‘Never apologize for showing feelings. When you do so you apologize for the truth.’
Benjamin Disraeli
It’s quite an art to insult someone well, to deliver a phrase that is cutting and effective, the perfectly pitched ‘put down’ ball, words that leave your adversary winded. Many a mother-in-law has perfected this art. But what’s always impressed me more is not the delivery of the insult but the fielding of it.
When I was a child, the two insults that hurt most were ‘Paki’ and ‘specky’. Contact lenses from the tender age of sixteen fixed the latter, but the former took a lot longer. Wandering around the Bradford mela during my youth I came across a young British Pakistani selling T-shirts, one of which simply read ‘PAKI’. Not quite sure how my mum would react to such a garment, I resisted the temptation to buy, but it signalled the start of a community owning its identity, insults and all.
Times have changed, ‘Paki’ is no longer the favoured insult for the likes of me; nor do I much these days mix in those circles where overt racism is worn as a badge of honour. I’ve been a positive social mobility story, and so my adversaries are no longer intellectually challenged skinheads but respectable, refined individuals where the insult is couched in reason and the words used are sophisticated, almost poetic. Xenophobia as an ideology is a broad church, with adherents ranging from your drunken, street-fighting thug to the chichi academic, commentator and, dare I say, even politician.
An emphasis on difference, an acceptance of that which sets us apart rather than that which makes us the same, can be the start of a positive lifelong learning experience. Acknowledging and accepting difference was the foundation of the multicultural melting pot that is today’s Britain, the basis of amazing friendships and loving relationships and the journey in which others change us and we change them. But this same difference can also be the justification for insult.
And for me owning the insult is the most powerful way of neutralizing the words and winning the fight for a diverse and plural society.
We all see difference, we all are different. Our children are now young adults, and often my husband and I will argue a position which makes absolute sense to us but seems alien to them. It’s a generation thing, but it’s also, as our kids keep reminding us, a Pakistani thing. They keep telling us they are different to us. We agree, and to make the point I recently bought my husband the T-shirt ‘It’s a Paki thing and you wouldn’t understand’. He wears it with great pride.
As a child I knew we were different from our neighbours.
I was six years old when we moved to Falcon Road in Savile Town, Dewsbury. It was the third of what in the end became six different houses we lived in over a period of twenty years in the area. My parents continue to live nearby. Savile Town, which takes its name from the Savile family, has a history stretching back to the 1300s and was part of the famous woollen trade in West Yorkshire. Most of the mills on the banks of the River Calder closed in the 1970s, but the workers the mills had attracted, the migrants from India and Pakistan in the 1950s and ’60s, went on to shape the Dewsbury of today.
Childhood in Savile Town during the late 1970s and early ’80s involved brass bands, scouts and guides parades, hopscotch and British bulldog games in the street. The Queen’s silver jubilee celebrations rubbed alongside a growing Muslim community and the building of what was then the largest mosque in Europe, the Markaz.
Dewsbury has in more recent times lost some of the charm and prosperity of its past. The Victorian houses, the town hall and the now converted mills still stand tall and majestic, the greenery and parks are still beautiful and the market still vibrant, but the general decline is visible in a town centre that is peppered with pawn and pound shops.
The last decade appears to have provided a string of bad-news stories, from the sad saga of the fake kidnap of schoolgirl Shannon Matthews by her mother to the town’s tragic association with high-profile suicide bombers Mohammad Sidique Khan and Talha Asmal. But for me Dewsbury is still the place that produced local girl Eileen Fenton, who swam the English Channel, the scientist who invented the first stored-program computer, Tom Kilburn, and the first female speaker of the House of Commons, Betty, now Baroness, Boothroyd. For me this town of my birth, where I made my career as a lawyer and which I adopted in the title I took upon being made a life peer, is what shaped my identity. It is the basis of my success and a place for which I have both great affection and cautious hope.
Savile Town is now almost exclusively made up of a community which is of South Asian descent and Muslim by faith, but as a child I grew up in a Savile Town that was much more diverse. It was a mixed community, a strong white working class and a minority Muslim community, which divided into families originating from the Gujarat district of India and families from the Punjab and Kashmir provinces of Pakistan.
The Goodlads and the Pearsons were our neighbours. Mr Pearson I held in high regard, as he owned the local sweet shop, and the Goodlads had a daughter my age, so provided an extra playmate. Both had immaculate gardens. Orderly, tidy, colourful and calm, whereas ours, however hard my mum tried, always looked like a cheap imitation. They had fairy lights at Christmas, a blow-up swimming pool, fencing which smelled amazing when treated and above all a greenhouse and a caravan, a clean white caravan that whisked them away on holiday usually during the summer, leaving me to contemplate another life that could be, another world, which included the magical place known as Great Yarmouth. I so wanted to go to Great Yarmouth, it seemed far away, exotic, unachievable, and I vowed that one day when I grew up, I would buy a caravan and take my children to Great Yarmouth. To date, I have not done so.
Of all the things the Goodlads had and we did not, it was the greenhouse and caravan I yearned for most. My parents didn’t seem remotely interested in investing in either, instead choosing to buy a second-hand glass display cabinet for the posh front room and some property in Pakistan. These were differences I wanted to change, to bridge. I wanted to belong.
We were one of the small number of Pakistani-origin Muslim families. Living there was an active decision taken by my parents, and one that had a profound impact on my upbringing and my identity. It was a decision which would in later life be regularly discussed in the family and one which my mother still cites as one of her many wise decisions. I agree with her. It exposed my siblings and me to a plural and diverse ethnic and religious upbringing, where the world at home was often very different from the world in our local Muslim community, different from the world in the madrasa we attended and certainly different from mainstream Dewsbury. As children, we quickly learned to recognize, rationalize and reconcile difference.
I was born in a small house on Dewsbury Gate Road, the second of what eventually became a family of five girls, though the care and support of a relative in Maidstone, Kent, meant that the family moved within months of my birth. My first two years were spent in Maidstone. I have no memories of Maidstone. Although photographs from the era show a happy childhood, my parents never felt settled there. The Muslim community was small, and everyday practical needs around prayer, support and diet were not easily accessible. My parents would have to order their halal meat in from Gillingham or Chatham as part of a weekly delivery.
A combination of cramped housing, a growing family, my mum was expecting her third child, and a general lack of cultural and religious needs resulted in us returning to West Yorkshire.
And it was upon returning to West Yorkshire that Savile Town became our home. It was an unusual choice, because the majority of the families and the community that my parents were connected to, the Pakistani community, had already started to make other parts of Dewsbury their home.
My parents liked the gentle Gujerati Indians who made up the majority of Savile Town’s Muslim community. The difference in background – my parents originating from Pakistan not India – allowed them greater freedom and less community censure. For my mum it opened up a whole new world of Asian cooking and friendships that are as strong today as they were then. For my father it provided access to mosques and a very formal and conservative religious community he knew little of as a child.
My parents were bought up as Sunni Muslims, although both have members of the family who are staunchly Shia. They grew up mainly in the Barelwi practice of Sunni Islam, although Sufism also played a big role through the family’s association with the followers of the Sufi shrine at Deva Sharif in India. Savile Town and specifically its Gujerati community, however, were mainly linked to Deoband in India, the Tablighi Jamaat movement in Pakistan and India and eventually the Wahhabi movement in Saudi Arabia.1
My parents took to the local Gujerati mosques and madrasas. They liked the formality of the teaching, they liked the way the Qur’an was taught, they liked the emphasis on Arabic pronunciation, something they hadn’t been taught growing up in Pakistan, and they saw the additional benefits of the broader religious education being in Urdu, the national language of Pakistan.
The teachings favoured in the local mosques we attended were both conservative and puritanical. Many of the cultural practices which my parents had grown up with were seen as unnecessary at best and forbidden at worst. This didn’t seem to worry my parents, who continued marking the Prophet’s birthday and holding food and prayer sessions with music and celebrations whilst continuing to send their girls to the local madrasas, where the teachings were at times in direct conflict. They also on occasions took us along to the Shia mosques in Bradford and Leeds during the month of Muharram to mark Ashura. Muharram was a big deal in our home: the mood was sombre and subdued, and the TV became a no-go zone, which caused much angst for us as teenagers, as soaps played an integral part in our lives, and, in these days before catch-up TV, my mum had decided the video recorder was also off limits during the first ten days of the month.
Our parents never taught us that a specific version of the faith was wrong, instead telling us there were many ways to pray and worship, an upbringing opposite to divisive sectarianism, which can be politically exploited and trigger deep hatred. Later, because it didn’t form a part of my upbringing, I wrongly assumed sectarianism was an irrelevant distraction and thus failed to respond quickly enough to the growing challenge it posed. More generally, this mistake has contributed to the current failures in policy-making.
But the one identity that was stronger than all others for me as a child was being a girl. It underlay most of the discussions that we had at home and became the basis of most decisions made about my life. It shaped my upbringing, my career, my personality, my drive and indeed the chip on my shoulder.
Each time my parents had another child, it further reinforced this ‘female’ identity at home. As the tally of daughters increased it signalled, in a male-dominated, conservative society, that once again my parents had failed. As a child I don’t recall my father ever expressing disappointment about having ‘just girls’, and if it hadn’t been for an overheard conversation between my mum and her friends, with mum’s friends saying that my father ‘must be upset’, I would never have known there was anything to be ‘upset’ about.
The birth of Bushra, my youngest sister, was met with almost universal sympathy by visitors. The mood was sombre, more suited to the weeks following a bereavement. Unlike the happy occasions when my aunts and mum’s friends would have boys, we never distributed Asian sweets, nor did we have them in the house to welcome visitors with when they came to congratulate my parents on their new arrival. In fact, there were no congratulations, no celebrations and no ladoos, which is probably what attracts me to them even today. The Pink Ladoo campaign launched by Raj Khaira in the UK, Canada and Australia is a very visual celebration of female births and a stark reminder that, four decades on, the war of gender equality is still not won.
In the community where I was born and raised, boys were assets and thus of value, girls were liabilities and thus a burden. Much of this thinking was based on cultural norms in South Asia, which valued a male child for the economic worth they would bring to the family as breadwinners, for their physical worth as protectors and defenders of family honour and property and for their social worth through succession. Boys in South Asia were contributors, girls were responsibilities; boys would add to the family resources, girls would be a drain on them; boys carried honour, girls brought shame.
Our births marked the start of a battle by my parents and us to prove worth and value. Dad’s hard labour, Mum’s single mindedness in ensuring we bettered ourselves, focusing on education and ensuring that our lives had to be more successful than the generation before us, and our determination to be better than the boys shaped my journey and that of my sisters. The message that we, the girls, were not going to be ‘labourers’ but professionals was drummed into us on a weekly basis
As a child I thought that the ‘boys are better than girls’ attitude was something unique in the Asian community. Later experience taught me that the status of women has been an issue in all societies, all of which are at different stages in the journey to genuine equal worth between the sexes. The election of President Trump after a disturbingly sexist campaign signals that some may be in reverse.
Although both my parents come from humble beginnings from a rural part of Punjab in Pakistan, in relative terms my mother’s family were comfortable. My mother thinks in middle class. She is one of seven girls and two boys, and despite the boys, my maternal uncles, being spoilt, the girls did not go without. All received a primary and secondary education, and my mum, very much like my grandmother, aspired for better. She embraced the opportunities Britain had to offer for her and her girls. She took up English classes, she learned to drive in the 1970s and she insisted her girls received a university education.
My parents had a very large social circle consisting of family and friends although we were only ever allowed to get to know a few of them well. My own friends were a small group of mainly Pakistani-origin girls whom I went to school with, and then of course there was Sarah, the daughter of our neighbours, the Goodlads. Although Sarah Goodlad and I were the same age and went to the same school, we played much more at home than we played at school.
The Goodlads were a hard, strong working-class family, and I know that our relationship as neighbours was warm and strong. My mum and Mrs Goodlad used to smooth over my many run-ins with Mr Goodlad, mainly connected to leaning against his fence. I know my parents valued this warm relationship and took great pride in nurturing it.
Holidays were mainly a few days at my maternal aunt’s house in Kent. While there, we would travel to the beach, mainly the pebbled beaches of Hastings, a quintessentially English seaside town, dressed up in our full Pakistani best. We must have seemed odd, fully dressed on a warm summer’s day on the beach, but I certainly never recall being aware of being stared at or not being made to feel welcome – an indication of how most of Britain was indeed tolerant, or at least indifferent.
An alternative to Kent in later years was Blackpool, both in the summer for the candy floss and fairground rides and in the winter for the illuminations.
The other great pastime for us was fruit-picking either in the many apple, plum and pear orchards of Kent or strawberry-picking in Yorkshire. It always seemed the nearest I would get to an adventure, the kind of adventure that I would read about in Enid Blyton books. For my parents it represented a connection with the villages from where they had set out many years earlier, where fruit on trees and crops in fields constituted a way of life. Again, photos from that era show us in the quintessentially English orchards in our home-stitched shalwar kameez, trousers and tunics that my mum would conjure up on her Singer pedal-operated machine that seemed to permanently sit on the coffee table. I never inherited my mum’s talent for sewing: failing my CSE needlework miserably at the age of sixteen proved early on that I was going to be an inadequate example of a ‘good “Asian” daughter’.
Overall, this feeling of difference always made me feel like we were special. It was only in later life that I understood that many around us didn’t see us as a special family but as inferior.
My parents embraced and encouraged us to embrace what they saw as ‘good’ within Britain, always keen for us to experience what they viewed as moments of great advancement. A family outing to the newly opened Humber Bridge was one such moment. My father decided the newly opened bridge in Hull, which at the time was the longest in the world, was a magnificent piece of engineering, human advancement which his daughters needed to experience. As ever, my mother dressed us up in our best silky shalwar kameez, complete with flowing scarfs, not quite the right attire for a very cold, blustery day as my father marched us along the length of the bridge. The pride they felt at this engineering advancement and the compliments they paid to the great achievements of ‘the British’ reinforced for us that to aspire to be like ‘them’, the Brits, was positive.
The big holiday during our childhood, however, was a visit to Pakistan. It was in 1979; I was eight and at middle school. It was my mother’s first visit to Pakistan since she arrived in England in 1970.
My parents decided that the girls – at the time there were four of us – should be immersed in Pakistan. What I learned subsequently was that many certainly in our extended paternal family hoped we would settle there. It was based on both a romantic idea that most migrants have of returning to the homeland, with the money to live the life they had always wanted but couldn’t afford, and a notion that the real values that they held dear would only be preserved in the next generation by going back.
In the 1970s my father definitely had a wish to eventually settle in Pakistan, to make it his final home. Having come to the UK in 1962, he has spoken to me about how he always intended to return home in 1970, having made enough money to set up a small business and build a home of bricks and render, not loam. In 1962, 1970 seemed a long time away. However, having married in 1968, my eldest sister being born in 1969 and my mother arriving in the UK in 1970, the time for returning shifted. Although there was no longer a date in his mind, I think the desire to return to Pakistan and settle was still there. In many ways that desire increased as he started to have daughters. I’m sure the desire was fuelled as much by others in the Pakistani community in Britain as by relatives in Pakistan who scaremongered about the dire consequences of girls growing up in a western society.
A few incidents of youngsters ‘marrying out’ during the 1980s, kids from families known to my parents, further heightened my dad’s sense of losing control. This was seen as a slippery slope by them, one of which we as girls worryingly could become the victims. My mother, on the other hand, was clear that Pakistan did not provide a future for her girls, that, whatever the challenges were for her and her daughters in the UK, they would be a whole lot worse in Pakistan.
However, she did have a desire to have a home in Pakistan. My parents led a very frugal lifestyle and invested in a home of their own in Pakistan. They continue to maintain a home in Islamabad. It’s a property which in the past we girls have tried to persuade them to sell and invest the funds in the UK, but in more recent troubling times we have been less inclined to push them to put all their eggs in basket Britain.
The conversation of where was ‘home’ was one we grew up with. I know from discussions with friends it was a conversation happening in Asian homes across the country during the 1970s and ’80s. What was unusual in our home was that it was a genuine all-family discussion, whereas in many homes the women were excluded. My father became a feminist by default.
Pakistan in the 1970s and ’80s was a safe place. Much of the troubles of recent years were yet to manifest. The cities, especially Islamabad, were growing and provided huge opportunity. With money earned in Britain, British Pakistanis could live a very comfortable middle-class life in Pakistan, attend private schools, own nice homes in expensive neighbourhoods and socialize and party in a ‘safe environment’ in ways that were considered off limits in Britain. So returning ‘home’ was an attractive proposition, and this was the kind of experiment that many a Pakistani family did during the 1970s, ’80s and even ’90s. It was an experiment which for almost everybody failed. Once the challenges of everyday bureaucracy, corruption and family feuds kicked in, Britain once more beckoned.
Our own experiment came to a worrying and abrupt end when my mother contracted meningitis. Her illness was both badly diagnosed and badly treated, and we nearly lost her. The fear of her not making it and the possibility that her girls would be left in Pakistan with a village-school education being the best on offer I think gave her the strength to fight back and eventually recover to travel back to the UK, and by the summer of 1980 we were back home in Dewsbury.
Summer also represented another difference for me. My mum has always been a keen gardener. She likes flowers and she likes a nice lawn. We had a heavy, clunky manual lawnmower which she would, after trying to persuade my dad to cut the grass, take over herself to ensure that the lawn was kept neatish. She also had a secret garden, a small, square piece of land that sat between the back of the garage and the boundary wall which she dug up and divided into plots by using old bricks and where she grew coriander, mint and spinach.
The coriander and mint garden was, and still is, a popular feature within Asian households. It provides the essential and almost daily used ingredients for Asian cooking. Indeed my mother-in-law still has an impressive coriander and mint plot. It is something that I have experimented with but always failed at. Unlike many Asian women who have a regular and necessary supply of these important herbs, I still buy them from the Asian shop if I have the time or more regularly and stupidly from the supermarket, where they are still sold in uselessly small packages extortionately priced. My incompetence at growing coriander is another example of me letting down the ‘Asian’ bit of me.
But where Mum had her secret garden, the Goodlads had a greenhouse, in which they must have grown many things, but the only item I ever recall was tomatoes, because Mrs Goodlad would come round with them during the summer. Although I could see the importance of Mum’s secret garden, as I would often be the one, at the most inconvenient times, usually mid comic-reading session, to be sent on the coriander errand, personally I wanted the greenhouse. For me it represented the sophisticated way to grow herbs and veg, and in my childhood it felt more civilized. It was suburban living in the way it should be on our road with its neat semi-detached homes and not the closet ‘ethnic village’ practices that my mum’s back-of-the-garage plot represented.
My upbringing was limited but not limiting. We didn’t travel much and, other than to Pakistan, certainly never overseas; we didn’t go to the pictures except for the very odd occasion as very small children when we accompanied my parents to Bradford to see Indian Bollywood movies; we didn’t go to restaurants, and we didn’t have any hobbies, clubs or sports activities. So I was limited in experience yet I always felt there was nothing that was impossible. It never seemed unusual that my mother would want and expect us to one day become lawyers, accountants and members of other coveted professions, and I never felt that I wouldn’t get there or deserved not to be there. This can-do attitude and almost blind belief in ourselves my sisters and I get from our father, who never seems to think anything is unachievable and has never accepted that anyone else is more entitled to success than he is. It’s the attitude that took him on a journey from arriving in the UK as a young man in the early 1960s with £2.50 in his pocket to today being the successful owner of two multi-million-pound businesses.
My Pakistani heritage was always a large part of our upbringing. The months spent in Pakistan during 1979 had felt like a new and exciting holiday yet also quite familiar. After the initial trauma of discovering that there were no indoor toilets, that the village schools did not have chairs and tables and that we needed to sit on the floor, that books were not a large part of schooling but personal slate and chalk boards were, and that if you did not eat your meals on time, that was it, there was nothing in between meals to compensate, I very much remember feeling that I was amongst family and people with whom I had a connection: my maternal and paternal grandmothers, my maternal grandfather, my parents’ siblings and their children, a huge family who just accepted us as one of them. Nobody felt like an outsider, and after a few weeks the strange surroundings seemed comfortably familiar. It was a place where I felt I both mattered and belonged.
I wasn’t aware that this Pakistan visit was a potential experiment that could have become a lifestyle. I enjoyed those months as a great adventure.
Looking back, it now seems surprising that four young girls were allowed out of school for such a long period of time. It affected me academically and has had an impact which even today affects my professional life. I was absent from school at a time when we had just started to learn ‘joined-up writing’. It was something that I never learned at the time, and no one subsequently taught me. To this day I still print.
Whether it was the Pakistan visit, the Savile Town upbringing or the all-female family, I was acutely aware of difference from an early age: different from the Asian community in which we lived, because we were all female; different from the Muslim community that surrounded us, because we were of Pakistani not Indian origin; and different from the broader English community in which we lived, because we did not have a greenhouse and a caravan. But I also learned that these differences didn’t have to be limiting. Differences could be ignored, different environments could be accommodated in short bursts, differences could be simply kept secret, and differences could be overcome over time through success.
What I did, however, sense both from my parents and my own experience growing up was a desire to try and fit in.
An example was a very childish game that my sisters and I would play in which we would try and convince Sarah Goodlad that we, like her, dressed in a nighty for bed. None of us had nighties or shop-bought pjs as children. My mother had stitched us little cotton trousers and tunics which were effectively our night clothes. Sarah, on the other hand, had a proper nighty. On an evening before we went to bed we would sometimes wave to Sarah from our toilet window which overlooked the two drives and faced their toilet window. On occasions Sarah would ask my elder sister and me if we were ready for bed, and we would say we were not if we were in our Asian night clothes. But to keep the façade of fitting in alive, my sister and I would occasionally raid our mum’s wardrobe, find one or two nighties that she possessed, which we never really saw Mum wear but we always saw her pack when she went into hospital to have a baby, pull the nighties over our heads and pop our heads through the window to show that we too had ‘English’ night clothes. I am sure that I looked odd and I am sure that it didn’t fit, but it seemed to work. It made me feel like I fitted in.
In the summertime caravans and greenhouses brought ‘differences’ to the fore, but winter too brought its own challenges, with a deep desire to fit in during Christmas. Christmas was never celebrated in our homes when we were young, but as children we were hopeful that we would get presents. It must have been during that time when we still believed that Santa Claus existed. One year my elder sister Farkhanda and I had a detailed conversation about why Santa didn’t come to our house. I was terribly logical and tried to reason it on the basis that Santa Claus did not come to us because there was no chimney for him to come down. In many Asian homes in the 1970s and 1980s the chimney breasts had been removed to allow the living room to be squared off and provide a bigger seating area. My parents saw alcoves as wasted space. So my sister and I decided to leave the back door unlocked on Christmas Eve. We did it late in the evening after bedtime. The open door was discovered the next day, but no presents had arrived.
I pledged when I grew up that I’d never have the chimney breasts removed, because I needed to create space for Santa. I’ve done major renovations in our last two family homes, and chimneys have featured in both. In one I insisted on creating a chimney in a new-build where none had existed before and in the second I reopened the old chimneys and restored live fires in a house that is our current family home. Chimneys matter, Santa matters.
As a child I needed to belong, to fit in, to be a part of the world and experiences of my friends and neighbours. I wanted to belong in all the different parts that made up the sum of my world: the Pakistani bit, the Savile Town bit, the English bit, the Asian bit, the western bit, the female bit and the many versions of the Islam bit. As an adult I wanted not just to belong in each one but also for each bit to belong in the others. By my early twenties I’d done with keeping differences neatly compartmentalized; the famous double life that many young Asians lived was tiresome, and I’d managed to grow comfortable in my own skin, flaws and all. We were staying, Britain was home, it’s where I belonged, it’s where I wanted to matter.
And yet three decades on, it seems interesting how conversations today about identity, belonging and the concerns of some minority communities mirror conversations from my teens. Back then, I would become frustrated with my parents’ conversations about maybe one day having to settle ‘back’ in Pakistan. My father’s argument was premised on a rose-tinted, good-life retirement-type dream, set in a northern Pakistan life in the way most Brits dream of southern Spain. My mother, however, based her argument on worry and concern about things becoming so difficult for Pakistanis in the UK that one day we might have to leave.
I was fully reconciled with Britain and my new multicultural, diverse British Asian identity, and it annoyed me that my parents were not.
Unusually, as someone born and raised in Britain, I found it easier to understand my father’s position of having a connection and wanting to make a home for his children in a place that in his mind was still his home. Wanting to make another place home I could understand; being forced to make another place home I couldn’t comprehend and I would, sometimes rudely, dismiss my mum’s position, which I found absurd.
During my twenties I would have heated conversations with my mum, arguing that Britain could never be a place which would be so unwelcoming to a community that a whole group of people would feel they had no choice but to leave and set up home elsewhere. British Pakistanis, I felt, were an intrinsic part of the multicultural nation we had become, a broad set of people from different backgrounds, a multitude of minority races all forming the fabric of modern Britain. I’d convince her that the debate was moving so far in the right direction that her references to Enoch Powell made her sound like she was stuck in a time warp, that Britain had moved on from its heady racist years of the 1960s and ’70s that she and Dad had experienced and it was never going to be that kind of an intolerant place again, that there was only one direction of travel, and that literally meant no going back.
Yet, despite arguing so vociferously against my parents in my twenties, I found myself in my privileged, successful thirties dreaming my dad’s dream of a nice holiday home in Pakistan and in my forties worrying my mum’s worry of things getting tough.
It didn’t remotely occur to me that some thirty years after my soapbox speeches to my parents about how there was no turning back my generation would be once again talking of where else could be home. I could never have predicted that in years to come my religious identity would be a basis of non-acceptance and conflict within the UK as great if not greater than my parents’ racial identity. Three decades on, these conversations are now happening again amongst people of my generation. A generation born and raised in the UK now regularly talk about their fear of life being made hard and difficult for a specific community simply because of its identity. And it raises the question how a desire to fit in, a pride in Britain, a warmth amongst neighbours and an aspiration to do well and get on, a belief that anything is possible could result in both great success and a deepening alienation. How a community that came to work and go back became a community that worked and settled and is now viewed as neither settled nor belonging.
I want to explore how we got here. The mistakes that were made by the community, society and policy-makers and the reasons behind those mistakes. I will try and unpick myth from reality, headlines from hard facts, and step out of the comfortable world of the converts to the god of diversity and plurality and explain how some people simply do not believe that difference can be accommodated.
Today, Muslims are often painted as not playing by the rules, as having practices and beliefs which are inconsistent, dare I say even incompatible, with being British. They are painted as intrinsically violent, irreconcilably aggressive, and intent on taking over this green and pleasant land.
I will revisit the seminal moments when ‘the Muslims’ were dramatically brought into the national and international consciousness and explore whether the ‘war on terror’ set the tone for how we see our Muslims or simply exacerbated a sore that was already festering. When was ‘the Muslim problem’ born?
I’ll try to deconstruct violence in the name of a cause: terrorism. I’ll try to explain what makes a violent ‘jihadi’. And I will also ask whether the rules we want them, ‘the Muslims’, to play by are indeed fair or even the rules we ask others to play by.
As a lawyer I have great faith in the rule of law, equality before the law and core principles of fairness consistently and transparently applied. Politicians often quote these as examples of our British values, but having spent nearly a decade working on our policy towards Muslims, I’m not as confident we apply these values as diligently as we assert these values.
It’s been brutal being a British Muslim for the last decade or so. Rarely has a Muslim in the public eye escaped either the outright accusation of being an extremist or the nudge-nudge, wink-wink suggestion of being one. The London mayoral election and the campaign against Sadiq Khan, the comments by the Sun about Channel Four news presenter Fatima Manji and the hounding of Aaqil Ahmed, the head of BBC faith programmes, are but some examples. Rarely have Muslim organizations, from community groups to youth clubs, faith schools to charitable foundations, been under this level of scrutiny. And rarely has the daily vilification in the media of all things Muslim been so unrelenting and Muslims seen as fair game.
Am I complaining? To pinch Ed Milliband’s line, hell no. Now, I’m no fan of sadomasochism, it’s not my thing, but I think a bit of pain for the community right now could in the end serve us, ‘the Muslims’, well. In the past, when I’ve warned of the changing winds in Britain and urged some of my fellow co-religionists to step up and step out, the response has been abysmal. We’ve talked a great talk, but I’ve seen little follow-through. So, however uncomfortable and unfair it is for those of us who face the onslaught on the frontline, I feel we, the Muslims, can make a virtue of this current phase.
Sometimes things need to get really bad for people to be jolted into fixing them. Government policy towards ‘Muslims’ is often unfair, often unwarranted and often wrong, and this could be the conduit for the change that is needed. It astounds me that even today amongst some community organizations and so-called community and faith leaders the ‘business as usual’ mentality prevails. The obsession with the minutiae, the irrelevant and the fringe is still a favourite pastime; our commitment to unity is a nice sentiment but vastly outshone by our commitment to doing down every other community organization, activist or Muslim in a position of authority and the passion with which we draw our theological swords on sectarianism is quite breathtaking. We haven’t quite worked out that when Islamophobia strikes it doesn’t ask whether you are Sunni or Shia, which mosque you go to and which imam you follow. You don’t even have to be Muslim to be sworn at, spat at or physically assaulted – ask the poor Sikhs who have been collateral damage for Islamophobes for years.
These internal and external challenges and how this tale of Muslim Britain has developed over the last fifteen years I explore in some detail in the coming chapters. I ask whether our counter-terrorism strategy has been effective or counterproductive. I explore what our Muslim communities would have become had the war on terrorism not happened, what journey they would have been on, whether we would even have identified them as ‘Muslim’ or simply defined them through their individual origins and race.
Whilst many of us were engaged with racial justice, religion crept up on us as a new dimension: the new race, the point of difference, the characteristic to fear, the focus of the far right, the fair-game group in the media and the acceptable rabble-rousing feature in politics. I will detail this transition.
British Muslims are on a journey. They are coming to terms with a changing world which over the last three decades has placed their religious identity centre stage both domestically and internationally. In fixing ‘the Muslim issue’, the starting point is knowing and understanding British Muslims in all their glory, failings, difference, diversity and nuance, valuing our intertwined histories, our fractious present and our shared future, and doing so in the spirit of open and inclusive values.
Britain has often found groups within its borders whom it does not trust, whom it feels have a belief, culture, practice or agenda which runs contrary to those of the majority. From Catholics to Jews, miners to trade unionists, Marxists to liberals and even homosexuals, all have at times been viewed, described and treated as ‘the enemy within’. The Muslims are the latest in a long line of ‘others’ to be given that label, from those like my parents who sweated and toiled in the mills of Yorkshire half a century ago to successful, integrated British citizens who now make up the growing Muslim middle class; it was a phrase used to describe me in government.
As the granddaughter of two men who both served in the British Indian Army, I felt it was probably one of the worst insults to be directed at me. It told me that I didn’t belong in Britain. This book is my way of fielding the insult, by owning and dismantling the label ‘the enemy within’.