exotic religion an alternative religious life.
A significant few stand out.
William Quilliam, later known as Abdullah Quilliam, was a solicitor born into a wealthy Liverpool family. After his own conversion to Islam in 1887 he converted hundreds of fellow Brits. His book, Faith of Islam, is said to have been ordered by Queen Victoria for her grandchildren. In 1894 the last Ottoman ruler, Sultan Abdul Hamid II, appointed him Sheikh-ul-Islam of the British Isles, the only grand mufti British Muslims have ever had, and he was recognized by the Shah of Persia and the Emir of Afghanistan as the leader of British Muslims.
He established the Islamic Institute, in Brougham Terrace in Liverpool, around the same time as the first purpose-built mosque was established in Woking in 1889. The Institute was eventually sold off and became a Council registry office for births, deaths and marriages, which included records of the marriage of John Lennon and his first wife, Cynthia. It eventually ceased to be so and fell into disrepair before being acquired by the Abdullah Quilliam Society. Its renovation and restoration once more as a place of worship and cultural centre is still underway, although the mosque formally opened its doors again in 2016.15
Henry Edward John Stanley, third Baron of Alderley, for whom formal Islamic funeral prayers were held, and Rowland George Allanson-Winn, fifth Baron Headley, also known as Shaikh Rahmatullah al-Farooq, converted to Islam in 1913 and became president of the British Muslim Society. Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall, born Marmaduke William Pickthall, was someone whom I was aware of as a child because of my first English translation of the Qur’an, which was done by him; this made him a household name in Muslim homes around the world. The son of a clergyman, a Harrovian and a friend of Churchill, he declared his conversion to Islam in dramatic fashion after delivering a talk on ‘Islam and Progress’ on 29 November 1917 to the Muslim Literary Society in Notting Hill, West London. His translation, The Meaning of the Glorious Qur’an, was authorized by Al Azhar University, the world-recognized historic seat of Islamic learning, and praised by The Times Literary Supplement.16 I recently had the privilege of discussing the influence Marmaduke Pickthall had on many British Muslims with his great-great-niece Sarah Pickthall, who feels modern Britain could learn much from his story.
Early British converts faced both outwards to new lands, fostering connections and serving as emissaries for and to Britain, and inwards, combining their English culture and heritage with their faith, despite the prejudice they sometimes faced. These founding fathers of British Islam proved what I have often said: that Islam is not ethnically, geographically or culturally specific, it is indeed ‘a river which takes the colour of the bed over which it flows’.17 It always has, it always will.
But Britain’s relationship with Islam prior to the twentieth century wasn’t merely the preserve of the travellers, adventurers and the converts but was woven through some of our most iconic pieces of literature, art and architecture. The dozens of references by Shakespeare to Islam, such as in The Merchant of Venice and Othello, are but some examples.18
For me it was Chaucer, an author I was introduced to during A-level English Literature, where The Canterbury Tales was a mandatory text. Once I’d worked out Middle English, I became fascinated with that intellect and wit that underpinned Chaucer’s characters. His ‘Doctour of Phisyk’ draws on the knowledge of the Muslim intellectuals ‘Razis’, ‘Avicen’ and ‘Averrois’.19 His references to the Prophet Muhammad as ‘Mahoun our prophete’ and the Qur’an, ‘the holy laws of our Alkaron’, in ‘The Man of Law’s Tale’ are further examples. Although the influence and knowledge of Islam is clear in his writings, his lead baddy, the evil mother of the Sultan, a Muslim trying to force the heroine of ‘The Man of Law’s Tale’, Custace, to convert to Islam, probably reflects the anti-Muslim hostility in fourteenth-century England, less than a hundred years after the end of the Crusades.
The Crusades are probably the single most widely known period of Britain’s contact with Islam, and they weren’t pretty. Started under the Papacy of Pope Urban II in 1096, a series of ‘holy wars’ were fought by the western Christian allies both in defence of the Byzantine empire and their brothers and co-religionists the Eastern Christians and for their own economic and political ends against ‘the Muslims’.
The next two centuries (176 years) saw successive attempts by European kings and clergymen to battle the ‘barbaric’ Muslims. Some battles were won whilst others, because of infighting, inadequate planning and ineffective troops, ended in compromise or defeat. In 1191, Richard I, the Lionheart, king 1189–99, led one of the most successful crusades against an enemy, the Kurdish Muslim political and military leader Saladin, or, as I grew up knowing him, Sallauddin Ayubi. Childhood tales told to us by Dad painted Saladin as a man who was perfect in all ways: learned, brave, compassionate and clever. At the height of his power he ruled modern-day Syria, Egypt, Yemen, North Africa and parts of Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Iraq and most importantly he captured and controlled the holy sites in Jerusalem. He was a man idolized by Muslims and westerners alike: Dante referred to him as ‘a virtuous pagan’ and King Richard called him his ‘favourite opponent’.20
These two icons, the Lionheart and Saladin, grew to respect each other and even in battle amidst holy war found compassion and humanity. Saladin’s sending of fruit and ice to assist King Richard’s recovery when he fell ill and a replacement horse when Richard lost his in battle are two stories that take me back to my pigtails and rara-dress era.
During our childhood Islamic history was taught to us as fairy tales, stories of conquests, battle and strife, but always focused on compassion, generosity and friendship. The story of the very special relationship with Jews during the time of Saladin as during others, his choosing of the Jewish philosopher Maimonides as a personal physician and, on capturing Jerusalem, inviting the Jews, who had been excluded by the Crusaders, to return were lodged firmly in our young minds.
I learned about the ‘Crusades’ at school years later and recall not being able to make the connection between the school narrative of Richard the Lionheart and the baddies he was fighting and my father’s story of the hero who could do no wrong, Sallauddin Ayubi. Maybe it was the way my history teacher pronounced the Muslim names or maybe it was the way he interpreted history, but whatever the reason I didn’t make the connection until much later in life.
By high school I had not only made those connections but become political enough to challenge conventional wisdom. I opted to write about the British Raj for my O-Level History project and, upon realizing that the ‘school version’ of that period in history was remarkably different to the ‘home version’, set about making a nuisance of myself in class. I wanted my version to matter as much as the school version.
It was another example of how British Muslim kids can have two experiences in parallel, how they can be living two presents based on two pasts, where the two aren’t brought into a shared narrative to create a single future. It is something we still don’t do well and something which is needed in these times more than ever before: a teaching of history which is inclusive, an honest discussion of ‘our version’ and ‘their version’ and a commitment to value the heritage of all those that today make this island nation Great Britain. A shared history woven through school in our formative years would teach all children early on that they mattered and belonged, so that all feel that people ‘like them’ had made positive and negative contributions to the world we have today. It was therefore bizarre when the need of the time was for us all to know more history and from different perspectives that Michael Gove, the education secretary, suggested in 2013 a narrowed, myth-supporting version of history which was quite rightly criticized by teachers, academics and historians and labelled as insulting, offensive and dangerous.21 A redraft followed, which included the study of Islamic history at Key Stage 2.
Centuries after the Crusades, we entered another period of history which today is more relevant than ever and still not taught well. A period where instead of the British and the Muslims being locked in holy war and facing each other across the battlefield, we stood shoulder-to-shoulder to protect King and country and defend what these days we like to call British values.
The Muslims, our Muslims, who fought with us during two brutal and bloody world wars, were recruited from across the globe. The need for manpower led to the allied forces recruiting Muslims from many continents. The wars introduced working-class Britain to Muslims, as both the poor in Britain and the poor from our colonies became the front line in our shared war effort. Men from different faiths, different lands, different cultures and speaking different languages fought and died together. Imminent death and patriotism proved a heady cocktail for probably one of our most successful cohesive community moments. Muslims formed a large part of the 4 million-strong British Indian Army contingent in both world wars and were mainly recruited from modern-day Afghanistan, India and Pakistan.22 And had it not been for their timely arrival in France and Belgium in 1914 as the Germans advanced and overwhelmed British troops, ‘the Germans may well have got through to [English]Channel ports … history might well have been different, their contribution was vital’.23
Thousands died. Amongst the youngest were three fifteen-year-olds, Amir, Gulab, and Mian Khan, who lost their lives in Italy. They originated from towns and cities close to the villages where my parents were born, part of the geographical belt where the Martial races – the tribes, casts and clans designated by the Brits as brave and loyal – hailed from and which were seen as a fertile recruiting ground. They proved themselves great warriors, soldiers who followed orders unquestioningly. They were well known for their reckless bravery, and one of them, Khudadad Khan, became the first Indian Army recipient of the Victoria Cross.
Hundreds of thousands were injured. Some of the injured were brought to Brighton, where the Royal Pavilion for two years became a hospital for the war wounded from the Indian subcontinent. The grounds of the Pavilion became a tented gurdwara for the Sikhs and the lawn an open-air Muslim prayer facility. Muslims who didn’t survive their injuries were buried within a short distance of Britain’s first purpose-built mosque, Shah Jahan in Woking. The mosque had been built in 1889 as a collaboration between Dr Gottlieb Wilhelm Leitner, a Hungarian-born British civil servant with a Jewish father, and Shah Jahan, the then Begum of Bhopal, the female Muslim ruler of a princely state in India. It has become the burial place of the early English converts to Islam, Muslim soldiers from across the globe and more recently deceased British Muslims, such as Dodi Fayad, who lost his life alongside Princess Diana in that fatal Paris car crash in 1997 (though his body was later exhumed), and the inspirational and amazingly talented, world-renowned architect Zaha Hadid. The burial ground, now recently restored, has stood through the centuries as a silent witness both to Islam in Britain and the loyalty of British Muslims and is the most poignant rebuke for twenty-first-century Islamophobes, who would love to erase and rewrite our shared history. In government I successfully pushed for government to support projects and events which highlighted these contributions. I wanted us to build our shared future by acknowledging our shared past.
So Britain’s awareness of, and encounters with, Islam reach back over 1,400 years, but Muslim migration to Britain in any real numbers is less than 200 years old. Humayun Ansari, in his book The Infidel Within,24 charts early Muslim migration from the mid nineteenth century as ‘sailors, merchants, itinerant entertainers, servants, princes, students and a sprinkling of people from the professional classes’. Seamen mainly from Yemen, Somaliland and Malaya established a growing community in Cardiff, whilst Indian intellectuals and students started attending English and Scottish universities. The Inns of Court in London became an early favourite. Lincoln’s Inn was where Mohammed Ali Jinnah studied, and it’s where many a British Pakistani parent dreams of their ‘little Ali’ going. The Inner Temple was Mahatma Gandhi’s choice of Inn and holds as much relevance for British Indians.
But even in those early days it wasn’t all exotic and positive. The Muslims who came arrived in different forms and received different responses. The well-to-do, royalty and adventurers fascinated English society, whilst the Indian servants, maids, nannies and footmen of the well-heeled English returning from India, when abandoned, which they often were, had to resort to petty crime and begging and became a menace.
It was the exotic part of these Muslim arrivals that provided the perfect storyline for Julian Lord Fellowes, the creator of Downton Abbey. Lady Mary’s scandalous encounter with the exotic Turkish diplomat, who dies in her bed in the midst of a passionate liaison, was based on a true story, when English high society, politics and the exotic Muslims came together in fact that made great fiction.25
In the early 1900s a number of seamen from Yemen and India docked in England and decided not to return home, instead forming early settled communities in Liverpool, Hull, Cardiff and South Shields. Many married white girls, usually from poor and broken families, and caused outrage in local communities and the media. The concept of ‘shame’, which today Muslim girls are all too familiar with as a tool of control, was invoked by local English communities to describe white girls who were considered ‘shameless’ for engaging in relationships with Arabs, Muslims or coloureds. Families, friends and indeed even officialdom felt it necessary to step in to stop this ‘most difficult problem’, which resulted in the depraved and immoral species of ‘mixed breeds’. And despite evidence suggesting that many of the white women were treated better by the Arabs than by white men and their children were well behaved, well fed and well disciplined, it wasn’t enough to convince the chief constable in Cardiff, who demanded legislation to criminalize relationships between ‘coloured seamen and white women’;26nor did it deter local authorities from urban planning which resulted in Arabs ‘living in a colony by themselves and not mixed up with white people’.27
Even though many of these early Muslim migrants intermarried or cohabited and practised little of their faith, they were still viewed as inferior and uncivilized; they ‘smelled’ different, looked different and were strangers, polluters or, in the more official word, aliens.28
Indigenous English communities felt they were not just taking their jobs but taking their women too. The settlers were too damn integrated, just couldn’t keep themselves to themselves, their own sort and the locals didn’t like them. Interestingly they were probably exactly the kind of Muslims which right-wing commentators today yearn for: intermarried, interfaith, mixed-race, non-practising and fighting to live in mixed communities.
As demand for labourers increased whilst our boys were away fighting in the First World War, Britain saw dramatic and visible increases in Muslim populations in small towns and cities near the shipping industry and docks. These labourers were tolerated while they were needed, but once the war was over they were expected to simply ‘go back home’. Parliament obliged by passing the Aliens Order in 1920, but this was too late for many who, having returned from the war effort, found their jobs had been taken by foreigners. Race riots in 1919 led to white mobs attacking ‘blacks and coloureds’ and demanding their expulsion. Many sought to justify the violence: ‘What blame … to those white men who seeing these conditions (relationships between Arabs and white girls) … and loathing them, resort to violence’ and that ‘such consorting or ill assorting … is repugnant to our finer instincts in which pride of race occupies a just and inevitable place’.29
These sentiments, taken from articles in mainstream British newspapers at the time, would not be unfamiliar today amongst some Muslim preachers and recruiters who seek to radicalize the young and justify violence.
A Conservative home secretary, William Joynson-Hicks, went further, by bringing in the Special Restriction Order 1925, early immigration control, to stop England being ‘flooded with the whole of the alien refuse from every country in the world’,30 with his under-secretary of state singling out ‘the Arabs’ as being particularly problematic.31 The order remained in place for nearly two decades, until once again a wartime need for migrant labour took precedence over racism and thuggery.
However, the discriminatory practices, ill treatment and deportations in the interim both reduced the numbers of Muslims here and discouraged others from arriving. Although some Turkish Cypriots migrated to London alongside Greek Cypriots in the 1930s, and Indian Muslim intellectuals continued to come to British universities, immigration of Muslims generally halted until the 1950s, when a need for labour once more resulted in Muslims from the old colonies coming to work. It was during this period of migration that my family and my husband’s families first started their ‘in-country’ relationship with Britain, having already been part of the empire and served in the British Indian Army.
My maternal grandfather arrived in 1958, my father in 1962, from the Punjab in Pakistan. Some from a nearby village in the Punjab had left in the early 1950s, and the chain reaction of geographical and family connections led to others following. The Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962, which restricted automatic UK entry for certain Commonwealth citizens, including those from India and Pakistan, and the introduction of the ‘voucher’ scheme, which enabled those already in Britain to arrange jobs and vouchers for friends and relatives ‘back home’, resulted in concentrated migration from small village districts, clans and families.
My husband’s grandfather arrived in 1962, and my father-in-law in 1965, from Kashmir. Many of the early migrants from Azad Kashmir, the bit of Kashmir on the Pakistani side of the line of control, came from Mirpur and were families who came as part of either the general voucher scheme or a specific voucher scheme negotiated in the early 1960s by the British constructor of the Mangla Dam in Mirpur for displaced families as compensation for the loss of ancestral land needed for the construction of the dam.
Both areas in Pakistan contributed to large levels of migration during the 1950s and ’60s, as older heads of households and young, mainly single men flocked to the mill towns to work in the steel, textile and car manufacturing mills. They never intended to stay; that’s why they left their families behind. Britain was familiar territory because of the colonial experience; it needed workers, and they needed work. However, controls introduced by the 1962 Act didn’t include dependants, who still enjoyed restriction-free travel to join spouses and fathers in the UK, resulting in wives arriving accompanied usually only by their sons. Many of these early women settled in the boys and ‘went home’.
Both my mum and mum-in-law were part of an early cohort of wives who arrived and settled in the late 1960s. They didn’t go home. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Alongside these Pakistanis and Kashmiris during the same period a number of mainly Sylheti Muslims arrived from the newly established state of Bangladesh after the 1971 Pakistani civil war. And although the Muslim community in the 1970s and ’80s was a significant minority, a large majority of the minority was made up of a handful of different origins: Pakistani and Kashmiris, Indians, Bangladeshis, Cypriot Turks and East Africans.32
But just as Britain was getting to know its now increasing Muslim community, which at that time was still defined through the prism of race and origins, Asian Muslims were getting to know other Muslims and finding both unity and difference through culture, theology and politics. The need to organize as a community to deliver basic needs and specialist services around births, marriages and deaths saw ‘community organizations and leaders’ starting to emerge. Muslim organizations began to develop and reflected both a unity of purpose on practical issues but also the differences within the Muslim communities based on race and origin and also geographical location in the UK.
Before the Muslim migration of the 1950s the home of British Islam was in the south of England. Its main centres were the Shah Jahan Mosque in Woking and its offshoots the Muslim Society of Great Britain, established by Muslim convert Lord Headley, and the Islamic Cultural Centre in Regent’s Park, which sat on land donated in 1928 by George VI in return for land in Cairo provided by King Farouk of Egypt and Sudan for the building of an Anglican cathedral.33
These early institutions had little impact on the ordinary lives of Muslim migrants based mainly in northern England and in Scotland. For those communities a local network of menfolk from similar backgrounds started to establish informal organizations and mosques. Most were small house conversions in residential areas where Muslim communities lived in large numbers. These house mosques still form something like 87 per cent of all mosques in the UK.34 But eventually a need to influence, lobby and engage with officialdom led to the emergence of the more formal community leaders and community organization.
These individuals and groups hit the national conscience in 1988–9 during the scenes of book-burning as Britain’s Muslims reacted to Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, the first political moment in my lifetime when religion became a point of difference. Up to this point ‘the Muslims’ were simply part of a larger group of ‘the Asians’, mainly first-generation arrivals from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh as well as East Africa, including the Asian victims of Idi Amin’s ethnic cleansing of Uganda. And Asians were themselves a part of the larger group of ‘coloured’ people.
Although while I was growing up racial discrimination was overt and at times brutal, religious discrimination was simply not a feature. ‘Asian’, ‘black’, ‘coloured’ and, for the less sophisticated, even ‘Paki’ were familiar terms to describe my lot during the 1970s and ’80s, but ‘Muslim’ was rarely if ever used. My identity was rooted in the colour of my skin; it’s what made me and others like me different. It was a difference which led to many misunderstandings and at times blatant racism. And it started early. Dewsbury had an immigrant centre when I was growing up. Kids like me were sent to it. I’m sure the centre was well-intentioned: it was a stepping stone to proper school for non-white kids, to make Asian kids school ready. But my father insisted we, that is, my sisters and I, were not immigrants: we hadn’t arrived from overseas, we were born in Britain and therefore would go to school, proper school, like others our age. We never went to the immigrant centre but heard many a story about what went on there. One that stuck in my mind was the story about kids being fed stew and dumplings which contained non-halal meat. It was perceived by my parents and their friends as a deliberate act to sabotage their practices, but it may simply have been a lack of awareness about religious dietary requirements at a time when ‘Asian’, not ‘Muslim’, was the identifying ‘other’ feature. But it represented a world I did not want to be part of. To do so would mean that I was an outsider. And I wanted to belong.
High school had its own complications, not least hitting puberty, a moment which most starkly marked Asian girls out as different and thus more likely to be in the firing line for racist insults. Puberty was a moment when a huge red flag went up which said to my parents: the girls are growing up and need protecting. We needed protecting from any exposure to sex and relationships: hence the TV was switched off at 9 p.m., Dynasty and Dallas, the long-running US soaps, were off limits. We needed protecting from inappropriate, immodest clothes, so a compromise was negotiated between local schools and Asian parents to enable trousers to be worn under the school skirt so ensure no bare legs. Hitching the school skirt just doesn’t have the same effect when you simply reveal more polyester. And summer brought its own challenges, when my mum, who was an excellent seamstress, decided that a beautifully stitched silky Pakistani shalwar kameez in the school colour, maroon, was very fetching. Not only was it too cold for British summers but it led to a phrase which I heard often: ‘You smell of curry.’ Dressing differently, not having the mainstream teenage girl’s TV experience and a universal ban on socializing like the white girls defined me as ‘the other’.
Quite a number of the other Asian girls at the school wore a similar uniform, and a few even wore the fine, see-through headscarf known as a dupatta, either wrapped around the neck as a scarf or pinned perfectly Benazir Bhutto style. But there were few hijabs, no prayer rooms, I don’t recall halal food, and we just took the day off school for Eid without any formal fuss. So yes, there was a point of difference, but it was race, ethnicity and culture, not religion.
The racism I encountered was never brutal, and the attitude at home was never defensive enough to mark out the lines of ‘us’ and ‘them’ in my own life. I believe it’s much harder now, where bullying doesn’t stop at the school gates but goes on through social networking, meaning there is no respite. The 69 per cent rise in Islamophobic bullying in schools, according to ChildLine’s annual report in 2013, should concern us all.35
Dad would occasionally end up on the receiving end of abuse and even violence while out cabbing on a Friday or Saturday night, but I saw that as fare-dodging yobs, ‘bad uns’ rather than race attacks. Yes, invariably the attackers were white and the victims Asian, and yes, the term ‘Paki’ would be used, but to me it didn’t feel like a broader battle.
The real victims were a community more ‘coloured’ than us: the black community. It was they who were always on the telly in the middle of some trouble; it was they whom Britain didn’t seem to want; it was they who still seemed to be second-class citizens in the US; and it was they who still didn’t have freedom in Africa. And it was they who inspired me: Trevor McDonald, the iconic News at Ten presenter; Floella, now Baroness, Benjamin. The vivacious Playschool host was my heroine, and my connection of colour with John Barnes made me a lifelong Liverpool FC supporter.
I sensed the blacks had it tough. News coverage of the riots in the 1980s showed housing which appeared many worlds away from our small but tidy semi-detached home. The police action appeared brutal, and the stories always appeared to suggest something inherently wrong about black people, their culture and their values: they weren’t like the rest of us. They had, as my colleague Oliver Letwin, current MP for West Dorset and policy adviser to Margaret Thatcher in the mid 1980s, put it, ‘bad moral attitudes’.36 Today these lazy and insulting stereotypes are reserved for ‘the Muslims’.
The day of Nelson Mandela’s release from Robben Island in 1990, his dignified and determined walk from the prison – the first time I had seen live footage of him – and the subsequent scenes of jubilation will always be one of my memorable political moments of my youth. I was nineteen, and it felt like real change.
So in the 1970s race seemed the political issue both domestically, with civil unrest, a demand for equality and the development of race relations laws, and internationally, with the black civil rights and the anti-apartheid movements. As a teenager what radicalized me was the colour of my skin. It’s what motivated me to protest, to become a part of local action with the Racial Equality Council, to become involved in setting the tone through years of volunteering with the Joseph Rowntree Trust, racial justice work and engaging people in democracy through Operation Black. As the ’80s gave way to the heady ’90s, with many an Asian comfortably yuppified, I could not have predicted that Muslim was slowly to become the new black.
Racial inequality, racism and the deficiencies of racial justice are still problems, and we are far from living up to the equality of opportunity mantra we all trot out. Black boys are still over-represented in school exclusions, underachievement statistics and prison populations, although many of these are Muslim too.37 But what had, certainly before the EU referendum, changed was society’s slow drumbeat of acceptable racism. Politicians using race as a convenient headline and newspapers selling copies off the back of a good anti-black story are now thankfully less acceptable and quite rightly vociferously condemned. Instead, religion has become the new race, the point of difference, the basis of radicalization, the reason for politicization, the other, the problem.
This journey – from race to religion – came in waves, with high-profile events bringing the Muslim communities to the attention of the media, politicians and public. The seminal pre-September 11 Muslim moments in British domestic policy were the Salman Rushdie affair, the protests immediately after and the subsequent 2001 riots in Lancashire and Yorkshire mill towns. Alongside this sit foreign policy moments such as the anti-Soviet Afghan War of the 1980s and its fallout in Pakistan, the genocide of Muslims in the Balkans war of the 1990s and the first Gulf War. All these events gave rise to a sense within British Muslim communities that their sentiments didn’t matter and in the world of policy-makers that Muslims were starting to become troublesome.
The Salman Rushdie affair, the reaction of Muslim communities across the world to a satirical piece of fiction, The Satanic Verses, highlighted a number of flashpoints which had been developing for years and the consequences of which we still see playing out today. Firstly it reidentified British Pakistanis, Indians and Bangladeshis from the Muslim faith as British Muslims rather than British Asians. British Muslims not only formed a group identified by their faith rather than their origins, culture, race or class, but were also identified with a wider group of Muslims around the world who at this moment were all collectively incensed, angered and united in opposition. The Rushdie affair also identified the target of this anger. Yes, Salman Rushdie, a man born a Muslim from South Asia, had written the book, but it was ‘the West’, ‘the colonialists’ who were not responding in the way British Muslim communities expected. The issuance of the fatwa, a religious legal ruling to kill Rushdie, by Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran in February 1989 came within weeks of a number of book-burning protests both in the Lancashire town of Bolton and the Yorkshire town of Bradford. The message from the fatwa signalled to British Muslims that, where their government, the British government, didn’t understand or, worse, didn’t care about the sincerely held beliefs and values of the British Muslim community, a power overseas did. And, worse still, it started to implant the belief that, however successful the community became, it would never be treated the same, as equals to white Brits.
Britain at this time still had blasphemy laws on the statute books, and even though the last public prosecution dated back to 1922 the courts did issue a fine against Gay News magazine in 1977 for the publication of a poem about Jesus which was deemed blasphemous as a result of a private prosecution by Mary Whitehouse, a staunch Christian and socially conservative campaigner.38
The response from politicians in Britain by today’s standards was both measured and considerate, with a clear underlying attempt to calm and reconcile. As the then foreign secretary, Geoffrey Howe, said
the British government, the British people, do not have any affection for the book … It compares Britain with Hitler’s Germany. We do not like that any more than the people of the Muslim faith like the attacks on their faith contained in the book. So we are not sponsoring the book. What we are sponsoring is the right of people to speak freely, to publish freely.39
But Muslims wanted the blasphemy laws extended to them, and they wanted the state to prosecute. They wanted British laws to protect Islam and indeed other religions as they did Christianity. When neither demand was met the government was accused of hypocrisy by British Muslims. These accusations, I believe, stemmed both from misjudged and misunderstood positions and statements both around the blasphemy law and its evolution over the last century. The law was seen by most in politics and the judiciary as a relic of the past and at the time of the Rushdie affair hadn’t been used by the police and the state for nearly seventy years. Britain had become increasingly tolerant of intolerance towards Christianity. Britain’s attitude to all things religious had started to change, and that attitude was simply being reflected in the government’s approach to Islam.
The private prosecution of Rushdie by British Muslims for blasphemy and the subsequent drafting of the particulars of blasphemy by some barristers who themselves were from the Muslim faith showed a number of deep misunderstandings: the failure of the Muslim community to see how Britain had moved on from its historic outrage against all things against God; the failure to comprehend and come to terms with the liberal commitment to freedom of speech; and mostly the failure to read the damn book to enable genuinely informed discussion meant that British Muslims spectacularly failed to be heard.
In reverse, Britain hadn’t even started to understand the depth and sincerity of belief within Muslim communities, and with the exception of some senior figures from faith communities such as the then archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, and the then chief rabbi, Immanuel, later Baron, Jakobovits, Britain failed to grasp what Muslims rightly or wrongly would find deeply offensive and interpret as a personal attack on them. Most notably, the government failed to recognize that if Britain didn’t hold its Muslims close, if it didn’t show them that they mattered and treat them like they belonged, then there would be others more than happy, on this occasion the Iranians and Saudis, to befriend them and shower them with concern and moral support. The more the liberal elite of Britain shouted freedom of expression, the more the Muslims raged about freedom of religion.
As the Rushdie affair played out domestically, an altogether different battle – one with an international dimension – was starting to develop: the battle for who would speak for the Muslim world. Whilst much of the early condemnation was from Saudi Arabia and groups in Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, the homelands of the majority of British Muslims, by issuing the fatwa Iran took pole position, ready and willing to come out leading the collective Muslim sentiment.
The Rushdie Affair resulted in civil unrest across the UK, with over seventy arrests taking place at an anti-Satanic Verses demonstration in London in May 1989, which saw 20,000 men, women and children gather to voice their anger at Rushdie and demand a change to the blasphemy laws.40 More serious attacks and even bombings took place across the globe, and even today the fatwa and the bounty on Rushdie’s head stands.
The seeds of distrust had been sown, and the fallout set the Muslims on a journey of simmering resentment and a narrative of grievance.
A growth of towns and geographical areas with single faith communities, local tensions about homes and schooling and challenges of underachievement both in Muslim communities and white working-class communities formed a bonfire of problems into which the Rushdie Affair threw a match. In the summer of 1989, in the midst the Rushdie affair, Dewsbury experienced a British National Party protest which turned into a riot. The protest by the far right was a show of solidarity towards families who had taken their children out of the local middle school, complaining it had too many Asians in it.41 The BNP chants of ‘Rushdie! Rushdie!’ during the protest had the desired effect and riled local youth.42
A counter-demonstration was organized, and local youths from the Muslim community in Savile Town were only too happy to respond to the rally call. It was a weekend, the weather was good, and this was a moment to be a hero. I was eighteen and at the end of my A levels. Dad was out, but Mum made sure all five of us were securely inside: the streets were not safe for her girls. I recall being scared and excited at the same time. The phone rang a lot, and although I was relieved at being safe I also wanted to be out.
A friend of mine was in town. He had heard the BNP were coming into town to fight the Asians, and at a time before mobile phones and social networking when you needed to know what was going down you went to find out. He recalls being in a large group of Asians, hearing chanting from the ‘others’ but never seeing them. They were pushed into Savile Town, and it took him a number of hours finally to find his way back to Staincliffe, where he was to receive a rollicking from his parents for firstly getting involved and secondly being out so late. He, like many other Asian youths, felt they had been treated like the troublemakers, whilst they felt it was the far right that had come to the town to cause trouble. The provocation by ‘the whites’ and the targeting of a local pub by local Asian youths when pushed back into Savile Town, damaging the premises and cars of locals who were drinking there that Saturday, caused deep divisions and resentment, which even today occasionally rears its head.
The proximity of the Rushdie Affair to the Dewsbury riots and the near single-faith identity of all the non-whites in Dewsbury redefined the Asians as Muslims. As a spokesman from the Muslim Council of Britain said at the time, ‘The Satanic Verses brought them [different ethnic communities] together and helped develop a British Muslim identity.’43 A large majority of the arrests that followed were from the Muslim community; many fewer were from the BNP provocateurs, which left the community feeling it had been punished for defending itself.44
Grievance on both sides started to set in. The Muslim community felt they were being excessively targeted and punished, and white, mainly working-class communities, living amongst or on the edge of growing Asian enclaves, felt their way of life was being threatened. This mutual distrust could simply be viewed as the challenges of different races living ever-separate lives in the same towns, but this sense of mistrust entered an altogether more difficult phase as we entered the era of terrorism and the war on terror.
This narrative of grievance – of being excessively targeted and more harshly punished – once again became a major point of discussion a decade or so later during the court appearances, convictions and sentencing of those accused of taking part in the Bradford Riots during the summer of 2001. The riots, which started on 7 July 2001, exactly four years before the date of the London bombing, as a reaction to the far-right presence in the city centre and the stabbing of an Asian man, became a defining feature in a grievance narrative which pre-dates the more recent challenge of terrorism. The excessive sentencing was seen as ‘one rule for the Muslims, another for the rest’ and it’s a narrative which has gained ever-increasing traction amongst young Muslims over the past eighteen years as they face the consequences of the war on terror and an increasingly hostile policy-making environment.
Much has been written about what triggered the Bradford riots,45 but some facts are indisputable: the growth of the Asian community in Bradford, of which a large part was Muslim; the growth of segregated communities, with parts of Bradford being over 70 per cent from a single ethnic group; despite some success, large parts of the community both white and black still living in poor housing and engaged in low-paid work; deep resentment in both Asian and white communities about ‘not belonging’ in a changing world; a lack of trust between the community and the police and national and local decision-makers. For the white Bradfordians the space around them – the buildings, the businesses and the bureaucracy – had changed for the worse, and they felt shut out. As for the Asian Bradfordians, they had helped change the buildings, businesses and bureaucracy for the better, but they still felt they hadn’t been let in. The spread of unrest was linked to an increase in racial violence; a long-standing mistrust of, and disillusionment with, the police; the overt and taunting presence of the BNP and other far-right groups; and the entrenched poverty and unemployment that existed within the cities.46
The underlying resentment and distrust between segregated communities was once again exploited by the National Front, the British National Party and other far-right groups, just as today terror is exploited. The Anti-Nazi League, with its long history of counter-demonstrations, sought and found recruits from a local community for whom this wasn’t just political and ethical but personal.
Nearly 300 arrests were made, and 200 jail sentences totalling 604 years were handed out. These figures are unprecedented in English legal history, and many cases took years to conclude, as the long sentences were repeatedly appealed. Many felt the provocateurs, the far right, who had come into the city to rally support and show solidarity to the ‘marginalized’ whites, had gone unpunished. Sentences for white youths involved in disturbances the night before the riot were much more lenient, whereas a number of the Asian youth received heavy prison sentences for acts which in effect amounted to the throwing of a stone. During appeals against the heavy sentences given to the Asian youths it was accepted that the judge failed properly to take account of the trigger events and the climate of fear that had been created by the far right.47
Disproportionate, hypocritical and institutional racism were oft-used phrases that over time fed grievance, some justified, some not, and which even today inform debates on belonging. The rot had set in, and it set the lens through which future policy-making was seen. Grievance for many young people was a real reaction to a real challenge; for officialdom it became a view increasingly to dismiss, an approach that hasn’t worked.
In the Rushdie affair Bradford’s Muslims had displayed collective anger; in the 2001 riots they had displayed collective muscle. Each time they responded excessively – excessive anger, excessive violence – to an external trigger, and each time little effort was made by local or national government to understand – not condone, but understand – the underlying issues and grievance.
We failed as a country to recognize the collective call from white and Muslim communities in northern towns who were saying they felt like they didn’t belong, we feel like we don’t matter. And in a rush to find someone to blame we focused on the self-proclaimed community leaders, the mainly male ‘gatekeepers’, who quite rightly deserved some criticism, but in doing so we overlooked the large number of the elders, male and female, who, having been outraged during the Rushdie affair in 1989, did not support the violent anger of the youth during the riot in 2001.
The riot signalled a generational shift. No longer prepared to engage in passive protest and no longer prepared to carry on being grateful for being ‘allowed’ to make Britain their home, Asian youth, becoming increasingly Muslim youth, demanded the political value of equality, had higher expectations of education and the labour market and were increasingly disillusioned in the face of continuing race and religious discrimination and the first generation’s compromises with what they viewed as the white power structure.48
These young Asians were critical of the police, fearful of the far right and resentful of the media, whom they viewed as stirring up trouble with one-sided reporting of racial attacks, only paying attention when it was suggested that most racially motivated attacks were by South Asians on whites. The rioting showcased the new generation, of young men in particular, shunning the acquiescent attitude of their parents and elders and demanding radical change.
This new-found assertiveness unsettled white communities, who felt that this aggressive demand for equality was a code word for dominance and thus pushed back with the ‘whites’ rights’ mantra. Grievance was the new campaign, with both groups staking a greater claim to victimhood. The fight to be at the top was played out by laying claim to being at the bottom. This hasn’t been addressed, nor has it helped us, as we’ve faced the challenge of terrorism, and the focus on difference has grown.
Years on, Bradford is better at responding to provocation but still resentful of a point in its history when the us-and-them divide wasn’t just between communities but also between the authorities and the Muslim community. It captures how genuine grievances which remain unchecked and unanswered remain grievances years later.
With the attacks on the twin towers following within two months, in September 2001, the Muslims’ fate was sealed. This violent and very visual attack defined ‘the Muslims’ worldwide, and, despite there being no Brits involved in the attack, British Muslims became part of the problem. Their Muslimness not their Britishness became their defining identity – perhaps the only identity they were going to be allowed. A community of people from different backgrounds, races, ethnicities, origins and colour became ‘the Muslims’.
Despite the burgeoning Muslim middle class, its increasing numbers of entrepreneurs and millionaires – fifteen in the 2013 Sunday Times Rich List49 – despite the thousands of medics and health professionals, lawyers, accountants, teachers and other professionals, despite starting to make their mark in arts, culture, media and sport, ‘the Muslims’ were seen through the prism of their faith. Their faith, Islam, was increasingly seen as the basis of a broader international cause of conflict and Britain was no longer at ease with either.
The ‘war on terror’, our support for the Bush administration’s decision to go to war in Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 and the first terrorist attack on British soil by British Muslims in July 2005 further set the scene for a future relationship between Britain and its Muslims. A Britain that hadn’t entirely reconciled race was about to have to reconcile difference on the basis of religion. My country was not comfortable with my religion, my religion was not at ease with my country, and neither was well informed enough to know our intertwined history, culture and language.50
We failed to understand ‘our Muslims’ but also failed to understand ‘ourselves’. We set off on a path of policy-making and demanded that ‘the Muslims’ sign up to ‘our values’ and more, without truly expressing who we are and our journey to the Britain we live in today. In an attempt to build a more cohesive and resilient society we demanded that ‘the Muslims’ join what we believed we stood for rather than jointly charting a route to what we wanted to be. We set out to prescribe what it meant to be British by a series of statements we called British values.