Around half the British bombers of 7/7 and 7/21 were of Pakistani origin, the other half of African or Caribbean origin. The NYT now spins the Pakistani group as victims of cultural confusion:
“They don’t know whether they’re Muslim or British or both…” They are alienated from their parents’ rural South Asian culture, which they see as backward… they feel excluded from mainstream British society, which has so far not yielded to hyphenated immigrant identities as America has.
‘Give me mango lassi and aloo gobi in every grocery store, or give me death’ (which they actually have in the UK, bless Sainsbury’s little heart). The sale of desi exotica and Apu on The Simpsons irritate thin, sunlight-deprived snarkidesis into penning high-class rants on blogs, like the class nerd hitting the football star with a rubber band sneak attack and then running like a coward. But did Apu push the 7/7 murderers over the edge?
It’s pretty silly when you put it that way, of course. And the UK has one of the richest desi diasporic subcultures anywhere, so there’s no lack of musicians, movie stars and models for teens to identify with. Naturally, it’s not about cultural chiseling. IMO the Beeston milieu boils down to three factors: the reverse psychology of teen rebellion, the in-your-face racism of working-class Britain and standard-issue criminality. The perversity of rebelling by being more conservative than your parents is by far the strangest one.
The second gen is much more demanding of their rights as Britons than their immigrant parents who just want to keep their heads down and earn a paycheck:
The British Raj officially ended on Aug. 15, 1947, but its relationship to its subjects did not. In the following decades men of the Indian subcontinent came to Britain en masse to supply cheap, unskilled labor for factories, foundries and, especially, textile mills in northern Britain…Mr. Hussain, now 54, worked in factories and mills, drove a taxi, and has run a corner minimart for 15 years… Integration was minimal, thanks to barriers of race and language, culture and religion. The migrants were the colonized who came to live among their former colonizers. “When we came, we were like servants,” Mr. Hussain said…
The children of the immigrants have shed the servility, and passivity, of their parents, Mr. Hussain said. They want their rights, even if they have to fight for them. This inspires both pride and unease in him… Arshad Chaudhry, an accountant and member of the Leeds Muslim Forum, sees it differently. “They were very timid,” he said of the first wave.
The second gen is also better off for the usual reasons, their parents’ hard work and the intrinsic advantages of being native to a culture:
Both groups say South Asians have actually prospered more than whites, which has generated some resentment… Plenty of British Muslims face staggering poverty and unemployment, but the bombers and their immediate circle were not among them. At least some youth seem more directionless than deprived.
In some ways, Mr. Hussain and other elders say, the young people have had it easy. At the age when their fathers worked like mules, the sons are playing cricket, studying, hanging out. Compared with their parents, they are well educated, thoroughly literate, fluent in English and the Internet…
But the reverse psychology of rebelling against your parents’ beliefs generates some odd beliefs in the young fuddy-duddies of the fundamentalist fringe. These beliefs are quite retro; they’re neither new nor usually associated with louche, layabout teens at all. On the positive side, they include the deep pro-Americanism among college students in Iran. On the negative, they include a more conservative interpretation of religion in young Muslims and the Arabization of South Asian Islam. You also see this reflexive rebellion in Pakistan, where support for Islamist parties has grown in reaction to Gen. Musharraf despite the unpopularity of their actual, Taliban-like beliefs.
Neo-Islamism contains many ironies. In questioning their parents’ more tolerant strain of religion, they’re even less faithful to their culture, which is exactly what they complain about. And their alignment with an Arab interpretation is odd because many Arabs are famously disdainful of South Asian Muslims on a personal level. Pan-Islamic unity has never truly existed, it’s always fallen prey to the usual human prejudices of language, origin, accent and appearance.
Religiously, the young men came at Islam like converts – questioning everything, accepting nothing. If they were going to practice, they wanted to do it in what they considered the right way. If they wanted to go to heaven, they felt, they had to find the purest form. They wanted evidence for whatever they did in the Koran.
All of the young men quickly rejected the Islam of their parents, who practice a Sufi-influenced strain of the subcontinent called Barelvi. Shaped partly by Hindu and folk customs, it believes in the power of pirs, or holy men, and their shrines… The young men, Mr. Khan especially vehement among them, believed such “innovations” contaminated Islam… They stopped praying at their parents’ mosque, even as they used its basement gym to warn youth against the type of Islam their parents practiced upstairs… They turned, instead, to the more rigid, orthodox Deobandi school of Islam, which also had a mosque in town. The adherents of Deobandism include the Taliban of Afghanistan; they take what they see as a literal approach to the faith.
Of course, working-class Muslim Britons face hardcore racism of the two-fisted variety:
They grew up in rough and often blighted neighborhoods where “hardness” – the ability to fight anyone, at any time – was essential, said Mr. Hussain’s son Nadeem Ejaz, 30, who runs the family’s green grocery. The red shoelaces favored by young racists from the National Front remain etched in his teenage memories. Many young Muslims, Mr. Khan among them, turned to martial arts or boxing partly to ensure combat readiness.
And some drift into standard-issue criminality:
Boys regularly divide into white and Asian gangs… Here and in other South Asian communities over the past 15 years, they have begun to out-English the English, selling drugs and serving prison terms at alarming rates. In Stratford Street, a Bengali-British drug dealer with a gold tooth and a practiced air of menace sits on a stoop…
Some know family businesses are waiting for them to take over. Some go on welfare as soon as they reach adulthood. Some sell drugs. “They are getting lazy, getting spoiled from the government,” said Abu Hanifa, 60, another shopkeeper who works around the clock…
Many white residents of Beeston tend toward tattoos and pit bulls. The drinking starts early, and openly. Trash and furniture clot some streets. Faces have been ravaged by drugs, whose use peaked a few years ago when legions of zombielike heroin addicts wandered the streets.
The class difference between Muslims in Britain and those in the U.S. is probably the most fundamental. Beeston’s issues ain’t exactly American Chai.
As in, an ideology that has become a parasite on Pakistani Islam in Britain – one that might feed off certain feelings of disaffection, that might press all the right ‘Ummah’ and ‘Jihad’ buttons in its rhetoric and appeal and therefore leech off Islam
yes, it seems that people have a difficult time absorbing the importance of contingency. that is,
racism AND religion X AND personality type = violence
while racism AND religion !X AND personality type != violence
if i had to sum up my current idea, i would say islam is the problem, when intersected with several other variables. since i see no short-term expulsion of muslims in the offing, i suspect we’ll have to focus on the other variables (which include perceptions and concepts of what islam exactly is). it also means we have to deal with the particular nature of religious memes, in that people privilege them and refuse to step back and analyze them rationally, and might tweak out if they knew you were doing that (a cognitive science friend of mine told me that one reason there is little specific research on the cognitive of specific religions is that religionists get enraged when they find out you are reducing their beliefs to scientifically characterized phenomena). so, among fellow atheists i tend to say certain things, but i know i’m not going to convince muslims of various propositions so i try to intellectual “tack” to get where i want to go….
Here is a picture of two shameless wenches with their breasts squashed together – we can all agree this is enough to drive a man wild and want to impose sharia.
Two Besharam Women – Stone Them!
That was an interlude – please carry on with the discussion in a serious and intense manner now.
Apologies for putting words in your mouth. I was drawing the conclusion because the biradari system that you have quoted and the honor and feudal mindset is actually quite prevelant in North India even today. If you read Prakash Tandon’s Punjabi Century he talks about the deep roots of the biradari system in Hindus and Sikhs also (in present day pakistan pre-independence quite a few who migrated to England in factory level jobs). So, even here you see the difference is really religion and not the biradari/feudal/honor mindset. (I am making an assumption baradari is biradari system)
razib, notice your post deals with hypothetical alternatives in future. I could easily say the ‘better’ option would result if muslims were expelled for example. At this point, we have to go with data on the past behavior and unfortunately the situation IN BRITAIN is that islam is causing this menace. Sure, the factors might be different in the US but that doesn’t change what might be a very good reason in BRITAIN.
also, on this point:
pendantic inquiries about majority/minority or poor/mercantile or asia/african immgiration splits are going to achieve
i know i’m a bit pedantic, this is a common complaint on my own blog. here is the issue i have though:
1) i feel liberals ignore the “islam issue”
2) while conservatives tend to react with rage as regards the “islam issue”
this is what i’ve experienced on other weblogs when i venture around. both responses have their place. muslims are now, at least for the time being, part of many western countries so even if they are a menace, to save face and not trigger civil war heads of state have to mouth platitudes of “islam means peace” while a subset of muslims are killing their fellow citizens. similarly, the killing of those citizens by muslims tends to falsify the “islam means peace” in terms of a simple reading, and explains the rage experienced by many.
but public policy is already too often dictated by emotional concerns. a long term, as opposed to short term, solution to a problem is achieved via rational and unemotive pedantry. starving people might elicit tears and temporary aid, but the long term solution is always is better agricultural science and engineering. starvation is a problem, but what solutions do you propose? well, you have to understand why people starve in the first place (climate, distribution networks, political violence, introduced pests, etc.).
not to be an asshole, but too many people everywhere accept their first blush preconceptions and ideas without subsequent analysis and critique. i do it too. to prevent this we need a system of rational discourse where we correct for each other.
otherwise, message boards become a game of “right on man! i agree!”
btw, brown chix squishing their breasts together. makes me reconsider my tastse in females for a second. 😉
Underneath Taseer’s article in the print version of yesterday’s Times was the counterpoint “…But Midwest Muslims share the American dream“. It talks about all the Arabs who came to Detroit to work in Ford’s factories, and how they’re a large, peaceful, sucessful community now. In theory, Bradford and Detroit could be similar case studies — Muslims flowing in to work in factories that later shut down. One group becomes insular, hating their host country, the other becomes American. Why?
I could easily say the ‘better’ option would result if muslims were expelled for example.
i don’t think that should be off the table is islam is found to be congenitally a menacing religion. the moriscos of spain were expelled in 1600, so if you study that case you might find what some of the problems that entailed. though it did fix spain’s muslim problem.
It talks about all the Arabs who came to Detroit to work in Ford’s factories, and how they’re a large, peaceful, sucessful community now.
90% of those arabs (“ford’s factories”) were christian. the majority of “arab americans” are christian to this day, though the new immigrants are mostly muslim, and christian arab identity is being eroded by deracination and intermarriage.
also, re: the “south asian vs. we-are-very-different” dispute has some similarities with the “muslim” vs. “muslim-groups-are-different” debates. i think in this case though (on this weblog) you have a situation where those who propose a catchall south asian label would assent to balkanization amongst muslims while those with disagree with a catchall south asian label would argue for a catchall identification for muslims (at least operationally in the way they speak of the group “muslim”).
Here is a picture of two shameless wenches with their breasts squashed together – we can all agree this is enough to drive a man wild and want to impose sharia.
you would think so, but as Seinfeld once said, “cover anything up on a woman and a man will want to see it. If you cover her head, we’re just going to go out and buy Playhead magazine”
therefore I think sharia in this case would make it worse…ok back to the thread, my bad
Ok razib, my point on your being pedantic wasn’t about putting you down or sticking to first blush preconceptions. It was to stop what I seen happen time and again – rapid topic deflection. Very soon, I could see this topic degenerate into a poor vs mercantile or asian vs african immigration topic. Both of which I think don’t explain the tube bombers. People on this blog are overly sensitive to the ‘islam issue’. Look at punjabi boy dancing around the issue before he could even hint at what he feels. The issue of “what solutions to propose” obviously follows from what the problem is. I feel unless you correctly isolate the problem to islam you are bound to spin around uselessly – poverty, WOT, racism, deindustrialization etc. If we can come to the consensus on islam as the cause (at least in a broad sense), we can then proceed with how Islamic reformation (and its extent) can be acheived. Otherwise spending time on other topics is a waste of time. In my experience the majority first blush preconception is – Islam can’t be the cause so lets talk about something else. Christianity has had its reformation, Hinduism is still having its reformation started over two hundred years back. It is time for Islam to fix itself up, or have someone from outside do it.
punjabi boy,
nevermind the noise. if i follow you right, you are making a sociological argument that is based in the fact (that i didn’t know) that most british muslims are not so much pakistani as they are mirpuri. so there is a complex alchemy of mirpuri origins and cultural legacy plus emigration plus the geographical, class and occupation trends in their lives in britain, that has made them a particularly fertile breeding ground for jihadis — or at least for a kind of disaffection and nihilism that jihadis can exploit.
am i following you right?
either way, i would like to hear the rest. keep making your argument and don’t worry about all the sniping going on. you will not be confused for a pakistan-hater nor for any other kind of small-minded person.
peace
If we can come to the consensus on islam as the cause (at least in a broad sense), we can then proceed with how Islamic reformation (and its extent) can be acheived. Otherwise spending time on other topics is a waste of time. In my experience the majority first blush preconception is – Islam can’t be the cause so lets talk about something else.
i take it the “islam problem” as a given. i know not everyone else here does (ie; “islam means peace, the radicals are just misguided”), so that confusion is understandable. the key for me is that within the subset of “muslims” some are wackos and some are not. taking the islam background as a given, we then have to, as you noted, move to other factors. at this point, the elucidation of the factors can lead to “solutions” to the islam problem as we might be able to peal back some of the other contingent variables with result in violence. and so forth.
Babloo, while I think all religions have caused enough problems in this world, I don’t see anything in particular in Islam that is causing your assertion that this is an islamic issue. You are confusing Islam and Muslims. While it was muslims who commit these random acts of violence targetted at civilians, they are not considered islamic by the majority (well, we all believe majority knows the best, right?). last 20 or 25 years of violence (that too people know about it because it is primarily against white folks) is hardly enough to judge a 1400 year old religion. Like I said earlier, the extremists of course derive their inspiration from religion, but that is a small subset of 1.2 billion population, and the original doctrines of Islam do not condone such acts. If you read Islam’s holybook, its message is not any more violent than any of its counterparts in other religions. The assertion that it is an Islamic problem would not solve anything – it is a muslim problem committed by a minority and they are finding a fertile ground in the prevailing political context.
Muslim terrorism has existed during most part of this century but in a very minimal, local scale and Doesn’t anyone know that if U.S hadn’t pumped billions of dollars to aid the mujahideen during the Afghan Russian war, this global menace would never have happened?
If you read Islam’s holybook, its message is not any more violent than any of its counterparts in other religions.
this is false. i have read the the analects and translations of portions of the pali canon, and the koran and the hebrew bible are more rather blood-drenched in comparison. of course, the key point is that christians do not take the old testament (the hebrew bible) to heart, so texts are not determinative.
and the original doctrines of Islam do not condone such acts.
there are hindus who assert that the rig veda does not condone caste (or jati). this is irrelevant, a religion is judged not solely on axiomatic definitions (which everyone will dispute in any case, religion is not formal mathematics) but how it is lived. religionists of all sorts are masters of wordplay. there is “no compulsion in religion” in islam, but it is also generally agreed that apostates should be killed. how do muslims get around this? one interpretation i saw is that apostasy from islam is against natural law, so it is the depravity that is being punished. by the fruit of your works you shall be judged, and for example, the moppila muslims of kerala rose up against the british and their hindu overlords in the 1920s, driven partly by economic conditions, but in the process also forcibly converted hindus to islam. this tendency is part of the religion. remember, even if dhimmis are protected, polytheists are not brooked any protection by the “original doctrines” of the religion.
Siddhartha
Yes, you seem to be following what I am saying. And I can also talk about other things, just as personal observations – things like how I remember a time when relationships between Desis in England were simpler and there really was a sense of a South Asian community but this changed – and it has been driven to a large extent by Muslim leaders in Britain who have been playing communalist politics in Britain ever since The Satanic Verses affair – in which the Mirpuri community in Bradford (right next door to where the suicide-bombers came from) played an integral role – and since that time there has been a definite shift in identity politics in Britain – in that Pakistanis started priveliging their religious identity over and above all else.
This is the irony – that this priveliging neccessarily involved a distancing of themselves from Indians – Sikhs and Hindus were no longer to be considered as brothers-in-arms, but were to be distanced from and rejected in favour of Ummah politics. And so now when some Indians say we dont want to be associated with Pakistanis anymore – the fact is that this discourse has been legitimised already by British-Pakistanis to a certain degree who discarded our shared ethnic bonds in favour of the Ummah identity – some people have called this Arabization.
These are generalities and trends and not everyone fits into these categories – I have Pakistani friends who I love – and this is why I am wary of saying these things because it sounds harsh and people get offended by it – I realise that these broad brush strokes are crude because they do not take care of the individual life – but it has been a discernible politics and a real movement – to deny this is to not face reality.
I can tell you other things – about how an aggressive type of religiosity has become standard discourse amongst some sections of Pakistani youth – predicated on extreme anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories – other things like how ten, fifteen years ago you hardly saw women in burqa’s – you go to desi areas now(including the one where I grew up) and every other woman is wearing a burqa – posters appearing in shops proclaiming the latest Hizb ut Tahrir conference or public meeting about the ‘evil’ of America and Israel – intermittent stories that come through about how Pakistani boys are taunting Sikh or Hindu children in parks and schools – Indians are moving away from the inner city districts as they become more prosperous – Pakistani ghettoes seem to grow in size and sprawl – a hundred different small things that indicate a turning inwards – a closing of the mind – a turn to religiosity and communalist politics.
So the ground becomes fertile to bring the Jihad home – when ‘community leaders’ and ‘intellectuals’ engage in a rhetoric and politics of grievance based on Ummah politics – and the ‘intifada’ is brought home – because every issue becomes a zero-sum game of us versus them – Muslims versus non Muslim – every disadvantage or issue becomes one of Muslims being persecuted – Pakistani boys perform poorly academically? – blame it on Palestine – blame it on ‘Islamophobia’ – blame, blame, blame but never take responsibility for your own welfare and well being.
Add in firebrand politics over Kashmir (a real issue – the Jihad in Kashmir is a reality to many Mirpuris here) – add unemployment and the resentment just breeds.
Look at the Muslim leadership who have petty sectarian minds when it comes to politics and they exacerbate the grievance culture of the youth so that they can gain leverage in British society themselves (really despicable) – add in a whole bunch of nebulous factors like the macho culture of Mirpuri izzat, rapacious fascistic political groups who offer solutions to all problems (which are not the problems boys in Leeds should really worry about, like getting a job, starting a family, but the real problems, like wiping Israel off the face of the Earth, and humiliating America, you know, the real priorities)
Add in these factors and other serious things like overcrowding and serious issues of family opression and a degree of social pressure regarding marriage that even Indians dont have to face (cousin marriage is the norm in many Mirpuri families) and you have circumstances ripe for a really crude type of religious identity politics and a type of communalism that is segragationist by instinct – you have a heady brew – resentment and anger on many different levels – and it is just not good enough to blame it on ‘racism’, ‘colonialism’, ‘Zionism’ – the time comes when some serious introspection has to take place, when some honest self examination needs to take place about a self-perpetuating culture of grievance and self-pity that manifests itself as hatred and nihilism in SOME Pakistani youth who are only too willing to fall into the apocalyptic clutches of religious fanatics.
I am sorry if I have said anything to offend anyone but you will have to take my word for it that I only speak out of a profound sense of sadness and honesty – that is how I see it – I grew up with Pakistanis, had Pakistani girlfriends who I loved – and when I see the turmoil my Pakistani friends are in after these attacks – I can only say it as I see it – the Mirpuri story in England is turning into a kind of tragedy. I hope it can be changed.
This is echoing some of what has been said and synthesizing it a bit but I think there are several reasons British Second Generation Pakistani Muslims have turned out to be more radical that other Muslims or than Muslims in America. First, I have noted from personal experience that Pakistani Muslims tend to be a lot more conservative than other Muslims (both in America and Britain) and hold their Muslim identity more closely than do Arabs and other Muslims. This is I think because their whole national identity revolves around religion, it was the only reason to create the country. So religious and national identity are the same. Whereas an Egyptian American may first identify as being Egyptian and American and then Muslim, a Pakistani American is more likely to identify as being a Muslim American first. The second reason for this is i think Pakistanis feel they have to prove they are real Muslims because they are not Arab so they tend to be even more conservative than their counterparts. At least in America I’ve noted this makes second generation Pakistani Americans have severe identity crisis – on the one hand some of them don’t want their parents to see them in sleeveless shirts and on the other hand they drink but then feel bad about it. I know all of us hypenated identities can be somewhat confused but never have I seen so much confusion as I have seen with my Pakistani American friends. However, I think this confusion in America does not play out in a violent way because many of the Pakistanis who came here have integrated better and done well economically in comparasion to their British counterparts. In Britain my guess is this confusion is compounded by economic failure and lack of assimilation.
one interpretation i saw is that apostasy from islam is against natural law
in my opinion it’s these beliefs and lines in holy texts such as the Quran and Bible that cause so much divisiveness in this world. The texts basically make it heroic to go out and do “God’s work”, and no one ever stops to realize that over the course of 1500-2000 yrs that religion was govt, so therfore, those who wrote the texts had a lot of political reason to throw statements in there that would control the masses and advance the cause. The question of why islam has stuck to this mantra more fervently than other religions (the christians are just as bad about conversions, except they use more psychological scare tactics) and has ppl willing to die for it is of the issue. I think a lot of times, psychologically, when you repeatedly tell ppl that they are being oppressed, abused and looked down upon, this is where the seeds are sown. This is why black americans have large chips on their shoulder to this day. Back that up w/ holy books ok’ing actions in the name of God, and you can see where ppl justify any craziness in this manner. At the end of the day, ti’s still the same concept, an elite few using religion to gain wealth and power, just like it’s always been.
Sorry I missed this, just a bit snowed under with revision. Razib and Punjabi Boy – your posts have been very interesting to read. Despite you disagreeing on things, I find myself agreeing with you quite frequently! I too have my theories on why the different communities here have followed different paths. The Mirpuri community theory was fascinating, but I’m not sure that explains it all. You made a key point PB when you said that Indian Muslims more or less perform on a par with Hindus and Sikhs.
We haven’t examined the Bangladeshi community much, but they are a very sizeable chunk of the Asians in the UK. They are equally ghettoised – well perhaps not quite to the extent of Bradford – but there is the same recalcitrant streak, the same unwillingness to interact amongst many in the community. The differences were illustrated, in a somewhat arbitrary way, by A-level results (cf. High School Diploma). Sri Lankans and Indians performed the best, followed by Oriental students, then white, black, with Pakistani and Bangladeshi joint bottom.
Religion was not part of the equation; but of course, it is. It’s a really complex issue and one not satisfactorily explained by the conditions when immigrants arrived here, nor by village politics transferred to Tower Hamlets or Oldham.
When I said that I had a theory, I realise now that that was a complete lie! But I just hope to illustrate how complex a problem this is and I certainly don’t know what to do about it.
Footnote: Another important point not to look over is class. Asian immigrants to the UK come in working, middle and upper. The richer, middle/upper middle class Pakistani community do very well for themselves.
We haven’t examined the Bangladeshi community much, but they are a very sizeable chunk of the Asians in the UK.
but they are far more 1st gen than 2nd gen. problems tend to show up in the 2nd gen.
The richer, middle/upper middle class Pakistani community do very well for themselves.
this is where the bombers came from though.
it is just not good enough to blame it on ‘racism’, ‘colonialism’, ‘Zionism’ – the time comes when some serious introspection has to take place, when some honest self examination needs to take place about a self-perpetuating culture of grievance and self-pity that manifests itself as hatred and nihilism.
couldnt have said it better
I know all of us hypenated identities can be somewhat confused but never have I seen so much confusion as I have seen with my Pakistani American friends.
for the record, i consider myself a full blooded CBCD/ABCD 😀
i have seen exactly what SBR is talking about, but even then, there seems to be this ‘us vs them’ mentality that just pervades Muslim life in general, and takes a stronger hold in Pakistani’s. I agree that national identity and religion go hand in hand in Pakistan, but I also think that it’s bcuz Pakistan is usually discussed in the same dialogue as India, almost like a yin/yang scenario. For every story you hear about Pakistan, you probably hear a snippet about India as well, but not always the other way around. This may make them feel marginalized, as in they will always be in India/n shadows (though it’s not true). I think Pakistani’s turn inwards in order to separate from the stark reality that the ‘infidels’ have created better lives for themselves back home and abroad, and this could be one flash point for their anger.
The Mirpuri community theory was fascinating, but I’m not sure that explains it all.
I agree. Too much of the discussion on SM focuses on Islam and not nearly enough is said about the two nation theory that’s the bedrock of Pakistani identity, at least in the context of this discussion about what sets apart Pakistani Brits from Indian Brits (Hindu, Muslim and Sikh)…if Savarkar’s version of the two nation theory won the day in India and India became the Hindu equivalent of Pakistan, I think we’d see a lot more resistance to secularization by Hindus in the UK or US (similarly, I don’t think it’s an accident that a rise in religious extremism among Sikhs has accompanied the demand for Khalistan). Such sentiments, given the subcontinent’s history of shared religious traditions, require a definitive break with the past. It’s telling that 2nd gen Pakistani Brits claim “roots” in traditions that are often alien to their parents (noted in the Taseer article posted above)…it appears that the break with subcontinental traditions necessary to maintain the idea of Pakistan has been replaced by a pan-Islam-uber-alles identity…combine this with the current events of the day and the factors Punjabi Boy mentions above and you get 7/7…
It has won the day in Gujarat (lets hope temporarily) – Gujaratis are the most Hindutva minded Hindus in Britain – I know because I listen to friends openly support Modi – this contrasts with my Hindu Punjabi friends and relatives who couldnt give a damn about Hindutvaism.
I should have said that that is all relative and most of my Gujarati mates are more interested in protecting their sisters and cousins from lustful predatory Punjabi boys from Southall than the politics of Hindutva, but you get my drift, its all relative you see as SMR says that what happens ‘back home’ does have an effect in the diaspora.
Well, this is another interesting phenomenon. I have several hardline Gujju friends, one of whom was chair of the National Hindu Students Forum when she was at uni. I attended a few things as an interested outsider and realised they’re just as zealous as the Muslims they condemn. Likewise with the pro-Khalistan Sikhs here and in Canada. All these groups actively support troublemakers ‘back home’, not realising they’re woefully out of touch as they haven’t spent any time ‘back home’ for 3 decades.
I think the chip-on-the-shoulder theory, about how British Pakistanis feel about Indians, has more credence than I originally thought. Some of them are deeply bitter about how the Indian community in the UK are more successful. The resentment for Indians is intense – on a par with their hatred for Jews, which is hard-wired.
About Bangladeshis razib – yes there are less 2nd gen, but there are a lot. Right now, I can see the seeds growing for them to follow in their West Pakistani colleagues’ footsteps. The Indian restaurant industry, which their parents single-handedly created in the UK, has changed immensely, leaving many without a family business to occupy them and many 2nd gen Bangladeshi Muslims are treading a similar path to the 7/7 bombers. I can already see how the history of Bangladesh has been apparently rewritten; Bangladeshis I know would rather support Pakistan than India in the cricket. Their Muslim fraternity has erased the events of the early 70s. As a Bengali, I find this deeply upsetting.
How quickly the past becomes history.
I dont know about that – I have rarely seen hatred like the hatred some Pakistanis I have talked to have for Jews – even though they have never met a Jew in their life and dont know a thing about them. I have found that there is some kind of superiority-inferiority complex with SOME Pakistanis towards Indians (a recent example – police banned Pakistan flags from being taken to Eid celebrations in Southall because they started fights and started shoving it in the faces of Indians – now why do they want to do that?) but I still say that the majority of Pakistanis are cool with Indians. Of course there are hardcore people who think we are sub-human but hey what to do?
the key point is that christians do not take the old testament (the hebrew bible) to heart
Oh, they did at times: They derived all the inspiration for the crusades from their holibooks – much like radical islamists do now. The brutal oppression of minorities under the christian rule in northern europe and the fervour in which they conquered non-christian lands of course had the support of the religious eddict.
If you think, Islam should be judged by those who live it, that is fine, but then, you should look at 1400 years of history – not just last 25 years. I am no apologist for Imperial Islam, but, Islam’s history of conquests never enslaved a whole class of people, to the same scale by Europeans, and they too had a fervour of religious spirit to their conquests. I remember seeing the first ever painting about the America’s discovery in a church in Spain, where they depicted the local indians being blessed by their new found faith – enslavement and subsequent genocide of Indians didn’t cause any reform in Christianity and that wasn’t a Christian problem. Was it? What makes a religion more violent in comparison? If you are only looking at last 50 years, sure, more violence has been committed in the name of Islam, but that is not enough to point out Islam is the culprit here. Trust me, I am not a pracising muslim, but I know how the muslim world (or any other religion for that matter) works, if you go with the assertion that Islam is the problem, I can guarantee that there will not be a solution.
I disagree – I think that if you go with the assertion that a certain form of Islam is not the problem then there will not be a solution. I dont think you can deny that an ultra-extreme interpretation of Islam is currently a significant part of the problem – it is just not credible to sustain that it is not so in the face of all the evidence before our eyes.
Note, a certain form of Islam – there are different forms of Islam that this particular form of Jihadism is inimical to. The key is to differentiate between them, isolate the extremist strain, and then discredit and break it.
I have rarely seen hatred like the hatred some Pakistanis I have talked to have for Jews – even though they have never met a Jew in their life and dont know a thing about them
‘coz, somewhere in Qur’an it mentions that you can’t be friends with jews. It talked to an audience of 1400 years ago – the key is in understanding that the book talked to the issues of the time, contrary to what some people might think about its ‘forever-true’ value. Most interpretations do recognize that, but the extremists sure have a knack to find the worst.
Oh, they did at times: They derived all the inspiration for the crusades from their holibooks – much like radical islamists do now.
no they didn’t. part of it was clearly a mimicry of the religious wars of jihad which muslims engaged in between 700-100.
The brutal oppression of minorities under the christian rule in northern europe and the fervour in which they conquered non-christian lands of course had the support of the religious eddict.
some of this is true. but it is also true that the roman catholic church militated against the “jew burners” in the middle ages, who were more often rabble rousers intent on escaping debt and offloading anger at gentile elites who were untouchable.
If you think, Islam should be judged by those who live it, that is fine, but then, you should look at 1400 years of history – not just last 25 years.
no, we shouldn’t judge it by 1400 years because for non-muslims the present is what is salient. i don’t care what muslims believe, i only care how they impinge on my own life. some muslims may keep the crusades alive in their hearts, but non-muslims fix on the deaths of those near and dear to them today.
I am no apologist for Imperial Islam, but, Islam’s history of conquests never enslaved a whole class of people, to the same scale by Europeans, and they too had a fervour of religious spirit to their conquests.
yes they did. how do you think there are large classes of “zanj” (blacks) in the middle east? the genetic data indicates that 30% of the mitochdonrial DNA of yemenis are sub-saharan african. the jews of yemen do not show this, rather, their mtDNA resembles the non-african ancestry of muslim yemenis. the jews of yemen date to the pre-islamic period, so the slavery of blacks in yemen is numerically preponderant in the islamic period. muslim slavers ventured into europe specifically because it was explicitly allowed to enslave kafirs (these enslavements caused a major demographic impact in places like iceland as late as the 1700s, as barbary corsairs ranged up the atlantic). the castration of blacks in africa prior to their entrance into muslim lands was specifically to evade islamic laws regarding castration.
I remember seeing the first ever painting about the America’s discovery in a church in Spain, where they depicted the local indians being blessed by their new found faith – enslavement and subsequent genocide of Indians didn’t cause any reform in Christianity and that wasn’t a Christian problem.
1) most indigenous people died of disease rather than slavery or explicit genocide.
2) the roman catholic rulers of spain had a debate about the merits of slavery. see the debates of bartolome de casas. the nobility (charles V) and the clerisy tended argue for humanity, was the rank and file conquistidors who commited the atrocities. so one could argue that slavery occurred in spite of christianity humanity.
3) the abolition of the world wide slave trade was in large part due to the militancy of evangelical anglicans in england in the late 18th century. abolitionism was in large part justified on religious grounds (though christians were on both sides of course). the point is that the history of christianity is checked, but the arrow of morality as regards slavery points in one direction.
4) slavery was abolished in saudi arabia in 1962. slavery is a serious problem in sudan and mauritania. it is practiced by tauregs in the central sahara. what do these instances have in common?
What makes a religion more violent in comparison? If you are only looking at last 50 years, sure, more violence has been committed in the name of Islam, but that is not enough to point out Islam is the culprit here.
of course not, as i note above, it is a start.
Note, a certain form of Islam – there are different forms of Islam that this particular form of Jihadism is inimical to. The key is to differentiate between them, isolate the extremist strain, and then discredit and break it.
I am not sure what you are disagreeing to. This is exactly what I am talking about too. You don’t create a better world by discrediting a religion completely, my point is that there are extremists who are the deviants of main stream Islam and they are the problem, not Islam itself. Most of 1.2 billion people go on with their normal lives and to say the problem is with their faith will instantly alienate them.
btw, no offense to najeeb, but a rendition of “facts” like the ones above, outside of historical context (ironic) is a serious problem. i have recently read a number of books by muslim writers who are western (tariq ramadan, reza aslan and feisal rauf) and they read like apologia of christian evangelicals, there are jukes, jives and historical misinterpretations. i understand some of this, but the lack of historical awareness that is normative among muslim intellectuals is more like stereotypical red-state jingoism than the self-critique that is the hallmark of the enlightenment tradition.
The bit where I thought you said it would be wrong to admit a religious component to the issue – but as it seems we are in accord – no problemo.
You don’t create a better world by discrediting a religion completely, my point is that there are extremists who are the deviants of main stream Islam and they are the problem, not Islam itself.
islam can’t be discredited, but it must be forced to change. the analogy i will use is that imagine that southern baptists were the liberal end of christianity. the median then is more conservative than southern baptists, and the very conservative range is extreme indeed. i believe that ‘moderate muslims’ are actually rathre like conservative christians in their outlook. conservative christians have moderate and liberal christians to balance them, and the number of radical conservatives (dominion christians, reconstructionists) is very small indeed because of the nature of the distribution. because the muslim median is way shifted over you have many more radicals.
razib,
Nobody [talks about] the Spanish Inquisition!
Btw, you can be a atheistic hindu.
Mean, back at ranch, while everybody with access to a keyboard is debating about the motivations of the bombers, the British police are circling the wagons preparing for a third attack. And I’m sure this comment about their un-pc techniques to not
“waste time searching old white ladies”. will surely upset some people.
Nobody [talks about] the Spanish Inquisition!
Btw, you can be a atheistic hindu.
1) the body count of the spanish inquisition was actually minimal (hundreds) in comparison to the witch burnings (thousands, tends of thousands) of protestant europe (the anti-spanish demonology actually has its roots in “anti-papism” in anglican england).
2) yes, i know. that’s why i left hinduism out of it. you can also be an atheist jain (technically, janism is not theistic). or atheist buddhist. different religions are different in the way they view memebership.
razib
Your breadth of knowledge is awesome – you tell it like it is too – wow.
Are you the cleverest Bangladeshi-American on Earth?
Future Nobel Prize winner I reckon.
Are you the cleverest Bangladeshi-American on Earth?
that’s not saying much 😉
I was merely making a Monty Python reference. But your statement that only “hundreds” made me kind of curious. Wikipedia says the Inquisition in Goa alone resulted in thousands of people “executed and tortured”. What source of information are you using?
no they didn’t. part of it was clearly a mimicry of the religious wars of jihad which muslims engaged in between 700-100.
Ok. When was the last time you heard a religious eddict from the supreme head of a religion suggesting it is okay to kill non-christians to take away their lands and to spread their religion? To refresh your memory, it was year 1095, Pope Urban II.
no, we shouldn’t judge it by 1400 years because for non-muslims the present is what is salient.
well, then, the view of course will be skewed. For everything, there is a context, without which, no discussion/argument can make sense.
I agree that there was large scale slave trading by Arabs, but I wasn’t refering to Slaves per say. I was talking more about Indians in America.
1) most indigenous people died of disease rather than slavery or explicit genocide.
Data is mixed on this one, but there is generally accepted that many of them died of ‘foreign’ deseases, which makes the stories of inflicted deseases more believable. if you compare Indian population to that of in south american countries, you get the picture what happened.
2) the roman catholic rulers of spain had a debate about the merits of slavery. see the debates of bartolome de casas. the nobility (charles V) and the clerisy tended argue for humanity, was the rank and file conquistidors who commited the atrocities. so one could argue that slavery occurred in spite of christianity humanity.
This is news to me, I will look it up. but I remember standing the court room in Seville where Queen Izabella summoned Columbus before/After his voyage to America urging him to bring atleast slaves to cover the cost. They did exactly that it is not a veyr known thing that they took Indians back to Europe as slaves.
of course not, as i note above, it is a start.
In the course of making Islam the culprit, you fell into the same trouble that I am falling into – which is suddenly you sound like an apologist to European/Christian conquests, – I am not an apologist for any ideology either. Let me make this clear beofe I sign off for the day – I see numerous problems with Islam, like anyohter religion, but the solution to religious extremism is to encourage the moderate elements to fight the extremism and you get disconnected instantly with the muslim world when you go with the assertion that Islam itself is the problem.
I was merely making a Monty Python reference. But your statement that only “hundreds” made me kind of curious. Wikipedia says the Inquisition in Goa alone resulted in thousands of people “executed and tortured”. What source of information are you using?
i was speaking of spain. the inquisition abroad might be more harsh-though my impression is that various political and military issues were conflated with that rubric. also, remember that goa was under spanish rule only for about a century (portuguese and all). anyway, the anglicans didn’t care what happened in goa (or brazil, or macau). the inquisition demonology was fixed on spain, and the real specific seed was the reign of bloody mary in the mid 16th century (she actually killed fewer heretics than her protestant brother).
as for sources, see the reformation by diarmand mccollough.
btw, no offense to najeeb, but a rendition of “facts” like the ones above, outside of historical context (ironic) is a serious problem
Well, I see only opinions here, not facts. Historians are divided on a lot of issues. And to say that the crusaders didn’t get inspiration from christianity would be a factual error in my opinion.
When was the last time you heard a religious eddict from the supreme head of a religion suggesting it is okay to kill non-christians to take away their lands and to spread their religion? To refresh your memory, it was year 1095, Pope Urban II.
uh, well, since islam technically doesn’t have a “supreme head of a religion,” you aren’t going to get anything like that. but you can find plenty of fatwas by muftis and the like (the ottoman ghazis justified their european depredations on the grounds of holy war centuries later after urban). also, please note that the pope was the supreme head of western christendom, the eastern churches were separate by this point (schism was in 1056 i think).
Data is mixed on this one, but there is generally accepted that many of them died of ‘foreign’ deseases, which makes the stories of inflicted deseases more believable. if you compare Indian population to that of in south american countries, you get the picture what happened.
1) oregon was depopulated by the time settlers came. these were people who didn’t encounter whites except for random trappers and traders. since germ theory is recent, you have to be careful about accounts of purposeful spread of contagion.
2) one reason there are many natives in south american countries like peru, ecuador and bolivia is that spanish women had a difficult time carrying to term in the highlands. even if plague deciminated them, the natives had time to rebound and resettle because europeans could not survive well in the andes.
In the course of making Islam the culprit, you fell into the same trouble that I am falling into – which is suddenly you sound like an apologist to European/Christian conquests, – I am not an apologist for any ideology either.
i’m not being an apologist, i’m just saying that the
islam was tolerant/christianity was intolerant meme is really propoganda. muslim tolerance was really dhimmititude. muslim mildness toward slaves has to be judged by the repeated rebellions of blacks in places like southern iraq. christian intolerance has to be judged in light of the fact that jews did survive in christian lands, and that on the eve of the holocaust 90% of the world’s jews were ashkenazi (european) jews. the idea that the renaissance was triggered by translations from al-andalus (muslim spain) has to be mitigated by the reality that greeks from constantinople flooded the cities of italy after the turkish conquest of the queen of cities. or that the translators and redactors of many of the classical texts were aramaic and greek speaking christians in muslim lands.
we can argue details, but first, we need a clearer sense of the reality of what is out there before we can determine would should be out there.
in general, i don’t think we disagree on policy prescriptions, but i’m not going to let causal historical errors pass because those are the seeds of future misunderstanding.
And to say that the crusaders didn’t get inspiration from christianity would be a factual error in my opinion.
i didn’t say they didn’t get inspiration from christianity, i just asserted that there were many factors. to boil it down to christianity is simplistic, and too often apologists for modern muslims do this very thing so to as to assert a manichaean juxtaposition.
in any case, you make the assertion that we need to look at 1400 years of history. i think that’s wrong, islam needs to move into 2005, soon!!! we aren’t checking their credit for a home application, we want to see the money now. i don’t care if they do stupid medieval shit in muslim countries, but i’ve had not so veiled threats from muslims because i’m an apostate. that’s not acceptable. i don’t give a shit what they think, they shouldn’t forget what century they’re coming into when they journey into the lands of voltaire and hume.
that’s why the stuff about the crusades is irrelevant. christianity has been gelded, supine at the feel of secular society, dominant no power. the spirit of islam needs to be crushed, but hook or crook. PC platitudes are blocking this right now, because muslims are turning into a protected minority.
there is no shame in moving on to better things.
in general, i don’t think we disagree on policy prescriptions, but i’m not going to let causal historical errors pass because those are the seeds of future misunderstanding.
A lot of times, experts are divided on facts, especially on issues like this. And I see only opinions for the most part: For example, your statement: islam was tolerant/christianity was intolerant meme is really propoganda, is no fact, it is just your opinion. There are various facts to be taken into consideration to come up with that assertion. It is an accepted fact that a good number of jews moved south to Spain during christian rule of northern spain to escape persecution. There are no cases that I know of where a muslim conquest has completely replaced indiginous population. While I agree that a lot of times information has been copied over from Indian/Greek sources, Muslim Spain had the most sophisticated scholars, artisans and critical thinkers of its times. Recently, my reading of Al-Muqaddimma re-iterated the kind of critical thinking that was prevailing at that time. I think the sophistication of one civilization is not only in inventing new things, but creating a framework where new ideas can be nurtured, and Muslim Spain did provide such an atmosphere. Finally, presently opinions as facts would benefit none.
It is an accepted fact that a good number of jews moved south to Spain during christian rule of northern spain to escape persecution.
no, i know my history. i can’t prove it to you of course, but i can let other readers judge. that specific fact does not prove a generality. non-muslims were dhimmi, and maimonides left spain because of muslim persecution. the “golden age” of al-andalus is more myth than fact, and it is easy to play up because the standards were rather low. the almohads and almoravids both persecuted jews and christians, and even during the peak of the ummayyad caliphate of cordoba there were historical memories of pogroms against jews. there was variance within christianity, while france and england were expelling jews, poland-lithuanian were welcoming them. in the generality i would argue that before 1600 jews had it easier in the dar-al-islam than in christendom, and after 1600 it was reversed.
but this is the important point: the record of the two universalist monotheisms as regards jews is shameful. the empancipation of jews in european countries post 1800 has erased some of that shame (the holocaust has brought more shame), but the muslim countries have not expiated their own shame. the ottomans might have welcomed jews, but they welcomed them from forced conversion or death, and gave them protection as second class citizens. laudable in 1500, nothing to brag about now.
p.s. while christians and muslims were persecuting jews, the rajahs of cochin were welcoming. for all of the ills of hinduism (caste), i think it is important to point out the refuge that hindus gave to parsis, jews and nestorian christians who wanted to escape second class citizenship in the caliphate and post-caliphal states, and in the case of jews, pogroms in germany as late as the 1600s (yes, ashkenazi jews traveled to india to escape anti-semitism!).
we do not need to keep apologizing for modern barbarity by appealing to relative tolerance in the past, india shows that religious tolerance can be had even in the pre-modern age. muslims can practice barbarous sharia in muslim countries, i don’t care, but the truths i hold dear as a citizen of the enlightenment must not be conceded. western muslims are attempting to roll back those truths, and the subjegation of the god of abraham, isaac and jacob to the goddess of reason is one of the unknowledged facts of the modern west which must be maintained.
Looks like the US authorities are getting more concerned over American born extremists. I wonder what new theories of “alienation” and “marginalization” of American Muslim youth the social experts will pontificate about when the inevitable happens, followed by the usual “They were such nice young men” comments.
Read all about it…
Fear Over U.S.-Born Extremists Is Brewing
Hmm.. I have been away, so you see I have a life outside reading blogs :=)
:It is an accepted fact that a good number of jews moved south to Spain during christian rule of northern spain to escape persecution.
razib: no, i know my history. i can’t prove it to you of course, but i can let other readers judge.
Well, you sure know some things, but if you can prove my statement wrong, quote the sources. The following quote is from JewishVirtualLibrary – the fastest i could find on it. Not an islamic site that is promoting some ‘propaganda’. These are accepted facts and even acknowledged by Catholic Church!
link: http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/muslim_rabbis.html
“For over 500 years, the Jews of the Muslim Empire enjoyed stability, prosperity and religious autonomy. As opposed to the oppressive atmosphere in Northern Europe, the Jews lived, for the most part, in a tolerant civilization, one that valued excellence in the arts, the sciences and trade. In these fields the Jews were welcome participants. Thus Judaism developed as part of society, not as a secluded ghetto-culture as was the case in Christian Europe.“
What happened in 1492 is parallel to what Nazis did. After the complete conquest, they expelled the muslims and jews – the only ones who were allowed to stay were the ones who converted to Christianity. Even the ones who converted were put to rigorous tests (making them eat pork..etc..) to make sure that they were indeed christians. This is NOT my version of history, this is acknowledged by even Spanish Government in their tourist literature. Of course there have been persecutions, but you have to look at everything with respect to its times. I was merely comparing with the christian counter parts and there is an overwhelming majority of historians who agree with what I am saying. I am curious to know which major historian suggests the history of Andalusia is like you say. Of course, they shouldn’t be anyone with remotely muslim names – that takes out the credibility part completely, right?