The violence that accompanied de facto segregation was vividly illustrated in January 2000. Sarfraz and Shahzad Najeib, two South Asian brothers attending university in Leeds, went to a nightclub in the city center, crossing the implicit lines of ethnic separation that marked the social life of the city. A group of white men got into an argument with them and struck Sarfraz, who, as a court would later hear, “had the temerity to punch back”—the South Asian stereotype was to not retaliate. In response to this so-called provocation, the group chased Sarfraz out of the club and into an alleyway, beat him to the ground, and kicked his head to within an inch of his life. The next day the brothers discovered that two of those accused of the attack were celebrities: Jonathan Woodgate and Lee Bowyer, stars of the Leeds United football club and the English national team. Woodgate was eventually convicted of being part of the chase but was not jailed, and he continued his successful football career; Bowyer was acquitted. Because of poorly designed laws on prosecuting racial violence, Sarfraz was unable to testify in court on the racial epithets he had heard. The brothers’ father, who in a racist attack thirty years before had also been beaten unconscious, said: “If I had had even a small inkling that something like this might happen, perhaps I would not be in this country. I would have gone back to Pakistan.”12 The following year, a string of towns in the north of England erupted in riots, as young South Asians battled with police forces that had both criminalized them and failed to protect them from racist violence.
Earlier generations of South Asian youth had made sense of these kinds of experiences through a secular and leftist political framework. But this was less true of the 1990s. Farasat Latif’s disillusion with a declining Left was not unusual. Nor was the influence on him of Islamic movements that had flourished in Pakistan as a side effect of the US sponsorship of the mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s. The fatwa against Salman Rushdie issued by the Iranian regime in 1989 further illustrated that Islamic movements were ascendant. In South Asia itself, the Indian army’s attack on the Sikh Golden Temple in Amritsar in 1984 and the Hindu nationalist mobilization that ended in the destruction of the mosque at Ayodhya in 1991 had undermined the credibility of Indian-style secularism. British Muslims arriving at university in the 1990s, with experiences of personal racist violence as teenagers, institutional racism in the police, and a growing awareness of global injustices such as the Bosnian genocide, were more likely to encounter Islamic politics than South Asian forms of leftism. Groups like Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT) offered a way of making sense of these experiences and were able to recruit thousands of young supporters to what would come to be known as “Islamism.”
Islamic movements like HT, founded in Jordan in the 1950s, the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) in Egypt, and the Jamaat-i-Islami (JI) in South Asia, which had emerged in the context of decolonization in the mid–twentieth century, were essentially attempts to respond to the legacy of colonialism at the cultural level. Frantz Fanon, the psychiatrist from Martinique who joined the Algerian anticolonial struggle, had noted: “Colonial domination, because it is total and tends to oversimplify, very soon manages to disrupt in spectacular fashion the cultural life of a conquered people.”13 Like all colonized peoples, Muslims in the Middle East and South Asia recognized that formal political independence did not by itself resolve the issue of how to reconstruct identity. Leaving the nation-state structures established by colonialism in place and simply replacing Europeans with native leaders was insufficient: it ignored the more complex question of what kinds of political subjectivity they would need to create to sustain newly decolonized states, what Fanon described as the demand for “not only the disappearance of colonialism but also the disappearance of the colonized man.”14 For the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the JI in Pakistan, the answer was to be found in turning Islam into a form of identity politics. It was as Muslims, rather than as nationals of a colonially defined territory, that a sense of shared belonging was to be established and a more fundamental breach with European cultural domination enacted. In this respect, these Islamic movements were similar to groups mobilizing other religious identities in decolonizing settings—such as the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh in India. In practice, as these movements began to increase their influence in the 1970s, they tended toward stabilizing the social inequalities left behind by colonialism. They campaigned for conservative positions on gender relations and mobilized support through agitation against minorities, whether it was the Ahmadiyya minority in Pakistan or the Copt minority in Egypt. They bore little resemblance to Fanon’s hopes of setting “afoot a new man” in the aftermath of colonialism that would offer new models for humanity.15
The appeal of these movements to some young Muslims who were living as minorities in Britain in the 1990s therefore seems hard to explain at first. The political program of HT, for instance, had little to say about Britain itself. Before the Rushdie affair, HT’s UK-based leadership did not even target British-born Muslims for recruitment, preferring to focus on visiting Arab students and professionals who might participate in an HT-led coup d’état on their return home. Such a program was of little practical relevance to minority Islam in a secular Western state such as Britain.16 HT’s success in this period rested not on its political program as such but on its ability to act as a vehicle for a new kind of globalized Islamic identity. As the French scholar Olivier Roy has argued, this notion of a globalized Islam is not the product of any specific “Islamist” organization but a broad sociological trend that has developed across Europe as a result of racism, migration, and globalization.17 Young Muslims felt alienated not only from the racism of the wider society, but also from the inward-looking mosque life of their parents, which was centered upon specific ethnic identities (for example, Sylheti, Gujarati, or Mirpuri) and mingled Islam with South Asian folk traditions. The idea of identifying with the global ummah proved an attractive third alternative to either assimilating into a racist society or following the inherited religio-cultural traditions of their parents. The version of Islam that suited this approach was one that was delinked from the ethnic folk practices drawn from South Asia (such as reverence for holy men, or pirs); these were to be stripped away on the grounds of their being impure accretions that had contaminated the original universal message of Islam. While their parents had imbibed their religion through an oral tradition bound up with South Asian languages and poetry, the new, globalized Islam was at home in English and on the printed page (and later, the Internet). It was this concept of a globalized Islam rather than a Pakistani Islam or a Bangladeshi Islam that appealed to some young British Asian Muslims in the 1990s, whether it led to the ranks of HT or, as for Farasat, to Salafism. Through these new Islamic movements, young Muslims thus carried out their own globalization, transcending inherited ethnic and national belongings in favor of an allegiance to the global Islamic community. As new immigrant communities from Somalia, Afghanistan, Algeria, and Iraq began to form in the UK during the 1990s, the idea of a global Islam, as opposed to a mosaic of ethnicities, made all the more sense. The world was now pictured differently. The South Asian neighborhoods of Britain and the original towns and villages of South Asia from which communities had migrated remained the central axes of young Muslims’ mental geography. But alongside them came a growing knowledge of other parts of the world where the ummah was oppressed: Palestine, Chechnya, Kashmir, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Iraq. In principle, all the struggles for justice of Muslims around the world were to be regarded as equally important. Ultimately, there was no homeland and no diaspora but a global Islamic consciousness unbounded by geography. This new sense of identity was fundamentally political: It provided a new language for describing injustice and offered a way of filling the void opened up by the decline of the Left. It countered the globalization of capitalism not with a return to local tradition but with a transnationalism of its own.
There was a range of ways in which this trend manifested. For some, having stripped Islam of South Asian cultural acc
retions, it was easier to establish a sense of belonging as a Muslim in Western society. This was the model offered by reformists such as the Swiss philosopher Tariq Ramadan, who emphasized the need to apply Islam’s universal principles to the specific context of when and where one lived. By going back to the original sources, Ramadan argued, universal Islamic values, after being separated from the particular immigrant cultures with which they had become bound up, are found to be broadly compatible with liberalism. This then provided an Islamic basis for active citizenship and engagement for social justice rather than isolation or a one-sided adaptation to British cultural norms.18 The unities between Muslims and others in the movement against the 2003 Iraq war rested on this assumption, that Islamic and liberal values could be aligned on specific political struggles. For others, like Farasat Latif, the path led to literalism and the attempt to model one’s life as closely as possible on the Prophet’s. While both of these approaches involved issues of identity, they could only be fully understood in the context of a political history of racism, the decline of leftist politics, and Western neocolonialism.
Three of the four men who carried out the 7/7 terrorist attacks on the London transport system in 2005, resulting in the deaths of fifty-two passengers, had also been shaped by the generational gap between a parental folkloric Islam and a new global Islam. In the aftermath of the attacks, the pundits, think tanks, academics, and intelligence analysts who were called on to explain this new threat of “homegrown” terrorism tended to assume because those perpetrating the violence had made a break with their parent’s Islam in favor of something called Salafism or Islamism, that these isms must be the cause of their violence, the drivers of their radicalization. In the most influential study of the causes of 7/7, the journalist Shiv Malik argued that the bombers were the product of a much wider trend in Britain’s Muslim communities, of a younger generation using Islamism to reject the traditional practices of their parents.19 The claim that the cultural origins of homegrown terrorism could be found in the general trend of young Muslims rethinking their identities was a convenient alternative to recognizing more political factors, such as Britain’s foreign policies. And such a claim had the implication that a whole range of behaviors associated with this generational conflict could be used by security officials as “indicators” of the risk of radicalization—for example, choosing to leave the congregation of one’s parents’ mosque in favor of an attachment to one with a more globalized idea of Islam. It also meant that government projects to intervene in the cultural dynamics of Muslim life to try to shore up alternatives to Islamism could be legitimized as part of a counterterrorism strategy. Finally, it implied that multicultural tolerance of these new forms of identity, in which Muslims identify with their coreligionists around the world, was in itself a national security risk.
Such analyses became the main lens through which Muslim identity in the West was viewed. In Prime Minister David Cameron’s much-discussed speech to the Munich Security Conference in 2011, he made the same argument: behind Muslim terrorism lay “a question of identity”; “the passive tolerance of recent years” had to be abandoned in favor of a much more assertive defense of British values against “Islamist extremism”; Muslims had to privilege their Britishness over their global allegiance to Muslims.20 On the same day, the far Right English Defence League marched through Farasat Latif’s hometown of Luton making roughly similar demands in less genteel language. By remaining within an exclusively cultural analysis, and ignoring the political histories of racism and the foreign policy practices of the war on terror, Cameron’s speech was unable to come to grips with the real roots of political violence. Ironically, demanding that Muslims be more British simply reminded them that as things stood they did not have an equal say in what Britishness meant.
In later chapters I argue that analyses of terrorism that locate its root cause in Islamist ideology and underlying cultural conflicts are conceptually flawed and inconsistent with the available evidence. In short, there is no demonstrable cause and effect between holding an Islamist ideology and committing acts of terrorist violence. The notion that “extremist ideas,” perhaps enabled by identity conflicts or group dynamics, by themselves turn people into violent radicals does not stand up to scrutiny, and it detaches the question of terrorist violence from the wider context of Western governments’ foreign policies. It is noteworthy that in the July 7, 2005, bombings the usual theories of radicalization, such as Shiv Malik’s, have to ignore the story of Germaine Lindsay, the suicide bomber who killed 26 people and injured over 340 on a Piccadilly line underground train between King’s Cross and Russell Square stations. He was born in Jamaica in 1985 and immigrated to Britain with his mother as a young child. His mother converted to Islam when he was fifteen, and he followed immediately afterward, before she left to live in the US. Thereafter, Lindsay seemed to live a life of petty crime but engaged in some political activities. He was reported to have been a drug dealer for a time, who was “always going on about racism” and “thought all white people were trash.”21 He attended a national demonstration in October 2002 against the impending war on Iraq and for the rights of Palestinians; there he met a woman with whom he would have a long-term relationship and two children. He was only nineteen years old when he carried out his act of mass murder. There was nothing in this story to correspond to the generally accepted radicalization models, which is why pundits normally neglect to discuss him.
At the Door of Whiteness
In July 2011, Arizonans complained that local television news stations were referring to the massive dust storms that sweep through the state as “haboobs,” an Arabic term long used by meterologists in the Southwest. One resident wrote to a local newspaper asking: “How do they think our soldiers feel coming back to Arizona and hearing some Middle Eastern term?”22 One wonders if soldiers would also object to their children learning algebra. That “some Middle Eastern term” could provoke this reaction points to the way in which signifiers of perceived alien cultures can designate racialized enemies. Just as the story of Muslim identity in Britain is inseparable from questions of race, so too is race a necessary part of understanding what it means to be Muslim in the US. In both settings, the social history of Muslim life attests to the shifting construction and reconstruction of racial meanings.
Compared to the UK, the American Muslim population is less concentrated on South Asia as a region of origin. In the last fifty years, Muslims have settled in the US from various Arab countries, other countries in Asia and Africa, Turkey, Iran, and southeastern Europe—and different parts of this mixed Muslim population have experienced distinct patterns of racialization. It is estimated that 20 to 30 percent of Muslims in the US are African American.23 Indeed, one in four of those brought to the Americas with the Atlantic slave trade originated from Muslim-majority parts of West Africa. The 1977 television miniseries Roots, based on Alex Haley’s novel, reflected historical realities when it portrayed Kunta Kinte, the African captured as an adolescent and sold into slavery in the US, as a Muslim.24 By the late nineteenth century the African-American connection to Islam had been largely erased, but as blacks moved north from southern segregation, they began to forge new and syncretic religious movements, often oriented toward Islam. Meetings of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association in Harlem often featured South Asian missionaries of the Ahmadiyya sect, who claimed kinship with African Americans because of their own hardships under British colonialism. The Moorish Science Temple, formed in Newark in 1913 by an African American named Timothy Drew (who renamed himself Noble Drew Ali), was the first significant organization in the US to identify itself as Islamic, though its knowledge of Muslim life in other parts of the world was sketchy. In 1926, the Egyptian Dusé Mohamed Ali formed the Universal Islamic Society in Detroit, a precursor to Wallace Fard Muhammad’s Nation of Islam, which was founded in the city four years later. These heterodox forms of religious practice were attractive as a basis for both spiritual salv
ation and reconceptualizing what it meant to be a black American. By proclaiming themselves “Moorish Americans” or “Asiatics” rather than “Negros,” followers imaginatively left behind their racial subordination within the US and aligned themselves with a transnational Islamic community, within which racial classifications were transcended.25 Islam became known as a religion that freed its followers from America’s racial definitions; the impact in the black community went beyond the number of actual followers.26 When Malcolm X claimed conscientious objector status during the Korean War draft, he identified his country of citizenship as Asia. By the early 1960s, when he was the Nation of Islam’s most dynamic leader, the organization had attracted a membership of tens of thousands and the admiration of millions.27
As well as a base for new forms of African-American religion, Detroit, and the neighboring factory city of Dearborn, built by Henry Ford, were also major centers of Arab immigration in the twentieth century. The majority of Arab immigrants to the US have been Christians, but in later decades Muslims made up an increasing proportion. Arab Americans are reckoned to make up around a quarter of Muslims in the US today.28 Ford began recruiting Palestinians, Yemenis, and Lebanese to work in his auto factories in 1913. Arab communities sprung up around the auto plants, the largest in the Southend area of Dearborn, in the shadow of Ford’s mammoth River Rouge complex. By the early 1970s, two thousand Arab Americans were working at Chrysler’s Dodge Main auto plant in Detroit. Like black workers, they were singled out for worse conditions in an attempt to divide the workforce along ethnic lines and undermine industrial labor organizing, following a tradition of racial division first systematized by Henry Ford. In 1973, three thousand Arab workers staged a militant parade through the streets of Dearborn to protest the leadership of the United Auto Workers; the union was accused of aligning itself with management and white workers, marginalizing blacks and Arabs, and purchasing $300,000 in Israeli bonds, in effect supporting the military occupation of Palestinian territories.29 (Arabs, mainly from Yemen, were also a significant segment of the agricultural work force in California in the 1960s and 1970s, and were active in César Chávez’s United Farm Workers union.)30 As a result of the auto industry, Dearborn became a national center of Arab-American life, even as, with the decline of US manufacturing, its communities were forced to seek new kinds of work. “Ask any family in Dearborn where their father used to work,” notes Rachid Elabed, a local youth worker,
The Muslims Are Coming! Page 5