But he was right, and I was wrong. I was callow and insensitive. I do see that now. My mistake was to assume that his experience and mine were essentially analogous. After all, like most Americans, I too am a recent descendant of immigrants. My grandparents, German and Polish Jews, refugees from the Nazis, arrived in New York in the early 1940s. But being Jewish has always been, to me, completely compatible with being fully American. In the few instances where I have encountered anti-Semitism in America, there has been no sense of inevitability about it: it has been a queer aberration, so out of place as to be ludicrous. I grew up with a deep, intuitive sense of full entitlement to everything America has to offer. Not only do I not view America as essentially anti-Semitic, I perceive my country as a haven from the world’s anti-Semites. Certainly, in being Jewish I am in an important way different from the majority of Americans, but I have never experienced this as a wound. For Zia—and for many other immigrants in Britain—it is just that: a wound that cannot be healed.
“A sense of belonging,” he subsequently wrote to me, trying to explain this better, “is crucial on a fundamental human level, because it is linked to the most basic question of how we give meaning to our lives. A sense of belonging, of rootedness, turns us into a link between history and posterity, and in doing so it hands us a purpose. We become part of a greater story. . . . I think that when we start to think about identity or a sense of belonging, as a premise, a condition, for creating meaning out of life, rather than merely in terms of political or racial fault lines, we could open up new ways of thinking about ideas that have ossified under the weight of platitudes. A feeling of belonging to Britain means feeling you’re part of the British story.”10
At dinner with Zia one evening in London, I mentioned in passing that more than once, when I’ve returned to the United States, the immigration officer has inspected my American passport and said, “Welcome home.”
“If any official here,” Zia replied, “had ever, ever, even once said that to me, I would have died for England on the spot.”
“AN HONORARY WHITE MAN”
Zia took an expected First at Oxford, then spent two years at Cambridge. We broke up. He abandoned mathematics. He received a scholarship to Yale, then worked for a few years for a prestigious investment banking firm in New York. The time he spent in America was a revelation: In America, he said, he was “a regular Joe,” not only to his professors and colleagues but to women as well. “Maybe they regarded me as an honorary white man—who knows and I don’t care. It didn’t matter to me because I was always treated well.” In Britain, he told me, he had been either fetishized by rebellious English women or simply unsexed; in America, he felt himself fully a normal man.
“I still feel an enormous amount of affection for America and Americans,” he told me. “I felt much more sexual in America. How the outsider is sexualized is as much a political matter as the legal rights conferred on him or denied to him. I felt that I was being acknowledged as a sexual being, in a way that I wasn’t so much in Britain. London is very cosmopolitan, and Oxford and Cambridge are very cosmopolitan, but it’s most curious that in my three years at Oxford and two years at Cambridge, and all my time in London before I went to the States, I didn’t have a single English girlfriend. . . . And the background, to put it in context, is that I did have many girlfriends, but none of them were English. The women I had been seeing and dating, who were interested in me, and in whom I was interested too, were all foreigners in Britain—Italians, French, Indians, Americans, bright foreigners in Oxford and Cambridge. Not English. In America it was no problem at all. Sure, it might have been different if I’d been African-American or even African, but I’m not. I was in an unusual environment, of course, New Haven and then New York City, but American women in these cities—well, I was made to feel welcome.”
A suggestive set of statistics might indicate that Zia’s experience was not unique. Intermarriage rates among Muslim immigrants in Britain are dramatically lower than in the United States. Fewer than 10 percent of Muslim immigrants marry native Britons. In the United States, the figure is probably closer to two-thirds.11 It is impossible to know whether this distinction tells us more about prevailing attitudes toward religion in the two countries or prevailing attitudes toward race; the two cannot be disaggregated, since the majority of Muslim immigrants in both countries are also nonwhite. It is also impossible to say whether these statistics reflect differences in the attitudes of the immigrants, the attitudes of their hosts, or both. But it is possible to say that hybrid relationships, and particularly intermarriage, may reasonably be considered the ultimate indicator of the true state of a society’s ethnic integration, for intermarriage demands a willingness to see one’s culture of origin genetically diluted and ultimately annihilated. Only those fully committed to their adoptive country propose marriage to its natives, and only those who view immigrants as full equals accept. Clearly, in this regard, the United States and Britain are different.
Zia returned to England, where he became a lawyer. Later, he returned to Bangladesh, where he campaigned as a human rights lawyer and anticorruption activist. But there he discovered to his dismay that he was even more an outsider and a curiosity than he was in England. “I was returning to an imaginary homeland.” In White Teeth, Samad’s confidant Shiva, another waiter, asks rhetorically, “Who can pull the West out of ’em once it’s in?” Zia couldn’t, evidently, any more than anyone else can.
THE BITTER EXPERIENCE OF IMMIGRATION
Hanif Kureishi published his semiautobiographical novel, The Buddha of Suburbia, in 1990. In a memorable scene, Karim, the half-Pakistani protagonist, is told by his friend Helen’s father not to see her anymore. “‘We don’t like it,’ Hairy Back said. ‘However many niggers there are, we don’t like it. We’re with Enoch. If you put one of your black ’ands near my daughter I’ll smash it with a ’ammer! With a ’ammer!’” 12 The reference is to Enoch Powell’s 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech, in which the Conservative shadow cabinet minister spoke with ill-tempered passion against immigration, inciting a wave of racial violence throughout Britain. White Teeth also alludes to this event, though in this reference the speech is portrayed as ancient and irrelevant.
“Conspicuously absent from White Teeth,” Zia said to me, “is the anger. Where have all the angry books gone? These new books don’t feel like Hanif Kureishi.” British novels, Zia reflected, no longer “talk about bitter experiences, about experiences of racism, domestic violence, chauvinism, and if they do, it’s made saccharine, sanitized. We don’t see the very dark aspects of racism. That’s something that divides the book from reality—the real experience.” And strangely, he noted, these new British novels are written by women, not men.
So what, I asked him, was the real experience? “The real story,” he said, setting his tea on the floor and fidgeting abstractly with his hands, “is very complicated, and becoming more and more complicated. Whereas before it might have been generally accepted that Asian men and women were the victims of racism, there’s a growing body of opinion that this is not the case—they’re now enfranchised, co-opted, we hear. This really isn’t so.” As we spoke, his voice repeatedly trailed off as he attempted to marshal his thoughts; sometimes he paused for as much as half a minute. It made him sound fragmented and disorganized, but I realized later when I transcribed the tape that in fact he was speaking in lucid, complete sentences.
“The truth is: It wasn’t so cheerful. Immigration is a very bitter experience for many people, and it was for us. It was difficult, it was a struggle. My father worked heroic hours, he was very rarely at home. My mother worked very long hours. We were all quite hot-tempered, quite fiery people, and there were fireworks. They were rather more alarming than the book portrayed. The police were called out. And there was a constant feeling of alienation. The book does bring that out, in my character: the alienation from family, the alienation of many, though not all, young Asians from their parents. Zadie does deal with that.
The man who became the Chalfen character in the novel, whom you’ve met. . . . I remember when I was eighteen, sitting in his kitchen, we had a discussion, and in the course of the conversation, he came to a sudden stop and said, ‘Where on earth did you come from?’ and I was struck by that, struck by it because I felt hurt, not by him but by the comment—there wasn’t any malevolence in the comment—but it made me keenly aware that I wasn’t regarded as forming a continuum with my family.
“My family was in many respects very typical . . . or if not typical, we had characteristics typical of Bangladeshi families but in accentuated form. We were atypical in that we were all very bright, all regarded by our peers and teachers as being very talented, which meant that we confronted problems other Asians might not have. Some of our experiences of racism were in contexts where people would say they didn’t like our ‘brashness.’ That was racism—it was pretty obvious. If you’re loud—well, people don’t like an uppity nigger. Before Oxford, I remember one Christmas when there was a Christmas tree in the foyer of my school. These three boys didn’t like me. I was loud, but in a socially unattractive way. I was a debating champion, editor of the school magazine, and pupil governor—I was never behind the bike sheds. The three boys set on me. I remember it very well, because one of them was Jewish. I remember marveling at the irony of this Jewish boy pushing a Muslim into a Christmas tree. I wanted to say to him, ‘What are you doing? Your people have been herded into ovens and you’re calling me a Paki?’”12
Zia’s brother Jimmi evidently made a much greater impression on Zadie than he did on me. I remember him as a vague, angry teenager but don’t recall much more about him. White Teeth was written and published shortly before September 11, and the character based on Jimmi, Millat, seems by contemporary standards a benign Islamic radical. Millat does nothing more sinister than burn a book he has never read. But Zadie’s plot device was suggestive. Was she correct to draw a connection between incomplete assimilation and Islamic radicalism?
Zia thought so. “The grievance of terrorists must operate on a very personal level,” he reasoned. “When you read about terrorists, you’ll read about arguments rooted in history, and in some slight committed by some Christian king against an Islamic ruler in the distant past. . . . And the explanations are rooted in history, they’re fantastic, those explanations, but what seems to be missing is an account of the knot of emotions inside a terrorist, that knot of fire, that personal dimension, that anger, that fear, that personal grievance. I live in the East End of London and I see a lot of angry Asian males. I see them walking in groups of twelve, I’ve seen them smashing things, I’ve watched as they set a car on fire. I see a lot of anger, and the statistics bear it out—the crime rate, I have friends who work in the emergency department of the local hospital. . . . I’ve wondered whether the anger that I have felt is qualitatively in the same category. Whereas my anger found expression and voice—not outlet—in articulate, nondestructive ways, theirs is turned outward, into other-destructive ways. So I might even sometimes fault myself for something that’s really someone else’s problem, but they rightly identify it as someone else’s problem. The mistake they make is in what they choose to do about it.”
If Muslim men turn their anger outward, Muslim women, it might be surmised, turn it inward: young Pakistani and Bangladeshi women, while rarely seen smashing cars, have the highest rates of suicide and attempted suicide in Britain.
But what, I asked him, is that anger about, exactly? “The anger is about being alienated from British society, and the great danger now is that as more and more Asians become visibly co-opted, the exclusionary forces have the protection of that fact, they can hide behind it. But things remain difficult—very difficult. There are still gaps in salary, in achievement rates, gaps that econometricians tell us—after factoring out unemployment, educational underperformance, social exclusion, and dozens of other candidate causes—are not attributable to anything but racism and discrimination, not even to the class structure. But my anger is not just directed at the establishment, or society, but also at the Asian community, with which I’m in profound disagreement. They have as much, maybe more, to answer for.”
“What kind of disagreement?” His voice had become so quiet that I was worried it wouldn’t register on the tape recorder. He reached over to switch it off. He told me that he was worried about maligning the Bengalis, that nothing disgusted him more than a man who would denigrate his own people. After thinking quietly a bit more, moving about uncomfortably in his chair, he permitted me to switch it on again, but he remained uneasy. “They aren’t equipped to deal with modernity. They come from villages—I come from a village, I’m a villager, I was born in a village, I lived in a village, I spent several formative years in a village—and there’s very little in a village that will equip you with the necessary skills. . . . A villager from rural Sylhet is going to have a hard time dealing with taxes, elections, is not going to have a sense of civic duty, he’s never had recourse to institutions. If you want a dispute resolved you go to the local holy man, or the village elder—there are village elders on council estates13 here in London, but that just demonstrates that they’re trying to re-create their village structures here; they’re not really integrating. Look, I sit on the board of governors of a school in Brick Lane. More than 80 percent of the children are Sylhetis from Bangladesh, yet there is not one Sylheti parent on that board. Many of these children are taken off to Bangladesh by their parents for months, even years at a time, interrupting their education. I help out in a reading program run by my firm at another school. The kids are wonderful, they still have brightness in their eyes, but they read the storybooks like drones. They can read the symbols, but ask them to explain what they’ve read and you see that they’ve barely taken in a word, and this at an age when their comprehension should be much better. How can that be? Well, after school, these kids are taken off to local madrassas by their parents, where they recite pages and pages from the Koran without understanding a single word—Arabic is a foreign language. For these kids, recitation is reading. This is how their parents are educating them. There is so little active engagement on the part of Sylheti parents in the education of their own that school governing bodies in Tower Hamlets struggle to reach a quorum, and people like me, who don’t even have children, let alone children at the school, are welcomed onto the boards.
“The kids are growing up with a sense that there’s something to be taken from Britain, in between extended visits to the home country, but they don’t participate in this society. They look to the state to provide things for them; they’re not rooted in the community; they lead lives with one foot in the airport. . . . They don’t want to belong, they don’t want to become part of the British story. Someone needs to tell them—because their parents aren’t—that our lives are short and the only story we can join is the one going on around us. There’s no time to lose. If you don’t like it, change it, or get out and join another story—either way, you’ve got to be part of some story to hold off the meaninglessness.”
What is Britishness? And why don’t Muslim immigrants want to become part of the British story?
ASSIMILATION IS DEATH
No one really knows what Britishness is. If you ask people in Britain what gives their lives meaning, the answer will often be football. Waiters, bus drivers, kids hanging out on street corners, they will all say the same thing: “Football’s our religion.” That turn of phrase strikes me as significant, although what it means, I have no idea.
One reason Muslim immigrants don’t want to become British is that becoming British means losing their faith, their sense of purpose and identity. Being British offers none of those things; if it did once, it certainly does not now. No other ideology now broadly on offer in Britain—certainly not football—can account for human existence or place that existence in a wider, meaningful pattern. British academic life is now dominated by the condescending strain of atheism promulgated by Richard Dawkins, who
holds the Chair for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. His remarkably unattractive worldview manages to be not only spiritually empty but also intellectually embarrassing—as evidenced, for example, in his campaign to relabel atheists “brights.”
British Christianity has become a vaporous shadow of its former self. Senior figures in the Anglican Church have described the story of the Crucifixion and Resurrection as no more than a metaphor; some have confessed that they do not believe in God. Cathedrals have been converted into nightclubs, the crucifix is a fashion accessory, and the word religion is a brand name for young women’s dancewear. The religious beliefs of politicians are hardly ever mentioned in the course of political debate. Tony Blair’s press attaché is reported to have told reporters, “We don’t do God.”
In the United States, by contrast, levels of churchgoing are high. Christianity, in its literal and evangelical form, is a vital presence in both political rhetoric and popular culture. But even American Christianity is nowhere near as muscular as Islam. Islam’s vitality is such that it is now the fastest-growing religion among native Britons. (The runner-up is a form of evangelical Christianity much like that of the American Southern Baptists.) Converts include some of the country’s most prominent aristocrats and celebrities. The great-granddaughter of the Liberal prime minister Herbert Asquith has converted to Islam; Prince Charles’s interest in Islam, it has been bruited, is more than ambassadorial.14 The Muslim Charles Le Gai Eaton, a former diplomat and author of Islam and the Destiny of Man, reports regularly receiving letters from “people who are put off by the wishy-washy standards of contemporary Christianity. . . . They are looking for a religion which does not compromise too much with the modern world.”
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