Author: Vir Sanghvi
Publication: The Hindustan Times
Date: November 1, 2001
For a country that was once regarded
as being riddled with the virus of racism, Britain has made astounding
progress over the last 20 years. It is, for my money, the most genuinely
multi-cultural, multi-ethnic society in the West. And unlike the United
States, which prides itself on being a melting pot, where distinctive national
traits are melted down to create an all-American identity, England is happy
to be a mosaic, allowing citizens to retain Indian, Jamaican or Bangladeshi
identities while calling themselves British.
And yet, this time, for the first
time in many visits, I sensed a vague disquiet within Britain's multi-ethnic,
multi-cultural ethos. Oddly enough, it wasn't colour that made the majority
uneasy. It was religion.
Even before the horrors of the September
11 attacks, Britain's Muslim community had begun to grow increasingly militant.
In recent months, there has been anger and violence. The maulvis at the
Finsbury Park mosque have delivered sermons that would make the Shahi Imam
of Delhi blush and there have been riots in the predominantly Muslim Brick
Lane areas. There have been full-fledged riots in the Lancashire town of
Oldham. The British media have called them race riots but anybody familiar
with the subcontinent would have recognised them as communal riots.
Gangs of young Muslims attacked
the police, destroyed property and targeted non-Muslims. In Bradford, a
Muslim underworld has grown up so quickly that the police are worried.
As worrying as these developments
were, they did not concern the vast majority of Brits till September 11.
Since then, however, the growing militancy of the Muslim minority has become
front page news.
Opinion polls show that a majority
of British Muslims believe that America had it coming. There is enormous
sympathy for the barbarians of the Taliban. There is little support for
the British-American operation against Afghanistan. And there is a more
worrying readiness to go and die for the Taliban. To the horror of British
liberals, hundreds of Muslim youth are trying to get to Afghanistan to
fight -against the British forces and along with the Taliban.
As such in mosques as the one in
Finsbury Park, the sermons have now got so extreme and anti-West that we
in India would have arrested the Shahi Imam if he had said anything even
half as offensive. Such sermons are routinely greeted with pro Bin Laden
slogans. Outside Birmingham's Central Mosque, stalls sell Bin Laden videos
and CD-ROMs. One such video has the mass murderer declaring that the death
of Americans gave him joy and emphasising that the jehad against America
is at the core of Islam.
The evidence is that this kind of
jehadi fervour is growing. Last week, a radical Muslim group firebombed
a church to show solidarity with Islam's global fight against Christianity.
And the police in such trouble-spots as Oldham and Bradford say that they
expect more trouble.
So far, at least, the British authorities
have taken an admirably liberal view. The Finsbury Park mosque gets police
protection. No action will be taken against a company called Foundation
of Radical Dialogue which distributes the murderous Bin Laden videos. Tony
Blair continues to meet Muslim leaders who have clearly lost control of
the extremist fringe of their community and pretends that British Muslims
are backing the war effort.
All this seems to support my contention
that Britain is a truly multi-cultural society - in India we would have
had communal riots if Muslims were openly rushing off to fight for the
other side in a war where Indian forces were involved.
But that patience is now running
thin. Even liberals within the British media are beginning to show their
exasperation with Muslim fanatics. Among the Asian community, the distinction
has never been clearer. The two main groups of Indian origin (Gujarati
Hindus and Sikhs) are solidly behind the anti-Taliban campaign. The Pakistanis
and Bangladeshis are more ambivalent. And condemnation of the fanatics
is not as loud as it should be.
Inevitably, there has been a search
for answers. Why should Pakistani children, born and brought up in the
UK, having enjoyed the benefits of the British welfare State, suddenly
want to make common cause with the murderous Arab leader of fundamentalist
Afghans?
The standard answer - this is a
response to British racism - will not wash. If racism is the motivating
factor then why don't Hindus and Sikhs react in the same sort of way? Nor
will the answer offered by liberal Muslims -- this has nothing to do with
Islam - work. To echo Salman Rushdie, if this is not about Islam, then
why should a British-born, English-educated youth in Bradford want to join
an Arab terrorist when the only thing they have in common is Islam?
The only answer that makes some
sense - in Lahore as much as London - is the role of the Islamic clergy.
Till 1973, most Islamic countries (including Pakistan) were moving towards
a more or less secular ethos in line with the Turkish or Egyptian model.
Then, after the Yom Kipur War, the Arabs raised the price of oil and changed
the balance of global economic power. The countries that had oil were run
by those who made a fetish out of religion.
These countries used their new-found
wealth to finance mosques and clergymen all over the world. They turned
hatred of Zionism into an Islamic religious tenet rather than the political
position it had once been and asked all Muslims to treat all Jews as the
enemy. (Think about it: a mullah in any Indian mosque will ask the faithful
to treat the Palestinian struggle as their own. But will any Catholic priest
in say, Goa, ask the congregation to treat the IRA's long fight as a battle
on behalf of global Catholicism?) When countries with Islamic populations
said they were secular, they ran into the disapproval of the Sheikhs. One
instance: King Faisal of Saudi Arabia refused to help Bangladesh till it
called itself an Islamic State.
Oil money was used to drive Islam
back into the middle ages. Mullahs and maulvis began spouting fundamentalist
rhetoric and treating liberal Muslims with disdain. Much of the money went
into the setting up of madrasas which told students that they were Muslims
first and citizens of their countries second. It is such madrasas that
produced this generation of Kashmiri jehadis; and similar madrasas are
now transforming the ethos of Nepal's Muslim minority.
Hitherto liberal Muslim nations
rushed to embrace medievalism in the hope of benefiting from their Arab
benefactors. ZA Bhutto pushed Pakistan into the front rank of Pan-Islamic
nationalism and Gen Zia-ul-Haq, completed the process, creating the fundamentalist
forces that will destroy Pakistan one day.
At first, the West encouraged this
process. In Britain, the State actually helped finance madrasas for Muslim
children. Only now are the British realising that no real teaching goes
on at these madrasas. For instance, Bradford has 18 private Muslim schools
that are independent of all secular scrutiny. Each year, students at these
schools turn out to be the least-educated kids in Britain. The schools
say they don't mind: they would rather teach the Quran, than history, geography,
science, etc. An official report into the causes of riots in Bradford blamed
the Muslim schools and the hatred they spawned.
None of this is meant to suggest
that Islam by itself is backward or medieval. All religions have their
fundamentalist sides. Think how Hindus would react if the Hindu community
was hijacked by the Bajrang Dal, if Sadhvi Rithambara or BL Sharma 'Prem'
claimed to speak for Hindus; or if children were given textbooks in which
Dara Singh was hailed as a hero. The problem is not Islam itself; it is
the fundamentalist faction that espouses an Arab-inspired, Pan-Islamic
identity.
And yet, I'm not sure that everybody
makes the distinction between fundamentalist Islam (the Islamists in Rushdie's
terminology) and moderate Muslims. In India, we've been fortunate that
so many liberal Muslims (led by the likes of Mushirul Hasan and Shabana
Azmi) have isolated the Islamists. But, as Salman Rushdie points out, this
is not happening elsewhere in the world. In Pakistan, the liberals are
silent.
And in such countries as Saudi Arabia,
the fundamentalists have actually turned on their paymasters and now threaten
their thrones.
But it is Britain that worries me
the most. A month ago I wrote that I was concerned by the number of Hindus
who were using Muslim support for the Taliban to treat all Muslims as fanatics.
That danger seems to have receded in India but a similar feeling is surfacing
in the West. For many Americans, Islam is already the enemy: the new evil
empire. Sadly, the same sort of view is beginning to take root in the UK,
despite the country's multi-cultural ethos.
None of this augurs well. The last
thing the world needs is another Cold War; this time, Islam versus the
West (or even, the Rest.)
