Most were from peasant backgrounds.
The Bangladeshis came to London's East End and found work in the garment industry.
The Mirpuris, who came from the part of Kashmir that Pakistan occupied, went to work in the old cotton and woolen mills of Yorkshire, Lancashire, and the
Midlands. They cohered around the mosque, the central symbol of
discipline in their lives, and around the small shops that sold the
spices, the lentils, the halal meat that made these towns
feel like home. The first generation that arrived imagined making
some money quickly and, some time in the future, returning home.
That future never arrived. Their children and grandchildren have now
grown up as Lancastrians and Yorkshiremen -- Muslim Lancastrians and Yorkshiremen.
These antiquated mills went out of business in the 1980s. The
population -- white, brown, and black -- had no jobs. The
general depression of the mill-and-mosque towns reflected itself in
run-down, restless schools, without ambition or excellence. The
activists and ambulance chasers of the Left demanded more
multiculturalism in these schools -- which gave cover to the ex-peasant
community's demands for
the Islamization of the schools' ethos and curriculum. They
demanded -- successfully, in
some cases -- that girls and boys
be taught separately, that girl pupils cover their heads and limbs,
that the schools serve halal meat, that Arabic and the Quran be
taught, that British history classes depict Britain primarily as an
exploitative, demonic nation. Principals who resisted these demands
were branded racists.
In 1989 came the most significant divide in the multicultural
history of Britain: the Rushdie affair, which uncovered a
multicultural fifth column, whose literary criticism entailed book
burning and death threats. The British Muslim community echoed the
call of the Ayatollah Khomeini to hunt down and kill the writer.
There were denunciations of Rushdie in every mosque by mullahs and
crowds who had only handled a copy of the book to burn it. Not one
mullah -- not one -- raised a voice in support of the principle of freedom of creativity; no mullah ventured the opinion that the fatwa was wrong
or against Islamic teaching.
Though the supposedly liberal Muslim
commentators whom the British press retains were not in favor of the
death sentence, none would extend himself to a defense of the book.
In Bradford, an ugly book-burning rally was led by one Kalim
Siddiqui, who was forced to admit to an investigating press that he
and his operation were financed by the government of Iran. He
subsequently set up a "Muslim Parliament of Britain," which
professed to dispense laws and promulgate rules for the Muslims of
Britain.
In the first week of the fatwa against Rushdie and his book, I
appeared on a television panel. Among the Muslim panelists, all of
whom favored condemning the book, were two zealots: the same Kalim
Siddiqui; and Yusuf Islam, the Muslim convert pop singer of Greek
Cypriot origin formerly known as Cat Stevens. The moderator asked
if, in my role as a commissioning editor of Channel 4 UK, I would
contemplate turning The Satanic Verses into a film. I said
that I would judge the cinematic merits of the script, and that no
other consideration would rule it out. Kalim Siddiqui and Yusuf
Islam snarled, warning that the sentence of death on Rushdie would
extend to all those who forwarded his book in any way.
We had all come from London to Manchester to record the
"discussion." The producer had a word with me when it was over:
would I feel more comfortable if he changed my hotel, away from the
threateners and their entourage?
Before the fatwa and the Muslim solidarity it generated, the
race industry that arrogates to itself the leadership of immigrant
opinion had assumed that, with a few concessions, and with some
exotic and welcome additions to British cuisine, the new immigrant
communities would be assimilated into British life with hiccups but
not convulsions. The fatwa affair -- when the entire Islamic community united behind the condemnation -- should have put an
end to the idea. This was one bridge that Muslim immigrants were not
willing to cross.
In fact, after the Rushdie affair, Muslim spokesmen and their
supporters demanded that the law of blasphemy, which still existed
in Britain, be extended to apply to Islam. The Muslim clerics would
then determine what was blasphemous. Thankfully, nothing came of it.
The book burners and novelist killers, recognizing only one book as
the fount of truth, cannot countenance a literary tradition,
established through centuries of struggle against censorship and
obscurantism, that allows the sacred to be prodded critically, even
to be profaned. The liberal, democratic freedom to think and speak
that the West enjoys has been won in part through this prodding and
provocation. That freedom allows people to vilify a writer, to
demonstrate their antagonism to his fiction, even to burn a few
books. But it does not bestow the freedom to call for the execution
of anyone.
The affair of the Verses demonstrated that successive
generations of Muslim immigrants to Britain, despite their broad
Midland accents and their (admittedly rather curtailed) education in
the Western intellectual tradition, identified themselves primarily
as Muslims. They declared their allegiance not to the traditions
that allowed them to settle, to worship, to have the Prince of Wales
visit their mosques and proclaim himself their protector, but rather
to a religious philosophy that emanates from a different place and
different age.
It was in the early eighties that this identity with a freshly militant universal Islam emerged as a politically distinct
force in Britain. While the earlier generation of Muslim immigrants
had gone their way without bothering to adopt Western dress, their
children grew up wearing Air Jordan sneakers, baggy trousers, and
Hilfiger tops, in imitation of American blacks. The great
cliché
of their
generation, enshrined in endless articles and now in facile novels,
is that they were caught between two cultures. Some of these second-
and third-generation Muslim Britons resolved this tension by
adopting the politics, philosophy, and culture of fundamentalist
Islam. On college campuses, some students began to dress in what
they imagined was a fashion decreed by an Islamic identity. They
reformed their lives, their speech, their friendships. They assumed
a mission and characterized the evolution of civil liberties -- the gains of feminism for instance -- as immorality. Their puritan disgust for the West's popular culture and sexual license, their support for laws that decree the
stoning to death of adulteresses and the beheading of apostates,
became the profession of an allegiance alienated from the Britain
that allows them the freedom to assume and argue these positions.
All these new zealots were brought up in a traditional Muslim way by parents whose religious views were generally orthodox but not
extremist. But in the 1980s, a new Muslim leadership of mullahs
inspired and paid for by various Islamic powers around the world was
entering the country and setting up bases in Britain, thanks to an
immigration-law loophole that allows religious personnel open-ended
permission to stay. Iranian money, Saudi money from worldwide
foundations for the promotion of Islam, was establishing mosques and
setting up madrasas, schools that purvey primitive religious
instruction and teach the Quran by rote. Adolescents attracted to
this new radical preaching, young people whose childhood religious
observances had already set them apart from their British
contemporaries, came under the domination of a stricter observance
with the allure of an ideology. The new mullahs were offering a
single-minded, luminously simple explanation of the cosmos and
promising membership in an organization that would dominate the
world. "We carry Islam as a political belief, a complete system,"
says Omar Bakri Muhammad, a poisonous cleric who runs a London
Muslim organization. "We don't carry Islam as a religion. It's an
ideology."
If you prostrate yourself to an all-powerful and unfathomable
being five times a day, if you are constantly told that you live in
the world of Satan, if those around you are ignorant of and
impervious to literature, art, historical debate, and all that
nurtures the values of Western civilization, your mind becomes
susceptible to fanaticism. Your mind rots.
Worse, it can become the instrument of others who send you out on suicidal missions. Three years ago, the Yemeni police caught eight young men with plans and equipment to bomb British targets in
that country: the offices, homes, and churches of the British
diplomatic and expatriate community. Six of these young Muslims, all
of Pakistani origin, held British passports. Three were from the
Midlands, two from the North, and one from London, the stepson of a
Muslim preacher in the Finsbury Park mosque. The Yemeni courts tried
and convicted them of conspiracy to commit terrorism.
Their cover stories were pathetic. They said they had gone to
Yemen to learn Arabic: that's like going to Pakistan to learn
English. The Foreign Office in London instructed the British
diplomats in Yemen to extend their support to these citizens. One
can imagine the conversation: "I say, old chap, you didn't really
come here to blow me and my children up, did you? Ah
well -- we'd better see you
safely back to old Blighty, hadn't we?"
I set out to write about these adventurers at the time. Their
wives or partners -- young white women wearing headscarves and
ankle-length
skirts, like the Albanian peasants who beg on the London
Underground -- appealed on TV for the British government to secure their release. The men in Yemen
denied that their aim was terrorism and begged for their freedom,
alleging that the Yemeni police had tortured and sexually assaulted
them. They, their lawyers, and their families claimed the protection
of the British state; and Britain, accepting an obligation to them
as British subjects, made representations on their behalf to the
Yemeni government. Where did these young men, British by birth and
schooling, develop the hatred that would take them to Islamic
guerrilla training camps in Yemen and then on a mission to kill
British diplomats and their families?
Journalists traced the roots of their mission back to Finsbury Park in north London, to the mosque situated in a largely
Turkish Cypriot area of the city and to a preacher called Abu Hamza,
a one-eyed mullah with a claw, like Captain Hook's, for a right
hand. I asked him where he had lost his hand. His reply was: "I
didn't lose my hand; I gained it."
I persisted, and he claimed that he had been a mujahid in Afghanistan and lost his hand in the fighting, though it seemed to
me that its amputation was consistent with the premature explosion
of a bomb. He boasted to me that he had sent young men to training
camps. He would not say what they trained for or where, but his
general contention was that, as Muslims, they must fight for the
conversion of the world to Islam. The young men in Yemen were part
of the worldwide jihad. He would not say which one of the
professed worldwide campaigns he was part of.
He seemed proud that
his own stepson was involved in the murdering foray into Yemen and
said that, if they had gone to destabilize the Yemeni government, he
would not condemn their enterprise.
I pointed out that Yemen was a Muslim country and that these British men and their Algerian co-conspirators were being tried under Islamic law.
His contention
was that any court that did not support the attack on Western
interests in the Middle East was insufficiently Islamic.
The Yemeni incident should have alerted Britain and its
government to the rise of a phenomenon that couldn't be explained by
any theories of race relations. It didn't. Liberal opinion, while
not admitting that the Yemeni six were out to kill Britons, called
again for an examination of the British racism that had alienated
them.
Then, in the summer of 2001, riots broke out in several of the mill-and-mosque towns. A few hundred masked "Asian" (which in Britain means Indian, Pakistani, or Bangladeshi) youths took to the
streets after dark and began torching shops, pubs, cars, and buses.
They fought the riot police with staves and stones. Oldham,
Bradford, and Burnley exploded in riots. The pundits and the Home
Office officials in charge of race relations were bewildered. Their
explanations were classic -- clichéd and mistaken.
They attributed these "Asian" riots to the "failure of years of race
relations," to resentment of poverty and unemployment, and to rumors
that neo-fascist anti-immigrant organizations like the British
National Party were invading these towns.
The BNP had undoubtedly established a small presence among the
white citizens of the mill-and-mosque towns, capitalizing on fears
of the unemployed and unemployable "Asian" youths hanging around the
streets. As for race relations, Britain has long been acting like
Florence Nightingale: selfless, dedicated, bandaging every wound,
but ignorant about the genesis and gestation of gangrene. What the
newspapers failed to mention was that these weren't "Asian"
youths -- not Gujeratis, not
Hindu Punjabis, not Sikhs. They were Muslims whose parents or
grandparents came from Mirpur or Bangladesh. The difficulties Muslim
culture places in the way of assimilation has produced a generation
of disaffected youth, highly susceptible to the incitements of
Islamic militants.
The pundits didn't seem to notice that the stone-throwing impulse
and the hanky masks were in imitation of TV pictures of Arab youths
in their street battles with Israeli police. They failed to engage
with the fact that among these rioting Muslims were members of
semi-clandestine Islamic fundamentalist quasi-organizations,
gathering under the aegis of a mosque or a college society. And
though none surfaced publicly in the wake of these riots to claim
responsibility, behind them there were preachers like Abu Hamza of
Afghanistan and Finsbury Park.
I had a foreshadowing of this connection in conversations I had
with some of these young Muslims in Oldham before the riots. They
wore the fundamentalist uniform -- the cap, the beard, the white tunic and trousers. They said
that Western civilization deserved to be destroyed.
"So where are you going to start? In your own hometown?" I asked.
Their spokesman smiled. "Everywhere," he said.
The riots had no targets, symbolic or strategic. They didn't seem
to protest against unemployment. The riots were swagger and mayhem,
and the rioters in successive towns vied to outdo one another. The
race-relations lobby's claim that this was an "Asian" protest
against maltreatment and racism -- and the lobby needs racism to keep it in business -- is worse than
unhelpful, for it obscures the real problem and the real danger: the
antagonism among some British Muslims that condemns all of Western
civilization as rotten and immoral.
After the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Hamza was wheeled out again, together with the poisonous Omar Bakri Muhammad, who had been expelled from his native Syria and
is funded by missionary money originating in Saudi Arabia. They both
said that they supported the jihad, that the laws and
sensibilities of men did not matter, and that only the law of the
book and the will of God, as interpreted by them, of course, could
govern the thinking of the Muslim. After all, "Muslim" means the one
who submits.
Established Muslim organizations of Britain, the sort that talk
to the Home Office and get invitations to Downing Street, expressed
their regret at the atrocity. The Prince of Wales went to prayers at
the East End mosque to demonstrate his solidarity with Britain's
Muslims. Tony Blair, staunch supporter of President Bush's
anti-terrorist initiatives, appeared on TV, flanked by leaders of
Muslim organizations. As a group, they condemned the attack and
denounced Hamza and Bakri as "clowns."
Despite these denunciations, outside the mosques of Britain,
young men of the jihadi persuasion mount soapboxes with
hateful slogans supporting the atrocity, exhorting the arriving or
departing worshipers to "join the war" against the wickedness of
America and demanding nothing less than its total destruction.
Outside the Regent Street mosque, the largest in London and the
one regarded as the central place of worship for all Muslim
denominations, groups of these youth, who would not say when
challenged whether they were followers of Hamza or of Bakri,
distributed leaflets. The leaflets called for the worshipers to
defend Islam against the imminent American war and called on the
British government to dissociate itself from the American-led
aggression against Islam. Uniformed London policemen stood by to
ensure their freedom of speech.
And now, even as I write, a young Muslim from Burnley,
Lancashire, has been taken prisoner by the Northern Alliance
Afghans. He had come to Afghanistan to fight for the Taliban. The
deputy prime minister of Britain, John Prescott, rallied to his
defense, perhaps, like so many Labour politicians with Muslim
constituents, looking for votes. Instead, he should send MI5 and MI6
to investigate where and how this young man was recruited and
whether there are other terrorist cuckoos in this same nest.
The governments of Algeria, Egypt, and Yemen may not be able to root out the fundamentalists in their midst who resort to terror,
but Western countries have no option. One can't shelter in one's
home those who would kill you. Britain has given extended permission
to stay to the likes of Hamza and Bakri. The very liberalism against
which they preach has nursed this fifth column. It must be rooted
out.
Muslim states, including Libya, have mouthed their support of the U.S. and its people in their hour of bereavement with an ironic brazenness. Some of them, apostles of Islamist terror themselves, do
it to avert the judgment and vengeance of an aroused America; others
because they have their own local terrorist problem, with which they
would welcome assistance. From within the U.S., several voices of
the Muslim community have expressed their sorrow, dismay, and
outrage.
And yet even when liberal Muslims declare that what was done to
the victims of New York, of the Pentagon, and of the four airliners
was an atrocity contrary to the tenets and teachings of the Quran,
that it was indeed a sinful transgression of Islam that will not
lead to paradise but to hell, the majority of Muslims around the
world don't believe them, because they have been convinced by the
interpretation of the fundamentalist, whom liberal Muslims allowed
to remain unchallenged for so long.
Ironically, this terrible act is destined to mark a day of
judgment for world Islam. In its 1,400 years, Islam has inspired and
incorporated the great mystical movement of the Sufis. It has also
suppressed it. It has spawned in its time liberal jurisprudence,
great art, scientific endeavor, and the simple idea that what is not
forbidden by the Quran is allowed. And yet Islam has, in the
twentieth century, funded by oil and inspired by the work of
Mohammed Wahab, an eighteenth-century fundamentalist, led its
followers back to the book.
Apart from the Muslims of Arabia, all Muslims are converts to
Islam. As V. S. Naipaul eloquently argues in his books and essays of
travel and discovery (see "Our Universal
Civilization," Summer 1991),
they date their history from the birth of the prophet. They adopt
the history of Islam, the movements and conquests of the desert
tribes, as their history, despite being themselves the descendants
of the world's most ancient civilizations. Five years ago, Iranian
fanatics, the descendants of Muslim converts from Zoroastrianism,
set out to destroy the ruins of the ancient Zoroastrian city of
Persepolis. This year, the Taliban of Afghanistan destroyed the
world's inheritance of the Bumiyan Buddhas that happened to be on
the land that they have usurped. Persepolis ultimately escaped
demolition only because members of the Islamic regime saw a
commercial opportunity in opening the site to tourism, making some
money while preserving their contempt for the site's historical and
cultural significance.
The creed that leads these vandals to disown and destroy anything that is deemed "un-Islamic" leads them to a mission to challenge and
convert the world, through terror if necessary. They don't for a
moment consider that the world doesn't want a religion that
suppresses women, adopts a medieval creed of crime and punishment,
forces people to prayer at the behest of the police, forbids the
writing of novels, the making of films, and the playing of music,
and destroys the minds of its young and leads them to fanatical acts
of suicidal terror in which they murder upward of 6,000 innocents.
This barbaric interpretation of Islam has inevitably come into moral and now mortal conflict with the West and its dominant state power. As the cowboy movies say, this earth ain't big enough
for the both of them. And this fight to the obliterative finish
ultimately cannot be a matter of killing people and toppling
regimes. It has to involve a revolution within Islamic thinking
itself.
What Islam needs is a reformation, and if this very concept is
forbidden in the unchangeable word of the Quran, there is enough
Islamic history to support a reforming and radical interpretation of
the law of living with others. There have been movements in Islamic
history that are by no means inimical to peace, tolerance, and even
to democratic and liberal principles.
But where is the will today to affirm such a history, to
promulgate such a theology, and to found an authoritative
reformation of the modern Islamic mission?
The U.S. has in the last three decades countenanced the
immigration of millions of Muslims from the Indian subcontinent,
from the Middle East, and North Africa. Some of them died in the
World Trade Center, where they had a mosque on the seventh floor.
The Muslims of America now live in what, with all its imperfections,
is a free, advanced, democratic society. Many of them are
professionals -- doctors, dentists,
engineers, software and hardware experts, scientists, pilots, even
members of the armed forces. Their right to the pursuit of happiness
will ensure their right to embrace Islam. They must now see that an
interpretation of the Quran that belittles all preceding human
history and that refuses to be modified by the discoveries of the
Enlightenment, of scientific advance and social liberty, cannot
coexist with the rest of the modern world.
The vast number of Muslims in Britain and the U.S. who are
educated in Western disciplines and culture, who live by the demands
of Western ways of work, are riven by a conflict between the
prescriptions of Islam and the freedom to think, speak, and
associate, and to be protected by democracy and Western
jurisprudence. These Western Muslims will have to resolve their
dilemma by seeding the reformation in Islam.
Western Muslims must now discover in their own history and
theology that nothing forbids the rise of a single or collective
Martin Luther who will defy the medievalist mullahs (a
self-appointed rather than an anointed clergy) and will pin new
theses, renouncing world conquest, on the doors of every mosque.
The development of Islam, though constantly hijacked by
fundamentalist sects like the Wahabis, has always had a strong,
non-proselytizing, mystical Sufi current, to which 80 percent of the
world's Muslims have some connection. And Islam has always had in
its theological armory the sanctioned concept and tradition of
ijtihad, which means coming to conclusions about
prescription, behavior, and morality through argument and the
application of reason rather than through dogma. It is in a sense
parallel to the reliance of the Christian Reformation on the
supremacy of conscience. True, passages in the Quran urge believers
to "kill those who join other gods with God wherever ye shall find
them" and to wage war on neighboring infidels. But a hundred
suras of the Quran also enjoin the faithful to tolerance: one
specifically says that killing one innocent person is akin to the
murder of the whole world. An Islamic Reformation would delegitimate
literal interpretations of Quranic passages stoking intolerance and
emphasize those that resemble the Golden Rule.
As for the officials of America and Britain, they need to
redirect the effort and money that they have poured into race
relations and multiculturalism into a clear, reasoned, energetic
defense of the values of freedom and democracy. Their future depends
on it.
|
y first name gives
rise to confusion. It's a common Muslim name, so people I meet, or
who read my byline, assume that I am of the faith.
