Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar (Allah is the greatest, Allah is the greatest). Ash-hadu alla ilaha illa-llah (I bear witness that there is none worthy of worship but Allah).
The call to prayer resounds across the rooftops before dawn, bringing echoes of the Levant to provincial Luton and its 30,000 Muslims. But for infidel locals, the holy wake-up is a curse. “I’d like to pull the plug on that caterwauling,” a second-generation Luton Irish woman tells me. “I go to work, and I’ve got two small kids. It’s just not fair on non-Muslim families around here.”
While nearly three out of four people in Britain claim some form of Christian affiliation, Christianity makes ever less demands on the public space. Even nativity plays are surrendering to the sensitivities of secularists and other faiths. But the impact of Britain’s estimated 1.6m Muslims is increasingly assertive. Asian Muslims account for about 1 in 50 of British citizens, yet they dominate entire districts in the vicinities of their more than 1,350 mosques: 10 of them in Luton alone. Are Muslim enclaves making a contribution to a flourishing multicultural mosaic? Or are they undermining the cohesion of Britain’s civil society?
When Archbishop Rowan Williams delivered his ratiocinations on adoption of sharia, it sent shockwaves through the nation. His initiative was emphatically rebuffed. Earlier, Michael Nazir-Ali, the Pakistani-born Anglican Bishop of Rochester, caused a rumpus by calling for an end to “‘no-go’ areas” for non-Muslims in Britain, suggesting Islam must integrate with us. He was applauded and disparaged in equal measure by faith leaders and community activists. Muslim extremists issued death threats. But where are the alleged “no-go” areas?
And how do they constitute a danger to the fabric of British society?
Lunchtime prayers at Luton’s Central Mosque. There are some 70 male worshippers dressed in traditional baggy linen trousers, ample shirts and skullcaps. As they slip off their shoes and douse their arms and faces in the washroom, they greet this infidel with a solemn “As-salamu alaykum” (peace be upon you). As they pray, their foreheads meet the carpet and their posteriors rise towards the ceiling. “Islam” means total surrender to God.
A mild-eyed young man called Osman comes to squat next to me where I sit with my back to the wall. “What does total submission entail?” I ask. “We don’t leave our religion in the mosque,” he says reverentially. “We take it out into the streets, the workplace, into our homes.” Osman is joined by three other curious worshippers. One of them embraces me and starts to talk about the Prophet: “Peace be upon him.” I ask him why, if their religion is truly peace-loving, it perpetrates crimes like honour killings and supports terrorism. “Islam is a religion of peace,” he says. “There is no such thing as Muslim terrorism, just as there is no such thing as Muslim alcoholism, no such thing as Muslim pig-eating.”
The majority of Muslims do not kill women for running away from brutal husbands and forced marriages, nor are they terrorists, yet moderate Muslims nevertheless appear to be creating divisive enclaves within this country as a result of routine Muslim religiosity and lifestyle. Consider the following. In Dewsbury, imams petition Mid Yorkshire Hospital NHS Trust to request nurses to turn beds of sick Muslims to face Mecca five times a day. A Muslim shop assistant at Reading’s Marks & Spencer refuses to touch a book of children’s Bible stories because it is “unclean”. In hospitals around Britain, female Muslim surgeons refuse to follow hygiene guidelines stipulating scrubbing up bare arms (a measure to combat MRSA and Clostridium difficile). In Oxford the imam of the new central mosque is requesting amplified calls to prayer, prompting Christian clergy to predict “white flight” from a city of burgeoning minarets.
The overall picture is of cumulative assertiveness, but there is evidence too of proselytising aggressiveness. A south London hospital chaplain tells me: “I created a multi-faith prayer room in a hospital I serve. The Muslim visitors left Islamic literature and prayer mats against the spirit of non-sectarianism I wanted to promote. Every time I set out holy books of other religions alongside the Koran, the non-Muslim books were chucked in the bin.” On a grander scale of missionary zeal, the Muslim group Tablighi Jamaat is proposing to build the largest mosque in Europe, for 12,000 worshippers at a time, close to the London Olympic site. The organisers aim to convert Britain to Islam.
But enclave-creation in Britain, most evident in racial discrimination, is seldom one-way. For decades, at every socioeconomic level, whites have fled their incoming non-white neighbours. Non-whites are scandalously under-represented in professions such as medicine, law, journalism, publishing, academia. In 2006, Trevor Phillips, chair of the Commission for Racial Equality, complained of the lack of non-white students at Oxbridge and other top universities.
The perception of “no-go” districts, moreover, is as much a result of contrasting lifestyles as deliberate exclusion. “In mosques after prayers,” the Muslim author Ed Husain tells me, “many of my Muslim friends ask what we are supposed to integrate into. Big Brother lifestyle? Ladette culture? Binge-drinking? Gambling? When the centre of social life in modern Britain is the local pub, where do Muslims fit in?”
It is hazardous to generalise about Muslim enclaves since each is shaped by its own history and circumstances. Luton’s 30,000 Muslims (in a population of 200,000) mainly live in a district of back-to-back terraced houses leading onto the vibrant main drag – Dunstable Road, with its aromatic grocery stores, halal butchers, jewellery emporiums, boutiques displaying Day-Glo saris fit for a Bollywood movie. There’s an impression of thriving business, albeit exclusively Muslim, in the scruffy internet cafes and solicitors’ offices specialising in visa and asylum issues. If any area in Britain is a candidate for Nazir-Ali’s “no-go” reputation, it’s Bury Park – dubbed Blackberry Park in the 1970s by “Paki-bashing” hooligans.
The Irish came to Luton during the pre- and post-war period to work at the Vauxhall motor plant. The second and third generations are still there, but in smaller numbers. The Holy Ghost Catholic church, which once ruled Bury Park’s spiritual roost, now stands sandwiched between a madrasah and a Sufi centre, just 50 yards from the town’s central mosque. Some of the parishioners (with gritted teeth, I feel) pay lip service to the virtues of multiculturalism, confining their grievances to the amplified muezzin and the mosque-goers’ insistence on parking illegally in Holy Ghost’s car park. There are disconsolate Hindu and Sikh temples in the area, and there was once a synagogue. No more: it was shut down several years ago. “There are many reasons,” the Rabbi tells me laconically, “but Bishop Nazi-Ali’s analysis fits the bill.”
Luton’s Asian Muslims, mostly from the rural Mirpur area of Kashmiri Pakistan, started coming during the 1960s as Vauxhall expanded (similar influxes were occurring in the northern mill towns). The men came first, then wives and families. They set up small local service businesses, and bought cheap run-down houses in the vicinity of the “Hatters’” football stadium.
The male migrant generation over 50 years of age – Asian and Irish – who did apprenticeships together and worked together at Vauxhall (the plant shut down in 2000) get on reasonably well to this day. But now jobs are in short supply, particularly for the under-25s. Yet Luton is still a favoured destination and domicile for migrants, including the new diaspora from eastern Europe, owing to the expansion of Luton airport and the availability of cheap international flights.
Kevin Crompton, the borough council’s chief executive, says that the perception of Bury Park as a no-go area to non-Muslims only started after 9/11 when Muslims were deemed potential terrorists by association. Only then did Islam, the majority religion of Asian migrants, he says, become an issue. Isolated incidents were exploited to give Luton’s Muslim population an extremist label. “In 2003,” Crompton says, “a teenage Muslim schoolgirl, Shabina Begum, took Luton’s Denbigh high school to court when she was sent home for wearing a coverall gown known as a jilbab. She won the case.” The articulate 16-year-old said it was a “victory for Muslims who wish to preserve their identity and values”. But religious and education leaders in Luton saw it as a defeat for cohesion strategies; and members of the local Al-Muhajiroun radical Muslim group took their cue to demonstrate outside other schools accused of anti-jilbabism.
Crompton’s overview, however, does not fit entirely with the narrative of Bishop Nazir-Ali and others, who stress the fact that British Muslim communities were radicalised through the 1980s and 90s in the mosques and madrasahs by the arrival in Britain of a wave of extremist imams, such as the Saudi Wahhabis, preaching jihad and Islamism. In 1989, the fatwa against Salman Rushdie drew support across the entire British Muslim community. It was a catalyst for Muslim resentment and feelings of victimisation, which in turn prompted ever greater British indignation. What’s undeniable is the growth of a younger generation of radical youth who have been exposed to the hate rants of imams like Abu Hamza and Omar Bakri Mohammed. “These teachers,” says Ed Husain, “spoke the ‘bruv’ and ‘innit’ language of the streets, which wasn’t the language of the more spiritual, Sufi-inspired, traditional imams, many of whom couldn’t even speak English.” Jonathan Evans, head of MI5, said in November 2007 that at least 2,000 people in the UK pose a threat to national security because of their support for Muslim terrorism, a rise of 400 since November 2006.
Bury Park became a byword for active Muslim extremism when it was revealed in 2005 that the 7/7 Tube and bus bombers set off for London from Luton station leaving a vehicle laden with explosives in the car park. A website titled “Holy War – Al Qaeda’s Luton & Dunstable war front” declared Luton a “frontline in Islam and Al Qaeda’s war against Britain”. The tabloids labelled Bury Park “Al Qaeda Street”, claiming that a Luton part-time taxi driver named “Q” had sent the bombers for training in Pakistan and that he was a ringleader in a plot to build a fertiliser bomb in a lock-up garage in Crawley, foiled in 2004 by MI5. “Q”, a shadowy figure, is apparently still at large. Meanwhile, similar links to terrorist plots, real and rumoured, were being made with Muslim communities around Britain. Seven Kings, Ilford, was dubbed a terrorist “hotbed” after an Algerian lodger was linked (wrongly as it turned out) with an outlandish plot to manufacture the poison ricin. Leafy Forest Gate, on the outer reaches of London’s East End, achieved notoriety after two Muslim brothers were accused of unspecified sedition following a raid involving 250 police, one of whom managed to accidentally shoot one of the brothers in the shoulder. The same pattern had occurred in many other parts of the country. In Oldham, for example, the riots of May 2001 – caused by disaffected youth gangs in an area of deprivation and unemployment – gave retrospective credence, four months ahead of 9/11, to the town’s status as an extremist no-go area.
As I travelled through Muslim communities, in the North, the Midlands and the South, I found religious and non-religious community leaders consistently adamant that Muslim majorities were not be confused with real and rumoured terrorist cells, nor with Islamist political radicals, such as Hizb ut-Tahrir, or youth gangs engaged in drugs and territorial conflicts. Yet I found that despite new hate-crime laws, seditious literature – whatever its effect on the majority – is nevertheless being distributed in mosques and Islamic centres around the country.
Meanwhile, Luton, like other enclaves, has experienced a spate of incidents that look all too like attempts to make Bury Park a no-go area to non-Muslims. Between November of last year and last month there were 18 attacks – all registered by the police – on five non-Muslim homes in the area. One couple, Mr and Mrs Harrop, white residents in their eighties, have had bricks hurled through their windows. The home of Mrs Palmer, a widow of West Indian origin, aged 70, has been attacked four times; on one occasion a metal beer keg crashed through her bay window while she was watching TV. Such attacks are not typical of the activities of the sort of radicals who preach a global Islamic state, or potential terrorists, who, according to one of my MI5 informants, merge into a background of “innocent normalcy” till the last minute. DCI Ian Middleton of Bedfordshire police says: “It’s the perception of the victims that their Muslim neighbours are to blame, and we have to respect that. But we have our doubts.” Middleton suspects, as does Margaret Moran, MP for Luton South, that the attacks could be the work of small groups of white or Muslim extremists, stirring up racial and inter-religious hatred for its own sake. I was to come across comparable “no-go” incidents in other parts of Britain, such as threats against Muslim converts to Christianity, and attacks on visiting social workers and Salvation Army facilities.
Yet for every story there is a parallel instance of racial insult by white British on every kind of migrant, white or black.
As one spends time within Britain’s Muslim communities, the easy generalisations evaporate. While most inter-faith activists – Sikhs, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists – tend to reject the “no-go” allegation, the principal complaints come not from victims of spasmodic incidents, but from ordinary non-Muslim residents who feel “like foreigners in our own country.” One elderly woman, born and bred in Bow, tells me: “You go into a shop and ask, ‘Got any Colman’s?’, say, and they haven’t got a clue. You feel like you’re the foreigner, not them.” Such reactions, of course, make no distinction between Muslims and other ethnicities. For younger non-Muslim families, it’s invariably the schools issue. Some state schools in areas like Stepney Green, where Bangladeshi migrants predominate, will have up to 90% Asian Muslim pupil intake, especially in primary schools. “When your child is the only white kid in the class, you get upset,” one Dagenham father tells me. “Why should my child feel different from all the rest in my own country?” The impression of “the only white kid”, however, more typically involves a white British child in class alongside children from a wide diversity of ethnicities, cultures and religions. Many schools adjacent to, or overlapping, Asian Muslim enclaves, have as many as 50 or 60 different first languages.
But is the impression of a Muslim monocultural phenomenon a result of the desire of Muslims to live a segregated existence? Or have they been constrained by the realities of housing provision in deprived and run-down areas? An independent review of Oldham’s communities by David Ritchie after the riots of 2001 revealed extensive problems both in owner-occupied and council properties. Many thousands of Pakistanis and Bangladeshis live in deteriorated, inadequate owner-occupied properties. Attempts at mixing Asian and white families in council properties “have been largely unsuccessful”, according to Ritchie, “because of racist victimisation of incoming Asian families”. Oldham’s estate agents, moreover, have been accused of creating ghettos by “red-lining”, or setting limits to where Asians can buy in the interests of protecting property prices in “better” white areas. The predicament of areas like Oldham, Bradford and Burnley was set out in Ted Cantle’s report (December 2001), commissioned by David Blunkett. Cantle referred to “a depth of polarisation” around segregated communities living “a series of parallel lives”.
Meanwhile, community tensions and exclusions are just as likely to come from within the Asian Muslim enclaves as from outside. Wherever I went, from Oldham in the North to Finsbury Park in the South, I found fragmented Muslim affiliations, rivalries and loyalties, comparable to traditional British socioeconomic and class divides. Many I spoke to thought the term “Muslim community” absurd since their relations are defined by a diversity of clanships, families, villages and class divisions “back home”. Every Muslim nation of origin – from Morocco to the Bay of Bengal – contains a huge array of social divisions as well as different complexions of Muslim practice. I lost count of the times Muslims accused others of not being “proper Muslims”, or even being kuffar – infidels.
How the dominant Pakistani Sunni groups in Britain interact with each other and non-Muslims depends on their diverse backgrounds. A Muslim councillor in Slough (home to 20,000 Muslims) says: “Look around you in the street. You think they are all just Asian Muslims. But we have working-class people, Mirpuris from rural Pakistani Kashmir. The shopkeepers are mostly Lahoris, and Sialkotis from urban Punjab. The wealthy businessmen are mostly from the city of Karachi.” A Slough Pakistani businessman gives new meaning to “no-go areas” when he says: “I want to buy a house in Luton, but my wife won’t hear of it. She says all those Luton types are lower-class Mirpuri riff-raff.”
A Muslim informant of Punjabi origin, Aisha Malik, a PhD student researching a thesis on sharia and women, tells me that a striking paradox involves the coverall jilbab and generation wars. “People see this garb as reactionary, but they are worn mostly by progressive young women exerting their right to education and choice in marriage over parents who want them to stay at home and marry a cousin back in Pakistan.” Aisha dresses in jeans and her head is uncovered, but with a scarf always at the ready. Everywhere I went in Britain I heard of the stratagems young Muslim women employ to make their hijabs and other coverall items alluring: the quality and cut of materials, a suggestive fold of the silk, a hint of bare ankle.
Ed Husain, who is a PhD student at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, provides similar telling insights, having visited several Muslim cultural borderlands. He was born in Mile End in London’s East End. His father, of Pakistani origin, ran a small curry takeaway on the Commercial Road. After leaving a multi-ethnic primary school in Docklands, Ed went to an Asian Muslim monocultural secondary with predominantly Bangladeshi intake. Then he got involved in student radical Islamic movements in Whitechapel and Tower Hamlets. After teaching English as a foreign language in Syria and Saudi Arabia, he returned to Britain reconverted to a gentler brand of Sufism, which insists that Islam is a religion and not an ideology. Husain is dedicated to the idea of encouraging Muslims towards acknowledging a purely religious, rather than political, dimension of Islam. This does not mean, for him, a retreat to enclosed religiosity.
Husain’s analysis of “no-go” Muslim Britain focuses on the monocultural groups that offer few opportunities for the young to move on and out of their enclaves. “It’s absurd,” he says, “to send kids five nights a week to Koranic class, dressed in costumes only suitable for the subcontinent, to learn scripture by rote in a language they don’t understand.” Husain contends that many migrant populations of Pakistani Muslims have never really settled here: “Migrants in the past tended to sink roots. Nowadays, with cheap long-haul jet travel, Pakistanis have homes in Britain and back in Pakistan. Satellite TV and mobile phones enable families to live in this country as if they were elsewhere. They are still mentally, spiritually and even physically back in Pakistan or Bangladesh.”
A result of the “in-betweener” phenomenon is the reinforcement of the tendency in Muslim communities to relegate women to an inferior status, denying them education and even the opportunity to learn English. But Aisha Malik believes that the influence of British culture on Muslim women is inevitable – in a recent demonstration outside an Ilford mosque, Muslim women sat in the street to protest their exclusion from the mosque’s committee. A change in attitudes, Malik concedes, will take time because of the insulated environments some communities have created for themselves. She tells me of a group of families that bought 16 houses in a row in Slough. “They knocked down the garden fences; they live in and out of each other’s houses creating the village environment they left behind in Mirpuri Kashmir.”
The advancement of women, moreover, involves a change of attitudes in men. I’m talking to Mustafa, a Turkish Muslim, in a cafe in Wood Green, north London. He is a state secondary school supply teacher and married to a British woman. Their four children are in state schools. “The fact is, a woman is not the equal of a man,” he insists. “That is why in sharia law a man can be a witness, but you need two women to equal a single male testimony.” I ask why, and he cites the emotional state of women during menstruation. He tells me he will bring up his daughters to accept this doctrine and that he has already instructed his 18-year-old son. “When I’m away, my son is automatically head of the household, not my wife.” He also defends the practice of excluding women from the main prayer room in the mosque, “as men must not be tempted sexually by their presence”. He admits, however, that he and his wife “don’t see eye to eye on these issues”. One suspects his daughters won’t, either; for the time being, one wonders about the influence Mustafa is exerting in British schools.
The interaction arising from mixed marriages and relationships (ethnic and religious), as well as the peculiar mix of proximate neighbours, already affects Muslim identity in Britain, just as diverse Muslim cultures have the power to influence the British majority culture. And Asian Muslims who have been in Britain for several generations are as anxious about the impact of the recent estimated half-million east European migrants as many long-term Brits.
Here’s a typical story: “The Poles are causing the main community tensions,” a young man from the Luton central mosque tells me. “They are undercutting hourly rates below the minimum wage, they drink and they abuse their women. They cram tenants into rented properties, and insult us in the streets by setting up their Polski pork-sausage stands.”
Every migrant community is unique, dynamic, shaped not only by cultures of origin but by the proximity of more recent migrants (in Ilford I was told by the leader of Redbridge council that there are now 96 languages spoken in the borough). Muslims, in other words, share the same cultural and territorial vulnerabilities as anybody else. New arrivals from eastern Europe, usually labelled “Poles” by Muslims, whatever their nationality, are prepared, according to one Slough-based building contractor, to work for £2 an hour, whereas Asians, who know their rights under the minimum-wage legislation, refuse to work for less than £5 an hour.
The influence of the “Poles” is set to expand in unpredictable ways. I’m talking with a chief imam in a Midlands city, who wants himself and his mosque to be off the record. He takes me up into an office on the second floor, past a room labelled Fatwahs – which merely means sharia judgments. He talks about Islam being a proselytising religion, unlike Judaism, Hinduism and Sikhism. For this reason, he says, Islam is set to expand rapidly in Britain. Then he drops a bombshell. “In the past two years, 16 Polish women have converted to Islam in my mosque.”
When I ask to meet these women, he says it is impossible. So I take another route. The imams are mostly ruled by the mosque councils which pay their salaries; the real power in the community resides with the local ward councillors, who hold court in the front rooms of their homes. This is how I met a remarkable Muslim woman community worker, who also wished to remain anonymous.
“There are second-generation Muslim men in many communities who have been obliged to marry village women or cousins back home. These men may be prosperous and westernised, and want a different kind of relationship, with a younger woman perhaps. A typical Polish convert might have been a victim of domestic violence with her boyfriend. She might have worked as a cleaner for a Muslim man who finds her attractive and takes her as a mistress or even proposes marriage as a second wife. He then sets her up in a flat and perhaps pays for her to go to college. They begin to find Islam attractive.”
On the Dunstable Road, I meet another Muslim woman activist, Dr Nazia Khanum. She runs a movement called Equality in Diversity and advises Muslim communities across Britain on cultural cohesion. We meet in a busy internet cafe. “Bishop Nazir-Ali is totally wrong,” she says. “We can all live in different worlds simultaneously. I know men in Whitechapel who look as if they just arrived from Lahore when they go to prayers, but they work in offices at Canary Wharf. They will be in a West End cinema one evening and attend classes at Birkbeck College the next. Being Muslim in Britain doesn’t mean we are restricted to our monocultural enclave. It means we can move between cultures and be endlessly enriched by them.” When this happens with the women, she insists, “it will have profound consequences”.
It seems ironic that Britain, which more than any other developed nation gave asylum to persecuted Muslims through two decades, should be fearful of an apparent lack of toleration on the part of its guests. It is equally ironic that Britain, the most enthusiastic surveillance country in the world, should believe that true no-go areas are possible in our cities. Growing assertiveness among Muslim moderates has nevertheless had divisive consequences. In its wake has come a profound disenchantment with multiculturalism, as well as disillusionment with prospects for Muslim integration into “typical Britishness” – whatever that might be.
But a way forward is evident in some parts of Britain, especially in relatively prosperous, well-run, second- and third-generation migrant communities whose councillors have resisted the formation of ghettos. The borough of Redbridge is an urban township of 250,000 inhabitants on the borders of Essex and London. It has become a destination of choice for many migrants moving out of the East End in search of better housing and schools, closer to the green belt. Its population, which includes Hindus, Sikhs, Jews and a Christian majority, has avoided the formation of geographical monocultural enclaves. Unemployment is relatively low, as there are good travel connections into all parts of London and industries along the Thames estuary. The different ethnicities are spread like a mosaic throughout the borough. They come together in something closer to their representative percentages of diversity in the schools.
I recently visited Valentines high school, a mixed state comprehensive in Redbridge, and found one of the happiest and most academically successful state schools I have come across in a migrant population approaching 50%. Valentines’ school roll of 1,250 is multi-ethnic (49 languages), with almost 40% Muslims. Since Redbridge has two grammar schools and three Catholic secondary schools, it could be argued that Valentines gets the leftovers. Yet last year 95% of its 350-strong sixth form went to university to read such subjects as medicine, physics, mathematics, political science and history, three of them to Oxford and Cambridge. With a strong head teacher and well-qualified staff, the school has managed to generate a dynamic pluralism, rather than a watered-down “integrated” relativism, still less a set of divided and divisive monocultures. The school generates interaction between the pupils as individuals, assisted by mature outside mentors. The result is a remarkably creative and cohesive community.
The head teacher, Sylvia Jones, tells me of the effort put into spoken English from day one of the first year, aimed not only at non-English speakers but kids who arrive communicating in local Ali G “innit” argot. “I want them to aspire to tertiary education and be able to travel out from Ilford into other worlds and back,” says Jones. “They’ve got to be able to communicate in any circumstances, not just among their peer group.”
There’s an insistence on old-fashioned morale-forming disciplines like uniforms properly worn. The sixth-form boys wear dark suits, which, they say, protect them from gangs when walking through estates. One lad tells me: “They think we are just young businessmen and leave us alone.” There’s a zero toleration for rudeness. A lot of thought and planning has been given to religious instruction, offering sympathetic knowledge of other world religions as well as respect towards difference.
In a class of third-years (with only one white pupil and four veiled Muslim girls) I sat in on a discussion of Carol Ann Duffy’s love poem for Valentine’s Day. "… I give you an onion. It is a moon wrapped in brown paper. It promises light like the careful undressing of love. Here. It will blind you with tears…" One by one, each pupil found something uniquely interesting in their reading of the poem. It struck me, listening to these articulate pupils, British yet widely diverse in culture, ethnicity and religion, that the metaphor of that humble onion, distinctly divisible yet entirely cohesive, could, with a lot of effort on the part of a lot of people, yet be the key to Britain’s multicultural hopes and fears.