Menace in Europe: Why the Continent's Crisis Is America's, Too

by Claire Berlinski

  The anti-Americanism of British Muslims is often ascribed to their sympathy with their coreligionists on the Arab street, particularly the Palestinians. But it is not at all obvious why British Muslims should be swayed by this. They are, after all, British. They have voluntarily made the choice to be in Britain; they live, work, and die in Britain; they—or their children—are educated in British schools; they trade and profit in the British economy; they enjoy a full range of civil liberties in Britain unavailable on any Arab street. Why should their loyalties lie with foreign peoples or regimes?

  Indeed, in recent history, few Muslims have been particularly concerned with the fate of fellow Muslims in foreign countries, so long as that fate is not in some way bound to the United States or to Israel. With the exception of the al Qaeda fringe and a handful of Indonesian nationalists, no Muslim gives a damn that East Timor is now independent. We certainly do not see the Turks, for example, burning down the Australian embassy in Ankara.

  At its fundament, the radicalism of British Muslims has a different source. Like Islamic radicalism throughout Europe, it is a distilled form of anti-Occidentalism. It derives from this group’s profound alienation from Europe, and from Britain in particular.

  A large part of this alienation is socioeconomic. The social and economic composition of the Muslim community in Britain is substantially different from that of the United States. In the United States, Muslims are geographically dispersed; in Britain, they are concentrated and ghettoized. In America, Muslims are largely middle-class professionals: doctors, engineers, academics. In Britain, most Muslims remain stubbornly stuck in the working class or the unemployed underclass.

  In the past decade, the unemployment rate for white Britons has been about 8 percent. It has been closer to 30 percent for Pakistanis and 38 percent for Bangladeshis (who are almost all Muslims). The incomes of almost 85 percent of Pakistani and Bangladeshi households are less than half the national average. Muslims do worse than other pupils at all stages of compulsory education. Fewer Muslim sixteen-year-olds are in education, training, or employment than any other ethnic group of the same age. Muslim students take an extra two years to obtain the same qualifications as their non-Muslim counterparts. They are less likely to obtain first- or upper-second-class degrees.10

  The failure of Muslims to penetrate the centers of political power has been spectacular. There are only two Muslims in the House of Commons; representation in proportion to population would demand at least twenty. Muslims are similarly underrepresented in the senior ranks of the civil service, prison service, police force, criminal justice system, and armed forces. 8 In the summer of 2001, Britain experienced its worst riots in twenty years, resulting in $15 million of damage and 300 injured police officers. The media termed these race riots, but could just as correctly have called them religious riots, since all the rioters were Muslims.

  This is not, of course, a problem limited to Britain, as the French, in particular, are now learning to their dismay. The number of Muslims in Europe has doubled in the past decade, and throughout Europe, Muslims remain for the most part uneducated and poor. Crime rates in Muslim neighborhoods are high. Unemployment in those neighborhoods generally vastly exceeds national averages—Muslims constitute half of France’s unemployed. The percentage of Muslims in France is roughly equivalent to that of African-Americans in the United States, but not one single Muslim sits in France’s 577-seat Chamber of Deputies.

  I do not conclude from this that poverty and low achievement are the causes of the terrorist impulse. The striking prosperity of the world’s most prominent terrorists suggests otherwise. Terrorism is caused by an ideological virus to which neither the poor nor the rich are immune. But this virus is best propagated under certain breeding conditions, and societies with large cohorts of frustrated, unemployed young men find their immune systems markedly compromised when diseases of the soul are at large.

  CHEERFUL MULTICULTURALISM: THE FICTION

  Much can be sensed about a society from the books it lionizes. Zadie Smith was all of twenty-four and still living with her mother when the publication of her first novel, White Teeth, catapulted her to vertiginous celebrity in Britain. Her panoptic portrait of post-Imperial London traces the lives of Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal, whose friendship was forged in a British tank at the close of the Second World War. They meet again in the early 1970s, when Samad emigrates from Bangladesh to London, destined for frustrated underemployment as a waiter in an Indian restaurant. He brings his shrewd, suspicious bride, Alsana, with whom his marriage has been arranged.

  Archie, meanwhile, poleaxed by love at first sight, has wed a Jamaican immigrant, Clara, the teenage daughter of an avid Jehovah’s Witness—a marriage no one would think to arrange. A racially heterogeneous generation of Britons issues: from Clara, Irie, who spends much of the book longing for straight hair; from Alsana, twin sons, Magid and Millat. Theirs is a generation of children, as Zadie describes them, “with first and last names on a direct collision course. Names that secrete within them mass exodus, cramped boats and planes, cold arrivals, medical checks.”

  Jump-cut to the near-present. Watching their sons grow up as Londoners, not Bengalis, Samad and Alsana see in their inexorable assimilation the disappearance of their own culture. “They have both lost their way,” Samad mourns. “Strayed so far from what I had intended for them. No doubt they will both marry white women called Sheila and put me in an early grave.” To Archie he confides his fear that his children will follow the path of Alsana’s Westernized niece: “They won’t go to mosque, they don’t pray, they speak strangely, they eat all kinds of rubbish, they have intercourse with God knows who. No respect for tradition. People call it assimilation when it is nothing but corruption. Corruption!”9

  Listening to this lament, Archie—an archetypal Briton, as his name suggests—is at a loss: “He kind of felt people should just live together, you know, in peace or harmony or something.” These sentiments do not amount to a stirring defense of European values, but it’s worth observing that when confronted with this species of condemnation, few contemporary European intellectuals have anything more vigorous or coherent to say.

  When one of the twins, the more intellectual Magid, takes to calling himself Mark, so dismayed is Samad that he kidnaps his son and ships him back to Bangladesh. This, he hopes, will protect Magid from the West and its seductive corruption. He cannot afford to send both sons, so Millat remains in England. But it is Samad who is seduced and corrupted by his shameful and sacrilegious erotic obsession with his sons’ music teacher, Poppy Burt-Jones, the perfect, preposterous, patronizing icon of British white womanhood. “‘Sometimes we find other people’s music strange because their culture is different from ours,’ said Miss Burt-Jones solemnly, ‘but that doesn’t mean it isn’t equally good, now does it?’”

  Irie is achingly infatuated with Millat, the twin who remains in Britain—as is Zadie, to judge from the excruciating longing with which she describes him: “Millat was like youth remembered in the nostalgic eyeglasses of old age, beauty parodying itself: broken Roman nose, tall, thin, lightly veined, smoothly muscled; chocolate eyes with a reflective green sheen like moonlight bouncing off a dark sea; irresistible smile, big white teeth.” But he is possessed of “an ever present anger and hurt, the feeling of belonging nowhere that comes to people who belong everywhere.” These, we are to believe, are the emotions that drive him to delinquency, and then to religious radicalism. Recruited by the Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation (the group’s acronym is our reassuring clue that it is to be mocked, not feared), Millat travels to Bradford to participate in a ritual burning of The Satanic Verses.

  Magid, to his father’s even greater mortification, returns from Bangladesh a passionate Anglophile. He is unofficially adopted as something like a pet by the neighboring Chalfen family, a smug clan of fully assimilated, unbearably condescending, right-thinking liberal London Jews. Irie and the Iqbals are fascinated by the Chalfe
ns’ comfortable integration into bourgeois British life; the Chalfens are equally fascinated by themselves, finding much to admire in their own high-minded commitment to multiculturalism. The analogy between the Chalfens and Britain is clear.

  White Teeth won the WH Smith book award for new talent, the Commonwealth Writers’ first book award, the overall Commonwealth Writers’ prize, the Betty Trask prize, the British book award for newcomer of the year, the Ethnic and Multicultural Media award; the BT Emma best book and best female newcomer awards, the Whitbread first novel award, the James Tait Black memorial prize for fiction, the John Llewellyn Rhys prize, the Orange prize, and the Author’s Club first novel award. It was adapted for television. The miniseries based on the novel was as much a sensation as the novel itself. The rapture over this book was enough to make other young novelists take to their beds with envy (I say this from firsthand experience). Britain adored this book, and adored it, I have to admit, for good reason: Zadie is an immensely talented writer with an uncanny ear for dialogue. White Teeth is a clever book, it is thoughtful, and like only the best of novels, it brings a whole world into being.

  But Britain loved this book most of all because of Zadie’s vision of modern Britain—a Britain where, as many critics observed, diversity and multiculturalism are lightly and whimsically drawn. White Teeth mirrored back to Britain an essentially cheerful and charming reflection of itself—credibly flawed, of course, but basically optimistic. Above all, it is a Britain where the conflicts experienced by immigrants are funny—or at least, more comic than tragic.

  “Imaginative,” writes one reviewer. “This book is imaginative. How on earth did she come up with this storyline?” Actually, I know exactly how she came up with the storyline. I recognized it immediately. Like most first novels, White Teeth is essentially autobiographical. Although she denies it, insisting that the book is not based on her own life, Zadie is Irie; like Irie she grew up in North London (blocks from Richard Reid, the shoe bomber); like Irie she is the daughter of an English father and a Jamaican mother; and like Irie she was in love with Millat. His real name is Jimmi Rahman. The book is dedicated to him.

  This is not speculation. I know this. I know this because I too was once in love with a Rahman—Jimmi’s brother, Zia. Zia is Magid. I knew all the characters in the book, except Zadie herself; for two years they were the center of my life. Zadie’s description of the Iqbal family is unerringly apt. But that is not nearly as funny as White Teeth suggests.

  THE CHEERLESS REALITY

  I met Zia Haider Rahman early one morning in the Junior Common Room of Balliol College at Oxford University. The year was 1991. I was a graduate student, writing a Master’s thesis about an aspect of American foreign policy so arcane that my dissertation passed into obscurity even before I finished it. It had been raining for weeks, a low, slanting English rain. Everyone’s shoes squeaked. The pantry was serving fried eggs, bangers, toast soldiers with Marmite. No one looked well.

  Someone surged to my table uninvited and swept out his arm as though he were flouncing a cape. “I’m so glad you invited me to sit with you,” he said cheerfully. “I’ve been waiting for you to do that for ages, you know.” He had an aristocratic accent. I was later to learn that he had acquired it from the radio; no one spoke like that where he grew up. He had beautiful white teeth, an erect spine, black hair, black eyes. And presence, he certainly had that.

  Within a half hour of urgent, flirtatious conversation we repaired to his tiny smoke-filled room over Staircase XIV, the blackboard against the wall crabbed with tiny mathematical symbols. Within another half hour, we had our first hysterical fight and were both in tears. “Don’t you understand,” he said, “the upheaval this would cause my family? How could you understand?” He was right: I had no idea what he was talking about.

  Zia was an exceptionally gifted mathematician, involved in the study of some fiendishly complicated conjecture related to the solution of Fermat’s last theorem. He was born in Bangladesh’s impoverished, flood-wracked Sylhet Province, and had grown up in a conservative Islamic home in North London. He was the first member of his family to be educated. His unusual mathematical talent conferred great, unexpected prestige upon his mother, a seamstress. It was particularly lucky, from his mother’s perspective, because of his corresponding misfortune: He had quite dark skin, which in Bangladesh made him an undesirable commodity in marriage. (Attention multiculturalists: I regret to report that the strange values of other cultures are not always “equally good.”) His mother was the bane of his existence—and mine. She was determined to leverage the prestige of his education by arranging an excellent marriage for him to another Bengali. I was, as you can imagine, unenthusiastic about this plan.

  Zia and Jimmi are not twins. Zia is the eldest of the family. Rendering the brothers as twins was a nice touch, though. By making the characters genetically identical but diametrically unalike, Zadie effectively makes the point that being British is not simply a matter of racial ancestry. As Samad puts it, “The one I send home comes out a pukka Englishman, white suited, silly wig lawyer. The one I keep here is fully paid-up green bow-tie wearing fundamentalist terrorist.” The brothers do have one thing in common, however, in both the novel and real life: their violent, bewildering experience of assimilation. The real story upon which Zadie based her novel was hardly “relentlessly funny,” as the Guardian called White Teeth, and it certainly gave no one “hope for a multicultural society,” as the Financial Times proclaimed.

  Zadie has taken fictional license in a number of ways; she has assigned Millat all the charm, and Magid is drawn as a cold and sexless intellectual, which is certainly not how I remember him. Jimmi never became an Islamic radical; he dabbled with Islam, ran a chain of bars, and then trained as an actor. But in emotional essence the story is true. Zia did indeed grow up with his parents’ demand that he remain Bengali in a culture where being Bengali brings patronizing indulgence— the kind displayed, for example, by the Chalfens, modeled on a very real family in North London who are exactly as Zadie describes them—or outright antagonism. (The critics made much of the fact that the Chalfen family is Jewish. What, they asked meaningfully, does this signify? It doesn’t signify anything, I suspect: It just so happens that the Chalfens were modeled on a Jewish family. As any novelist will tell you, sometimes you borrow from real life because it’s there.)

  Growing up, Zia, like so many immigrants from the Subcontinent, was bullied and beaten; he was insulted in the street. Once, when we were dating, he came home covered in coffee. It had been thrown on him from the window of a speeding car. Even upon coming up to Oxford, he was harassed; racist graffiti was scrawled on his door, forcing him to switch colleges. That was how he had come to be at Balliol, a college better known for its tradition of tolerance.11 “When I went into the bar of an Oxford College in my first term, I was chased out,” he recalled when I last spoke to him. I had heard the story before. “I’d made some friends, I was loud. I had a swastika daubed on my door. When I told the dean of the college, he looked very skeptical. Weeks passed, matters grew worse, and then I received a note from the dean saying that he had made enquiries and apparently my claims were ‘not without foundation.’

  “I walked to Balliol. Within an hour I met two fellows, my grades were checked, and Balliol accepted me. The following year, at my old college, one of the people who had attacked me was sent down. He had poked someone’s eye out for bringing a black person to a party. One would have thought this would be unheard of at Oxford in the late twentieth century. So that was Oxford.”

  He recounted this to me recently in his apartment near the City of London, blocks from Brick Lane, London’s largest Bengali neighborhood. Brick Lane bustles with cheap curry restaurants, sari shops, greengrocers selling sacks of rice, vats of ghee, exotic tubers and fruits. Zia is now a corporate lawyer for an American law firm where, he said, “the color that matters most is the color of money. Clients don’t give a damn who wrote the memo. Where there�
�s a great deal of money at stake, people tend to focus on content.” Recently, he said, a newcomer to the firm noted the domination of exotic names on Zia’s department’s letterhead. “Do you have to be Asian to work in this department?” he asked. Zia’s coworker looked up from a stack of briefs. “No, you just have to be fucking smart,” he replied.

  Zia’s loft apartment, on the top floor of a converted brick-wall warehouse, is furnished in the modern, masculine style that became popular in New York during the 1980s stock-market boom, with oak floors, recessed spot lighting, chrome and glass, Italian leather. Apart from the antique maps of Bengal on the wall, there is no clue that Zia has any connection to the Indian Subcontinent. His handmade bookshelves, however, are full of volumes on Islam, Christianity, the clash of civilizations; there are rows upon rows of novels by authors from all over the world—though notably few from the U.K.; books are overflowing onto his windowsills and kitchen table, dog-eared and haphazard. Zia has spent his life trying to figure out where he belongs and what it means to belong. “I’ve often been asked, ‘Do you consider yourself British?’” he said in response to precisely that question. “I think the fact that people ask is infinitely more interesting than any answer I could give.”

  During the two years we spent together, my inability to understand Zia’s difficult relationship with Britain was a constant source of friction. From my perspective, Zia’s sensitivity to racial slight bordered on paranoia. He could discern subtle racism in the most trivial of gestures, a single raised eyebrow. He was capable of brooding for hours about a shopkeeper who spoke to me before speaking to him— evidence, in his view, of the way the British thought it impossible for him to be romantically attached to a young white woman, the way they saw him as nothing more than a “dirty little Paki.” Those words were the identifying epithet of his youth. His desperation to succeed and to prove himself, his ambivalence about dating Western women, his willingness to take seriously his family’s insane demands—none of this made sense to me. He was British, I thought, and since there could be no going back, he might as well get on with things.