The Muslims Are Coming!

by Arun Kundnani

  Contrast those numbers with the loss of life in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan as a result of the wars the US has fought since 9/11. Scholars at the Eisenhower Research Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies calculated in 2013 that those wars had led to the deaths of 270,000 people, the most conservative of such estimates.61 A study by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health estimated that the Iraq war had led to 655,000 deaths as of July 2006, before the worst period of violence.62 One of the key arguments of this book is that to comprehend the causes of so-called jihadist terrorism we need to pay as much attention to Western state violence, and the identity politics that sustains it, as we do to Islamist ideology. What governments call extremism is to a large degree a product of their own wars.

  A Note on Sources

  The Muslims Are Coming! is based on three years of research in both the US and the UK that was supported by the Institute of Race Relations in London and the Open Society Foundations in New York. Research for the book was carried out in a number of locations in the US (Dallas, Dearborn, Detroit, Houston, Minneapolis–St. Paul, New York City, and Washington, DC) and the UK (Birmingham, Bolton, Bradford, London, Luton, and Manchester). In all, 160 interviews were carried out with activists, campaigners, religious leaders, law enforcement officials, policy makers, government advisers, and young people. In partnership with the civil liberties organization Liberty, the Freedom of Information Act was used to obtain previously classified data on the demographics of individuals profiled as extremists by the UK’s Prevent policy.

  CHAPTER 1

  An Ideal Enemy

  The ideal enemy for America would be ideologically hostile, racially and culturally different, and militarily strong enough to pose a credible threat to American security.

  —Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We?

  As a teenager in the 1980s, Farasat Latif was a Marxist. Politicized by his experience of racism while growing up in England, he thought that abolishing capitalism was the only way to create a just world. He began to travel at the age of fourteen, from Stevenage, the small town north of London where his family had settled, to the capital, where he hung around with anarchists and leftists. When he wasn’t fighting fascists on the streets of east London he was in demonstrations fighting the police. He read books by Marx and Lenin and became a student at the London School of Economics. When, in 1990, the Thatcher government introduced the new poll tax that shifted the local government’s tax burden from the rich to the poor, he joined the hundreds of thousands of other protesters who had gathered in Trafalgar Square. Panicking at the unexpected turnout, Scotland Yard ordered mounted police into the crowds, and the square descended into violence. Demonstrators, Farasat among them, grabbed bricks from a building site to use as missiles. He was caught red-handed and arrested. While he was detained in a police cell officers asked him to sign a form for his personal property on which they had written “a brick” as one of his possessions. He declined to sign the incriminating form until it was corrected. After his release on bail he was advised that he faced a prison sentence. The trial was scheduled for nine months’ time.

  Around the same time, Farasat’s 107-year-old grandfather fell ill in Pakistan, and he decided to visit him for the last time. While there he happened to browse a bookshop and came across a text entitled Marxism and Islam published by the International Islamic University, Islamabad. Before, when people had asked if he was a Muslim, he had answered that although he grew up in a Muslim family, he was not really sure anymore. He did not drink alcohol or eat pork, and occasionally he would visit a mosque, but more for social than religious reasons. His lack of deeper religious conviction had never troubled him. But now, his reading of this book forced him to decide between his Marxist and Muslim identities. The book, written as propaganda material to support the mujahideen fighting the communist regime in neighboring Afghanistan, gave a systematic critique of Marxism from an Islamic perspective. Farasat returned to England with his Marxist beliefs shattered and realized he no longer knew what he believed in. And he thought he was about to go to prison. As it turned out, a character reference from Farasat’s professor impressed the judge, and he only received a £400 fine. By then he also had found that Islam was able to address the same needs that had earlier been met by Marxism.

  I met Farasat twenty years later at a Salafi mosque in Luton, a town thirty miles north of London that had attracted immigrants, mainly from Pakistan, to work in its auto industry. Looking back, he explained how Islam had supplanted his commitment to Marxism. “It answered the same questions, which were about injustice. And it also put a perspective on this life, that it is a small part of your overall existence. At that time I was very angry and frustrated. There was the total massacre in Iraq in 1991. There was so much injustice, and they were getting away with it. Thatcher had smashed the unions, and the Left was too busy arguing over silly little things. And then Islam took me back to fundamental questions: What’s the purpose of life? What’s the purpose of creation? and, How does one achieve justice? It didn’t happen overnight, but that’s what started dawning on me.” He began spending time with the different Islamic sects in England—Barelvis, Deobandis, and the Tablighi Jamaat—asking the questions that had been thrown up by his crisis of meaning. In the end it was the clarity of the Salafis, a tiny trend within Islam with less than 5 percent of British Muslims as followers, that attracted him most. “Salafism is very literalist: This is what Allah says, this is what the messenger said, this is what the companions said, this is what you do—end of story. I prefer that. The idea that the message is infallible appealed to me.” His attraction to the Salafis solidified further a few years later, when they proved the most willing to volunteer to defend Muslims against the atrocities being carried out by Serb forces in Bosnia. While others had talked about “jihad” to defend Muslims from oppression, the Salafis actually went and did it.1

  Farasat joined the Salafi mosque in Luton and soon found he had a knack for winning over young people on the fringes of society to his puritan worldview. The mosque reached out to those in prisons or involved in crime, most with Pakistani backgrounds, and tried to transform their lifestyles. So successful was the group’s approach that Luton’s most prominent drug dealer was won over and gave up his old life of casual sex, violence, and fast cars for the austerity of praying five times a day and lawful work on the minimum wage. Soon other young people from working-class African-Caribbean and white backgrounds were converting to Islam and following the same Salafi lifestyle.

  The Salafis preached “self-rectification,” a process of individual purification aimed at modeling one’s life as closely as possible on the Prophet’s example. “When it comes to religious things, dress sense, character, morals, manners, behavior, it should be exactly as it was in the time of Prophet Muhammad,” says Farasat. The political oppression of Muslims was central to this Salafi discourse but interpreted as a punishment from God for failing to adopt the correct lifestyle. Unlike other groups, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, Jamaat-i-Islami, Hizb ut-Tahrir, or their offshoots, which focused on using political power to create an Islamic society, the Saudi-aligned Salafis thought there was no point in engaging in such political struggles until individual Muslims first corrected their own beliefs and practices. For the time being, they believed, the struggle involved self-transformation: doing away with South Asian cultural practices seen as diluting the original Islamic message and rejecting innovations introduced by Islamic scholars after the early generations of Muslims. “We don’t say that the solution is a political one,” notes Farasat.

  We don’t blame [King] Fahd [of Saudi Arabia] or Mubarak or Saddam Hussein for the ills of the Muslim ummah [global community]. Even though every Muslim country is ruled by a tyrannical leader, we do not call the people to rise up against them. We warn people against revolution. We say that the reason you have these dictators is because we are sinful, and so we need to change ourselves and better ourselves, an
d Allah will give us a leader who loves us. So in that sense, we are antirevolutionary. We need to pray five times a day, respect our parents, and do all the things that Allah has ordered us to do. When we do that Allah will give us victory. That is why we talk about the political situation as the illness that has befallen Muslims, but the cure lies in self-rectification.2

  While the Salafis of Luton hope their comrades in Chechnya, Kashmir, and Palestine will be victorious in fighting what they consider to be foreign occupiers, they reject violence against civilians and against the British state. “In England we would strongly oppose any armed conflict,” states Farasat, “because it is not a situation where Muslims are being massacred and raped in large numbers. If that happened, our call would not be jihad, but emigration.”3 Nevertheless, they believe individuals should participate where they consider legitimate armed struggles to be taking place in other parts of the world if they have undergone a successful process of rectification and “got things right in other aspects of their life.” Thus, in the 1990s, a small number of young Salafis from Luton volunteered to fight in Bosnia and Kashmir.

  Britain’s security services had tacitly approved of Muslim volunteers fighting Serb militia in Bosnia and Kosovo. But after 9/11, the Salafi networks came under greater suspicion. The national media, too, descended on Luton in the weeks after 9/11, when it emerged that the city’s branch of a rival group, al-Muhajiroun (local membership: six), had sent two men to Afghanistan to join the Taliban; they had been killed in a US bombing raid on Kabul. Unlike the Salafis, al-Muhajiroun’s rhetoric included calls for political struggle in Britain to establish an Islamic state. The media attention soon gave Luton a reputation as a hive of extremist activity. At football matches, Luton Town supporters were mocked by opposing fans for having Muslim extremists in their city. Racial animosity mounted among elements of Luton’s white majority. In an effort at appeasement, the Salafis found al-Muhajiroun’s local leader, beat him up, and warned him not to continue his activities in the town. Then they called a press conference and publicly denounced the group. “Their activities will no longer be tolerated here,” read their statement. “If we see al-Muhajiroun on the streets spreading their poison, we will drive them off the streets.”4 The Salafis wanted to send a message to the city and to the security services that there was a difference between themselves and al-Muhajiroun, that their agenda within the UK was purely religious, and that they were willing to police their own community and drive out “violent extremists.” For a while, the threats of racial violence against Luton’s mosques declined, although a few years later some Luton Town Football Club supporters would be central to forming the English Defence League, a new far Right political group with a violent anti-Muslim agenda.

  Farasat Latif was not alone in his struggle to make sense of a world that seemed plagued by vast injustices yet was without any prospect of radical change on the horizon. The children and grandchildren of the African-Caribbean and South Asian settlers who had come to the UK in the decades after World War II had grown up in a society that usually saw them as a problem to be solved rather than as fellow citizens with an equal right to shape British life. They were disproportionately stopped and searched by the police on the streets, subjected to racist violence and harassment on their way to and from school or college, and pilloried and mocked in newspapers and television programs, so a sense of racial injustice—often understood as a continuation of the colonialism their parents and grandparents had fought—was an enduring feature of their lives. Their very presence in Britain was only explicable within the broad sweep of a colonial history that most British people preferred to forget. When Britain had needed cheap labor to rebuild after the war, British subjects from South Asian and Caribbean colonies were recruited. Since colonialism had already made them subjects of the British Crown, they were technically not immigrants but subjects moving from one part of Britain’s multiracial empire to another. As Britain’s imperial project finally collapsed in the 1950s, the people of color who had begun to settle in the “mother country” were left as a kind of historical anomaly, and their settlement was construed as an external intrusion into the body politic. Both liberals and conservatives among the governing elite in the 1960s looked anxiously across the Atlantic at the urban uprisings occurring in the US and hoped they could avoid similar problems by passing immigration laws to close the colonial “open door” to those who were not white at the same time that they implemented antidiscrimination measures to integrate the new communities of color. In the event, official efforts to end racial discrimination proved largely symbolic, while the new immigration laws worsened matters by reinforcing the perception that people of color were not really part of Britain, conveniently erasing the colonial history that had brought them there. A. Sivanandan, a Sri Lankan writer who had settled in London in 1958, refused this false separation of immigration from imperialism by inventing the slogan: “We are here because you were there.”

  Community movements against racism, influenced by Black Power movements in the US and anticolonial struggles in the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia, emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. Their starting point was that Britain’s color line was also the cord that held British capitalism together—fighting racism was therefore necessarily connected to a radical anticapitalism. For instance, the Asian Youth Movements, youth-led organizations which had sprung up in various South Asian neighborhoods in England in the 1970s to coordinate community self-defense against racist violence, were modeled on the US Black Panther Party. Like the Panthers, they understood racism as inherent to Western capitalism. Local government leaders responded to such radicalism with a formula of soft multiculturalism, looking to conservative identity politics as a useful counter. Giving “ethnic minorities” a cultural stake in the existing system would, it was hoped, prevent their search for a socialist alternative. In the city of Bradford, the heart of Britain’s Pakistani community, the city council encouraged a council of mosques to be constituted in 1981, as an alternative community voice to the secular Asian Youth Movement. The city council legitimized the mosque leaders as a new class of community leadership through funding and consultation exercises, hoping they would become conservative allies in a process of undermining the younger radicals.5 Bradford’s approach was replicated elsewhere, and by the end of the decade, religious identity politics was on the rise among young South Asians as secular leftist radicalism was declining.

  The official language of multiculturalism was more about managing ethnic identity than dealing with institutional discrimination. Government ministers hoped institutionalizing ethnic identity would sever it from political radicalism. The introduction of multicultural television programming, for instance, was described by William Whitelaw, then the home secretary, in the following terms:

  If you are Home Secretary in any government, you are going to take the view that there are a lot of minority interests in this country, [for example] different races. If they don’t get some outlet for their activities you are going to run yourself into much more trouble.6

  Political trouble was to be avoided with the sop of cultural identity. Yet culture itself could be a field of political contest: the question of what it meant to be British was itself becoming politicized.

  Between 1991 and 1993 there were nine racist murders in London.7 The murder of African-Caribbean teenager Stephen Lawrence by a racist gang in the southeast of the capital attracted as little attention as the others when it first occurred in 1993. The police refused to take action, despite a number of people coming forward to identify the perpetrators. But Stephen’s family spent years campaigning for justice, making legal history by launching a private prosecution. The case collapsed, but the momentum of the campaign—helped especially by the support of Nelson Mandela during his first visit to London—pushed the government to announce a public inquiry into the murder in 1997. Two years later, Sir William Macpherson released the inquiry’s report, identifying a pervasive problem of institutional racism in the p
olice.

  Outside London, where communities of color included significant numbers from South Asian Muslim backgrounds, the picture was, if anything, bleaker. In the northern textile-mill towns of Yorkshire and Lancashire, for example, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis had been recruited from the 1950s onward to work night shifts, which were unpopular with the existing white work force. But as new machinery was developed, the need for labor diminished, and such labor as was needed could be obtained for less elsewhere. The work once done cheaply by Asian workers in the north of England could by the 1980s be done even more cheaply by Asian workers in Asia. The decline of the mills left entire towns on the scrap heap. With the end of the textile-mill industry, the largest employers were the public services, but discrimination kept most of those jobs for whites. The future for South Asians lay in the local service economy. A few brothers would pool their savings and set up a convenience store or a takeout restaurant. Otherwise, there was taxi driving, with long hours and the risk of violence and racist abuse. In one of the former mill towns, Oldham, a quarter of Pakistanis in their thirties were unemployed by 1992; for those age eighteen to twenty-four, the unemployment rate was 37 percent.8 Industrial collapse led ethnic groups to turn inward on themselves in different ways. The depressed inner-city areas, lined with old terraced houses built for millworker families, were abandoned by those whites who could afford to move out to the suburbs. Others took advantage of discriminatory public housing policies which allocated whites to new housing estates cut off from South Asian areas.9 Those South Asians who did get public housing on predominantly white estates soon found their homes targeted: bricks were thrown through windows; sometimes gasoline and a lighted match were tossed through the door. The fear of racial harassment and violence meant most South Asians sought the safety of their own areas, in spite of the overcrowding, the damp and dingy houses, the claustrophobia of a community penned in. The geography of the balkanized northern towns became a chessboard of mutually exclusive areas.10 It was no surprise that, in this ghettoized context, dirty linen was washed neither in public nor in private: problems of drug abuse and forced marriage in South Asian communities went unaddressed.11