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.
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.
So, you really are saying there was relative tolerance in the past. Ok, thats all I was saying too.
I have no intention to be an apologist, but if you say well known facts are just myths, well, you just have to say it is not. If that makes me an apologist, be it that way.
tell that to bush, ashcroft, or the alabama judiciary.
In god we trust.
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.
Funny. What is the span of history that you should look at? 10 years, 20 years, 2005? If you are blaming it all on Islam for the Al-Qaeda menace, you better know something more than Islam in 2005. If Islam can be peaceful (which I am not sure whether you agree, you have given conflicting statements) at some point, it can be peaceful now as well. But there are elements within Islam who for various reasons have found a fertile ground for extremism against the west. It is as simple as that.
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.
Well, there is a whole lot of anger here, but it is not wise to judge when I don’t know what you are subjected to by muslims. condolences if anyone threatened you because you are an atheist or apostate or whatever.
the spirit of islam needs to be crushed, but hook or crook.
I would say this about Political Islam, but not about Islam, and not as far as crushing it. I’d have liberal muslims taking on the fight like the left leaning reform parties in various countries, they will get there sometime, as long as the west stays out of it.
(i dont know if conceded is the right word here).
You seem enmeshed in the myth of the “enlightenment” …. for an alternate perspective, consider one of the works by Adorno or Horkheimer.
One more thing:
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.
I agree with you there.
razib is a dude
islam was tolerant/christianity was intolerant meme is really propoganda
they both were intolerant and both religions in past and present times are fixated on either ‘saving’ non-believers or ‘converting by pressure/force/underhanded’ tricks all in the name of God. Christian philosophy of ‘holier than thou’ attitudes is what primarily drove atrocities in previous times on a large scale and if Islamic thought isn’t modified it will become the next flashpoint of this era. If these religions didn’t approach non-believers w/ such fear, hatred, contempt and condescension, we probably wouldn’t have half the issues we have these days. My .02
if u were blinf folded an stepped out of a aeroplane an then the blindfoles were removed u wouldnt b able 2 tell which was india or which was pakistan.unless of course u did a aids count.
yeah, i wouldn’t be able to tell bcuz we all know hindu temples are everywhere in pakistan just as mosques are in india. Nor would I be able to diffrentiate modern corporate cities such as Bangalore, Gurgoan, Mumbai, Delhi from karachi and lahore. I’m sure I would be able to practice my religion of Hinduism in Pakistan w/o fear of getting harrassed or killed. And speaking of women’s rights/roles, I’m sure I’d see a lot of women going to school in Pakistan and increasingly taking a larger role in the workforce of and politics of the nation and I’m sure in Pakistan of all places they’d have valid opinions and wouldn’t be looked down upon if they chose to not wear a hijab or burqua.
Lovin, To add to your last point … Jewish Senagoges (not sure of spelling)!!!!! I remember when I was 10 years old, my father took a visiting US AID official to a Jewish Temple (as the US AID official was Jewish) in Ahmedabad. I was in the car. On the other hand in Pakistan they killed Daniel Pearl for being Jewish.
i really don’t get what gripes Pakistan has w/ Israel other than ‘muslim brotherhood’…I just want to slap some Pakistani’s when they go off on an anti-Israel tangent, it just makes no sense culturally or historically, outside of a mob mentality. I don’t see Arab Muslim nations spewing venom at India.
“Why don’t Sikhs and Hindus blow up the London Tube?” It seems kind of redundant to find the answers in Islam, we’ve been down that route so many times that it is flaccid category of analysis at this point. Somebody (Punjabi Boy? sorry for being vague and wrong, too many comments to go through again), suggested it might be more interesting to look at the specific histories of the South Asian countries and diaspora. Fundie Hindus and Sikhs can send money to the VHP and Khalistan folks, they don’t have too blow up anything in their adopted countries. Perhaps Baluchis send money home to their separatist movements and its the Punjabis from Pakistan who are blowing stuff up. Second, the history of immigration in the US at least has been quite different for Indians, pakistanis and Bangladeshis vis a vis the class differences, might not that have something to do with what your experience is in the adopted coutnry? and what becomes available to you as an attractive ideology, be it Jihadism or Hindutva, both of these very modern phenomenon have ways of manifesting themselves in the diaspora in ways very specific to them. Third, has anyone seen, “My Son the Fanatic” ? I think writers and filmmakers were onto something way before anyone noticed.
Lovin, You need some loving sista
Shahswati
I dont think that examining the specific nature of Islamic extremism and how it latches onto young minds as an ideology is a flaccid category of analysis at this point – I think it is vital and urgent to examine as a factor amongst many rather than just brush under the carpet.
Razib – I find your notions about Enlightenment and Modernity troubling but that’s a discussion saved for another time…it’s pointless to expect an Islamic version of the Englightenment since the Englightenment and Modernity arose in Christianity’s image…the best way to reduce the threat to those in the West from Islamists is to stress the pluralism of Islam (an empirical reality though alas clearly not an aspiration) and to do our best to keep a Muslim from Dacca making common cause on Chechnya with a North African from Rabat…We can start small. Like by asking the Met to put their Indian Muslim art into the South Asian Art section rather than stick it in their “Islamic Art” section…Not to get all post-modernist here but modernism and its attendant notions of identity are to be blamed as much as Islamists for the pan-Islamist demon as it exists today…
shashwati and punjabi boy,
i see no disagreement between you. it’s clear that islam is part of what we are talking about because we are discussing early 21st-century jihadi terrorism (as opposed to the many other terrorisms that are and have been out there), and jihadi terrorism makes reference to islam by definition.
having established that, i agree that discussing “why” people of other faiths don’t commit terrorist acts is a complete red herring. not least because people of all faiths commit terrorist acts.
with respect to the question at hand, then, i think punjabi boy has made a big contribution by getting us to think about specific diasporic sub-communities (specific both by origin and by destination) and what might lead one to become more prone to jihadi terrorism and another less so. i don’t think we’ve got the answers yet, but i appreciate the method. it’s certainly made me think.
shashwati, you are right on with “my son the fanatic.” (this was discussed somewhere here in the immediate wake of the london attack.) great film. i was disappointed by hanif kureishi’s recent op-ed, though. very abstract, timid, taking refuge in some kind of vague intellectualism. the brother’s definitely lost his edge.
peace
I met a Pakistani Hindu once, she acted as if it was the most natural thing in the world. (Probably a built up reaction to everyone’s inevitable surprise and intrigue). But I wonder, to what extent is the above statement really true? Especially the “harassed” part…Would love to get some first-hand accounts (or links).
a few points
1) see infidels: a history of conflict between christendom and islam by andrew wheatcraft on the absolute vs. relative state of jews (as well as muslims and christians) in al-andalus/spain. wheatcraft is a scholar with a deep background in spain, and he focuses on jews as a third person in the narrative. the point is that al-andalus is often lionized as if it was analogous to the jewish haskalah (“enlightenment”) of the 19th century. but the analogy is not particularly strong.
2) as for the quote from the jewish library, one tradition in historiagraphy asserts that the lionization of al-andalus by jews is due to two factors:
a) the singular trauma of the expulsion b) it was a non-western example of tolerance that was used to criticize western anti-semitism in the modern period.
in other words, i think it can be understand within the intellectual context of the west like the sinophilia of the early 18th century, or the romanticization of the kingdom of prester john. this is not to say that jews did not have tolerance in al-andalus vs. many christian nations (where they were expelled), but one needs to keep perspective, as before 1500 it seems highly plausible that before 1700 more jews lived in the dar-al-islam than in europe in any case (there was a population explosion of ashkenazi jews between 1700-1800 of enormous magnitude).
3) as for the quibbling about the “enlightenment” and “modernity,” there is simply a paradigm gap that won’t be bridged here i suspect. i am not utopian idealist, i have spoken in other places of how enlightenment science was a necessary precondition of modern scientific racialism. i am aware of how the enlightenment was coupled with the civilizing mission to the barbarians and colored peoples of the world. nevertheless, it is a sui generis civilization in my opinion, to use sagan’s phrase, it is a candle in a “demon haunted world.” ultimately the self-critical and scientific values of the enlightnement are minoritarian even in the west, where most individuals are breeders. but i reject the hand-wringing contextualization of some, and the contention that the enlightenment is an outgrowth of “christianity” is a true, but substanceless contention in my opinion.
4) one of the issues that seems to crop up here is a concern for the whole world. i think i’ve made it clear my focus is on america, and in particular the west. i don’t particularly care what other people do.
You need some loving sista
huh?
You need some loving sista
huh?
Because you seem to be very angry and bitter.
I met a Pakistani Hindu once, she acted as if it was the most natural thing in the world.
me too, i met a Pakistani Hindu and she was telling me that life in karachi was ok. That she could practice hinduism, HOWEVER, it couldn’t be expressed strongly, nor would the locals tolerate any big celebrations of any type. Basically, pray and be quiet and don’t piss them off….that’s not religious freedom. In India, USA, UK, etc, where muslims have resided, they blatantly show their religious beliefs via women wearing hijabs/burquas, their behavior and prayers and celebrations, and it’s ok. To suppress that would inflame the community. yet in their backyards it’s a privelege to practice your own religion. Sadly, this girl had the same reaction your acquaintance did, that this was the way things are.
now before anyone jumps down my throat, realize that many of my family’s dear friends are muslims and are great ppl, i was making a compare/contrast observation based on my experiences and encounters.
Because you seem to be very angry and bitter.
no, as usual most ppl take an honest opinion to mean anger. I’m in no way angry or resentful of Muslims or anything else, my life is wonderful, but I do voice my opinions on wrongdoings and inadequacies. I’m not PC by any means, which means these days if you don’t sugarcoat something you say, you’re a jerk. Some ppl can deal w/ it and some can’t.
Utter lies and nonsense it makes perfect sense. Desi politics is clearly all about the Is vs the Ps. India vs Pakistan, Isreal vs Palestine, Insaf vs Politics, etc …
Though you have to be careful it’s not that simple anymore, the world is becoming more corrupt. Nowadays it is fashon for the sides to switch letters like the Islamic-wahabists vs Puritan-wannabees thats is so popular.
I blame Vestern influence.
In India, USA, UK, etc, where muslims have resided, they blatantly show their religious beliefs via women wearing hijabs/burquas, their behavior and prayers and celebrations, and it’s ok.
I hope I donÂ’t make this conversation stray of it’s point (if that hasnÂ’t already occurred) but to my knowledge more acts of violence have been perpetrated by Hindus on Indian Muslims than by Pakistanis on Pakistani Hindus (Gujarat, Kashmir etc). Acts of violence are committed by both countries on their minorities. Where people get this impression of India being a utopian magical place where minorities are completely equal and in no way suffer acts of violence or hostility I donÂ’t know. Again I stress, minorities in BOTH countries suffer SPORADICALLY at the hands of the majority (Hindu or Muslim).
The percentage of Hindus going from 15% to about 1% in Pakistan is not a coincidence is it?