[Mb-civic] The heart of Muslim Britain - H.D.S. Greenway - Boston Globe

[William Swiggard]

The heart of Muslim Britain

By H.D.S. Greenway  |  October 12, 2005

BRADFORD, England
IN NORTHERN mill towns such as this, you can see into the heart of 
Muslim Britain. The industries that once flourished have gone, but the 
migrants who filled the mills, their children, and their children's 
children are still here. There is Mustafa's Food Shop, and Kharri 
Shalif's on the Whetley Hill Road, if you are hungry. And the shops are 
full of clothes familiar in Karachi or Lahore.

This was a wool-weaving town, and immigrants from Pakistan filled a 
labor shortage following World War II, feeling the push of poverty at 
home and the pull of jobs here. But the woolen industry is gone now. A 
sign on the handsome façade of the gutted Lister Mills proclaims a 
''regeneration," which means nothing will be made here anymore, and that 
the building is being turned into flats that the people who worked here 
will not be able to afford.

It is a story familiar to an American. Industries come and go, 
immigrants come and huddle together in inner cities for spiritual and 
cultural warmth in a strange land, and then are, hopefully, absorbed 
into the mainstream of national life. Some find it harder than others. 
In America, race has always been a problem. In Britain, it is more recent.

When I first came to live in Britain for a while 45 years ago, Britons 
used to shake their heads at America's racial problems, as only a 
comparatively homogeneous people could. Even then, at the end of empire, 
her majesty's subjects were flowing from all corners of the world into 
this green and pleasant land. Although Britain has absorbed them and put 
its faith in multiculturalism, this has not gone as easily as Britons 
had hoped.

Bradford and other northern towns have experienced race riots in recent 
years. Commissions and tasks forces have been assigned to discover what 
went wrong, and one conclusion has been, according to Ted Cantle, who 
headed one inquiry, that racial disturbances are more likely to happen 
''in those areas where diversity really hadn't been valued and seen as a 
positive force. It had been allowed to degenerate into segregation and 
polarization."

Britain has traditionally been a live-and-let-live country in which 
there is less pressure to conform than in France, where the ideal is for 
immigrants to assimilate into French culture. There is, people say, more 
public space for religious and ethnic differences in Britain then in 
many countries. But race riots have alerted people that all is not well, 
and when Muslim boys born in Britain became suicide bombers back in 
July, there has been even more soul searching.

First generations have enough to do making a living, but second 
generations look around and demand equal status and recognition of their 
identity. Second generations can fall into an identity hole in which 
they are no longer of the old country, and not yet completely accepted 
in their new land. ''We are as British as they are, but you wouldn't 
know it," says Sediq Khan in his Yorkshire accent. In the next breath he 
says he wouldn't live anywhere else. Yet British intelligence estimates 
that 70 Britons have joined the Iraqi insurgency in the past two years.

Britain has several Muslims in Parliament, and Muslims have achieved 
more acceptance in top jobs than in most European countries or the 
United States. But still, as professor Humayun Ansari, director of the 
Center for Ethnic Minority Studies at Royal Holloway, University of 
London, says: ''We had nonwhites in Parliament in the late 19th century, 
but the established order, the hallowed institutions of society, are 
still monolithically white."

Ansari believes that ''multiculturalism is crucial to establishing a 
national bargain" between the majority and minorities, but even 
multiculturalism has come to be questioned in the anguish that has 
followed the suicide bombings.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/10/12/the_heart_of_muslim_britain/
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