Author: Sarah Lyall
Publication: The New York Times
Date: May 12, 2003
Something changed Omar Khan Sharif,
sent him in a new direction, and Derby's older Pakistani population cannot
begin to fathom what it was.
But the radicalization of the well-educated,
thoroughly Westernized Mr. Sharif, 27 - the forces that led him from Derby
to Tel Aviv, where he is wanted on charges of helping to carry out a suicide
bombing in a beachfront nightclub on April 30 - make a certain sense to
the younger, second-generation immigrants born and raised here. Mr. Sharif
was angry, they say, for reasons that would be all too understandable to
Muslims everywhere.
"In a way, I sympathize," said Mohammed
Zahid, 23, an automobile-plant inspector with a broad Midlands accent,
who was strolling down Normanton Road, near where Mr. Sharif lived with
his wife and two daughters. "When you see what's happening in Israel, something
comes into your mind, something just goes."
On a fine spring day on a pleasantly
bustling street, such an explanation seems partial at best. As Sarfraz
Bashir, 31, a college graduate in between computer jobs who was helping
out at the Jamia Mosque on Rose Hill Street, put it: "In the U.K., you
can have a proper job and a proper education. We have everything here -
why ruin it?"
Along with another Briton, Asif
Mohammed Hanif, 21, Mr. Sharif is said to have entered Israel as a tourist,
via Jordan, using his British passport. There, the two checked into a hotel,
donned explosive belts and made their way to Mike's Place, a jazz club
next to the United States Embassy.
Mr. Hanif's explosives detonated,
killing him and three others and injuring at least 50 more, the authorities
say; Mr. Sharif's explosives failed to go off and he managed to slip away.
He and Mr. Hanif now enjoy the dubious notoriety of being the first British
suicide bombers to strike within Israel.
Mr. Sharif's wife, sister and brother
are under arrest in London, charged under antiterrorism legislation with
failing to disclose information about acts of terrorism.
Publicly, what Mr. Sharif is accused
of doing has been roundly condemned here. But scratch beneath the surface
in Derby, and people begin to talk about Iraq and Afghanistan and Israel
and the oppression of Islam.
"Some people take Islam deeper than
others," said a young man on Normanton Road, by way of explaining Mr. Sharif's
motives. He declined to give his name, but said he was 19 and an unemployed
second-generation Pakistani.
"Killing people is wrong, obviously,
but if he was doing it for God himself - then fair enough," said the man,
checking his cellphone for the time, so he could get to the bank before
it closed. "You have to be pretty brave to do something like that, to hold
a bomb in your hand and blow yourself up."
Across the street, a group of hair-gelled
youths in Nike and Reebok sweatsuits perched on a railing and commented
on the events involving Mr. Sharif. Inside, the older proprietor of a fast-
food restaurant dismissed their comments with contempt, but talk they did.
"What he's done is very good, and
they won't ever find him," said Basu Hussain, 18, taking a break from his
job at Lick'n Chick'n, a fast-food outlet. "We should all get together
and kill all the Jews."
Derby seems an incongruous crucible
for such talk and for a suicide bomber, and Mr. Sharif an unlikely candidate
for a position usually filled by young, unmarried men politicized from
birth by virtue of growing up in places like Gaza or the West Bank.
Derby has always prided itself on
the good relations between white Britons and Muslims of Pakistani descent,
the preponderance of the 8.4 percent of the population identifying themselves
as Asian. Although the unemployment rate among young Muslims is disproportionately
high, there has been no ethnic violence of the sort that has taken place
in other northern and midlands towns in recent years.
The British National Party, a right-wing
political group that has gained ground in local governments by capitalizing
on Britons' fears of Muslim outsiders, has no presence here. Al Muhajiroun,
a Muslim group that advocates overthrowing Western democracies, regularly
tries to recruit believers here, but most Derby Muslims - although by no
means all - dismiss it out of hand.
Mr. Sharif grew up in the heavily
Pakistani Normanton district. It is here, in a neat Victorian row house
with a large garden in the back, that his father, Mohammed, a prominent
businessman originally from Kashmir who owned a laundry, a kebab restaurant,
and other shops, moved with his wife and six children about 20 years ago.
Both parents have since died.
In a country where many immigrants
stick to their native languages at home, the family spoke English among
themselves and wore Western clothes, said Hamida Akhtar, 54, who lives
down the street on Breedon Hill Road and was a close friend of Mrs. Sharif.
"They were very respectable and nice," she said.
The family emphasized education
for their children, and Omar, the youngest, was perhaps particularly privileged.
Although he attended state schools (the equivalent of American public schools)
in Derby for most of his childhood, between 1986 and 1988 he went to Foremarke
Hall Preparatory School, set on acres of woods, fields and ponds about
20 minutes outside the city.
At 18, he enrolled in college in
London, and came back transformed. He wore a beard and clothes that identified
him as a religious Muslim. He prayed five times a day.
"He used to be dressed like this,"
Ms. Akhtar said, pointing to her husband, Mohammed, who was wearing a suit
and tie. "Suddenly, he was changed." He had a new wife, too, named Tahira
Tabassum, who wore a traditional Islamic head scarf.
In recent years, too, Mr. Sharif
began spending more time with the local representatives of Al Muhajiroun,
a group based at the Finsbury Park mosque in London that has several regional
offices around Britain. Its leader, Omar Bakri Mohamed, told the Derby
Evening Telegraph that Mr. Sharif had attended regular "ideological discussions"
with the group at St. James' Center, a community center on Malcolm Street.
"I first noticed him because he could understand Arabic, which he said
he had studied in Syria," Mr. Mohamed told the paper.
The group has recently played down
its links to violence, modifying public pronouncements in a way that seems
aimed at consumption by the Western news organizations. But it has spoken
very differently in the past, encouraging Britons to go to Afghanistan
to fight on behalf of the Taliban, for example.
In 2000, it held a rally through
the streets of Normanton, with placards urging the killing of Jews.
Last year, it sponsored a celebratory
conference marking the anniversary of the Sept. 11 bombings; a fading notice
advertising the event, with a picture of the burning twin towers and the
words "a towering day in history," is still stuck to a post outside the
Rose Hill Street mosque.
The Finsbury Park mosque, Al Muhajiroun's
London base, is well known as a center for espousing anti-Western ideas.
Among those who have passed through its doors are Richard C. Reid, the
so-called shoe bomber, convicted in the United States of trying to carry
out a suicide attack on a plane in 2001.
Most Muslims here tend to avoid
people from Al Muhajiroun, who regularly waylay them as they leave the
mosque after Friday Prayers.
"The literature they put out is
embarrassing for mature members of the community, people who have more
understanding," said Fareed Hussain, a member of the Derby City Council.
"Not only do they they put out propaganda against Jewish people, but also
against Indian people, Sikhs and Hindus."
But there are very real fears that
they are offering something that young men, particularly the underemployed
and frustrated, want to hear.
It is a hard time to be Muslim in
this country. Many Muslims are particularly unhappy about the harsh antiterrorism
measures introduced here in 2000 and tightened in 2001, which give broad
powers of arrest and detention and have been used too enthusiastically,
in the minds of some, by a government eager to demonstrate its antiterrorist
credentials.
"We're extremely worried about young
people being susceptible to their message," Shokat Lal, general secretary
of the Pakistani Community Center, said of Al Muhajiroun. "The people in
these groups present themselves as positive role models - they make you
want to participate and be part of something."
Mr. Lal said young men across Britain
were at risk. "Muslim, and particularly Pakistani, youth at the moment
seem to fall within two categories," he said. "Either they join a fundamentalist
group, as Sharif did, or they get involved in drugs and crime."
One young Derby Muslim who admires
what Mr. Sharif is said to have done is Shaban Yasin, 17. He works at a
halal fish, chips and kebab shop that caters to all manner of multiethnic
culinary tastes. Suicide bombing, he said, is the "wrong way" to kill the
Jews, adding that, "We should find out the best way to kill them, and do
that."
Mr. Yasin grew up in Derby, too,
and said that his parents, immigrants from Pakistan who settled here happily,
had retired and were "living it large" on their British pensions. But,
he said, he considers himself a Muslim first and foremost.
If he were to blow himself up for
the cause, he said, "I think my parents would be proud of me."
