Is it possible to become British without abandoning Islam? Of course. But it is not possible to become fully British without abandoning Islam in its more radical forms—in other words, embracing a dilute Islam that is no more compelling than Britain’s dilute Christianity. Perhaps this is why so many immigrants view assimilation as something literally worse than death.
A DIET FOR THE SPIRITUALLY FLABBY
I was struck, when I returned to Britain recently after an absence of almost ten years, to find that middle-class Britain had become obsessed with health food and dietary purity. It was once rare to see fresh vegetables served in Britain, but now the nation is raising organic produce, shunning red meat, flushing toxins from its collective system, and taking colonic purges. This last, evidently, is Diana’s legacy.
Dr. Gillian McKeith—her doctorate in Holistic Nutrition comes from a mail-order diploma mill in Alabama—painstakingly inspects her clients’ excrement on her national television program, You Are What You Eat. This astonishing display of prime-time copromancy is wildly popular. Her book of the same name was a national number one best-seller. “If dieting has become a sort of religion,” writes the editor of a popular British lifestyle magazine, “then Gillian McKeith must be this year’s top guru.”13 British psychiatric professionals have reported a notable rise in orthorexia, a previously unknown mental disorder in which sufferers, fixated upon righteous eating, starve to death.
Phiroze Nemuchwala is a British psychotherapist; his specialty is the treatment of psychosomatic illness. We have been friends since we met by chance in a bookstore nearly twenty years ago. Of late, he has noticed that many of his patients on restrictive vegetarian diets— women especially—are suffering from depression, anxiety, and susceptibility to coughs and colds. He is beginning to suspect that they are malnourished. I asked him what, in his view, was at the psychosocial heart of Britain’s strange food fixation. “Religion,” he said immediately. His patients, having like most Europeans rejected theism, are embarking upon a desperate quest to conquer the unacceptable prospect of disease, aging, and personal extinction. (He offered the suggestion, too, that women who declared themselves repulsed by the very thought of eating red meat frequently presented with intense sexual conflicts and a great deal of unconscious rage.)
Phiroze’s practice consists mostly of upper-middle-class white Britons, the majority of them women. In recent years, his professional approach has changed. “For the first ten years of my practice I worked very much as a Freudian,” he said. He did not, in his practice, discuss “deep, fundamental, powerful values like truth, integrity, action, will, clarity, awareness—indisputable values” for him. These concepts are not generally considered by psychotherapists in Britain to be relevant to mental health. “I was not talking about those concepts, and I was quite determined not to. One can do a pretty good four-year, twice-a-week analysis with someone and the word love never comes up. Because if the patient doesn’t mention it, it’s not really the therapist’s place to. And eventually, after some ten years of this, I found this way of working a little bit sterile, and I found that it was missing the deep point. And I suppose my own explorations into psychology, philosophy, and literature were inclining me toward an idea that love, integrity, compassion, courage—values that are common to all religions, values that date from Socrates, eternal human values—were more important than I’d realized.”
The focus of his practice now is on imparting those common religious values that, he believes, give life meaning. These are ideas, Phiroze notes, for which his clients, when they come to see him, don’t even have a vocabulary. “Until recently in Europe it was about serving Christ. They didn’t really think about that, they were just offered it at the age of three, as soon as they could speak. But the people who come here don’t have a whole set of ideas like that. What I try to get across to them is that there has been this current of thought in world thinking for three or four thousand years, and that certain things are agreed to be deeply meaningful and certain things are generally agreed to be not so. I call them true deliverers of the Good Life. I contrast this with false deliverers, things that promise to deliver but don’t really—the obvious ones being money, sex, fame. Media and advertising will tell us that if you buy these sunglasses, this handbag, then you will have the good life, and you will be blessed, and you will be in the elect, you will be special. But the truth of it is that the much more religious and philosophical ideas of love, courage, integrity, dignity, respect, compassion, authenticity, genuineness—these are the things that will deliver the Good Life.”
Phiroze does not, however, tell his clients that they should embrace these values because they are, simply speaking, good values. “I never suggest they should do this because it’s the right thing to do. I say, ‘In my observation and study, and personal experience, these work better, and what I advise you to do, in the empirical, scientific tradition of the West, is experiment.’ So I say to them, ‘Well, try it out. Try it for this week until next Friday, doing this, and come back and tell me if it yielded a better harvest of good feeling than buying that pair of Ray-Bans did last month.’ And without fail, they come back and tell me that yes, being much more honest with their sister, boyfriend, child, parent did yield meaningful, worthwhile results. They feel more deeply anchored in themselves, their self-respect has gone up, and they see very readily that what I call the True Deliverers are better deliverers than earning a bit more money, getting promoted, buying a new car, losing a bit of weight. I don’t have a religious type of belief, a faith belief, that these are the things that work. I have found them to be things that work.” These are, as he puts it, “a mishmash of religious ideas,” though he never mentions God to his patients, and calls himself an atheist.
“My patients don’t think much about the search for meaning. I encourage it. They don’t come here saying, ‘What’s it all about?’ Perhaps they come here because of depression or anxiety. Usually when we’ve cleared all that up, in the third year, I raise the question, ‘What do you want your life to stand for, what do you think you’re here for?’ And almost without exception they get fascinated by that and do another year with me.
“I love that stage of work.”
His patients are hungry for something, obviously, as are the patients of Dr. McKeith. Is it really so surprising that presented with a choice between Islam, which offers a coherent and absolute set of answers to these questions, or its alternative, which seems in modern Britain all too often to be a bracing colonic purge, many recent immigrants have found the former more compelling?
CORRUPTION, GHETTOIZATION, AND A PERVASIVE SENSE OF UNFAIRNESS
There is more to this complicated story, though, than the empty flabbiness of Britain’s secularism and the horror it inspires among Muslim immigrants, or at least Zia thinks so. “What we’re seeing in the East End of London is a ghettoization,” Zia told me, “and nobody’s doing anything about it—certainly not at the level at which something would have to be done. The local government of Tower Hamlets is riddled with waste, if not outright corruption, and it’s very difficult for people to criticize the local government, because the counselors are Bangladeshi, so accusing them of corruption might look like racism.”
Tower Hamlets, the area around Brick Lane, is a small, densely populated London borough adjacent to the eastern boundary of the City. It has the largest Bangladeshi population in the country. There is severe economic deprivation throughout the borough, and if Zia is right, the local government isn’t helping. “In order to help the economically and socially excluded who don’t speak English as a first language, well-meaning liberals insist that every pamphlet produced by the borough advising its citizens of their rights to health care, education, social services, and so on, every form and leaflet, has to be translated into a dozen languages. This introduces an enormous cost, especially when you think that new local and central government programs are being rolled out at a rate of knots with every passing fad of public policy. But
aside from the cost, it’s either useless or dangerous. When you go to the doctor’s surgery,15 the leaflets in Bengali remain piled high—nobody takes them. My friends in local government confirm that reams of these translations get pulped. Here’s the terrible irony: They don’t get used because the literacy rate among Sylhetis is very low—the literacy rate in Bengali, that is. Sylhetis don’t even speak Bengali, they speak a dialect or another language, call it what you like. But this business of translation is useless and worse still it is very likely dangerous. The provision of services in Bengali means Bangladeshis are drawn to Tower Hamlets and remain there. The reception at my doctor’s surgery here counts a number of Sylhetis among its staff. As a Sylheti in Tower Hamlets, you can conduct all your exchanges with official Britain, in the doctor’s surgery, at the unemployment benefit office, at the social services office, in your mother tongue. Why on earth would you not come here and why on earth would you ever leave? This is a ghetto. We have got to get every generation speaking English as well; we’ve got to abandon the dogma of multiculturalism.”
Tower Hamlets is the setting of Monica Ali’s book Brick Lane, another extremely successful recent novel about Bengalis in Britain written by another attractive young woman of exotic ethnic extraction. Despite Zia’s complaint that the modern British novel is not angry enough for verisimilitude, Brick Lane portrays the bewilderment and alienation of Bengali immigrants in Britain quite successfully—and proposes, as well, that these emotions morph readily into Islamic radicalism and hatred of America.
Ali recounts the story of Nazneen, an obedient Bengali villager sent to London as a teenager to marry a stranger twice her age. When Phiroze spoke of his wasting vegetarians, I thought of Nazneen, who is astonished to discover that in Britain it is the poor who are fat. Nazneen’s daughters, like the children in White Teeth, dismay their father, Chanu, with their enthusiasm for assimilation. “And what is their culture?” Chanu asks contemptuously of the British. “Television, pub, throwing darts, kicking a ball.” Like Zadie Smith’s character Samad, Chanu schemes to take his children back to Bangladesh against their will.
Nazneen’s rebellion, late in life, comes in the form of an extramarital affair with a virile young Muslim radical, Karim. His anti-Americanism—and the anti-Americanism of Muslim immigrants generally—is assumed by the author as a given: At the community meetings Karim convenes, the debate is not about whether British Muslims should oppose the United States, it is about how to oppose the United States. The outcast of the group, who objects to violence on the grounds that it is not sanctioned by Islam, is a black convert— the only one who is not of Bengali origin.
“So there’s a lot of anger,” Zia concluded. “There’s the anger and the fear of the terrorist, the vandal on the street, but there’s anger too in the lawyer, the physician, the banker. I’ve wondered if when you see someone passionate against something, against unfairness, whether behind that passion there is anger. I know angry Asian men who will only discuss their anger behind closed doors in the company of friends.” He had, he told me, thought of writing a novel about these angry men.
A woman he had met the weekend before was sleeping in his bedroom. She was already besotted with him and he was already bored with her. Several more women called him on his cell phone as we spoke. His life did not seem a vale of tears. I interrupted him. “Look, Zia,” I said, gesturing around me at his apartment, the leather sofa, the panoramic view of London’s skyline, “you’re one of the most successful people I know, by any measure. It would seem that Britain has been good to you. Why are you angry?”
He didn’t seem surprised by the question. Perhaps he’d heard it before. “It’s a curious need,” he answered, pausing at length between clauses as if retrieving them from deep storage, “that we all have, which is to be treated fairly. We all must feel that we are being treated fairly. We hear people saying all the time, ‘Since when was life supposed to be fair?’ And yet we all absolutely rage against injustice. Injustice perpetrated against an individual coupled with injustice perpetrated against the individual because he’s part of a wider group, not only is that an unfairness, it’s obliterating of his uniqueness. It’s so disregarding. Not even a moment’s thought about his uniqueness. The desexualizing—it’s bound to make you angry.”
Zia began to speak now as if facing a jury, no longer using the first person. “Everyone faces adversity. And everyone must position himself in such a way not only to overcome adversity but to find challenges equal to his talents. Now, we all do things, we all find creative ways of negotiating through difficulties. That doesn’t mean we don’t have them. If you see someone who’s done moderately well, what you see is someone who’s done moderately well. What you won’t see is what obstacles he had to overcome. It almost smacks of greed for that person to argue that he’s been treated unfairly—it is unseemly—but I think it’s unfair to deny him that argument, because whether that argument is a valid one is entirely to do with matters of fact, which we may or may not be able to ascertain, but it is a factual question, not a moral one. How do I account for my success? I’m an outlier. I’m random. There are many, many more who have much more talent than me, many more, I am sure, who never broke through. And in the whole of life, you will get a few like me, who have had the happy confluence of circumstances. I’ve been lucky.”
As he finished his sentence, the woman who had been sleeping as we spoke walked into the living room in her pajamas. She stared at Zia with infatuated eyes. He sighed.
THE GREAT SATAN’S SECRET WEAPON
Zadie’s book suggests a particularly important truth: In the war against Islamic radicalism, Europe’s chief weapon will be its enormous seductiveness. While Europe has been home to history’s most extraordinary forms of religious fanaticism, European civilization has also had a corrosive effect on the religious life, whether Catholic, Protestant, or Jewish. There is no reason to expect the Muslim experience to be different. The temptations of Western civilization, as the characters in British novels repeatedly discover, are corrosive; and even sending one’s children back to Bangladesh is no proof against them. That which disgusts the Islamists—alcohol, promiscuity, faithlessness, decadence—will for many be their undoing. These are what Europe has to sell, and they are commodities that have repeatedly proved more appealing than abstract salvific ideologies—at least, in the long run.
The Berlin Wall did not fall simply because the Soviet Union was militarily and economically bankrupt, nor even because the citizens of the East longed to be free. It fell because those citizens said “Screw this” to communism’s utopian message. They wanted video recorders, not the dictatorship of the proletariat. They wanted Michael Jackson albums. They wanted motorcycles. They wanted Penthouse magazine, combination washer-dryers, twenty-four-hour convenience stores, rave music, and a lot of Ecstasy to go with it. Communism provided none of that. 14 The West, by comparison, demands no adherence to grim, selfsacrificing ideologies, even as it offers infinite possibilities for pleasure in the temporal realm. Of course it is that very same seductiveness— accompanied by the complete absence of a redemptive message, the disdain for redemptive messages—that introduces into the West its anomie and hopelessness, but surely it is far better to have newly faithless immigrants moping around the cafés, fretting about the toxins in their diet and complaining that none of it makes any sense, than to have them planning to blow up buildings. Unfortunately, it is that very anomie and hopelessness that prevents the West from defending itself aggressively even when the buildings actually are blown up.
The eminent Middle East historian Bernard Lewis has remarked that when the mullahs call America the Great Satan, the Satan in question is not our incarnation of evil, but theirs—“the adversary, the deceiver, above all the inciter and tempter who seeks to entice mankind away from the true faith.”15 In the Orientalist mythology described by Edward Said, the East is a seductive female and the West is a conquering male. But it can equally well be viewed as precisely the in
verse.16 The West tempts the faithful and the West devours religion, not so much by subduing it militarily as by offering something so much more immediately attractive: personal autonomy, sexual freedom, nice things to buy. Europe has snuffed out Christianity, and sooner or later it will probably do the same to Islam. With luck, it will do so before Islam manages to wreak too much more damage. But given how much easier it is to destroy than to build, there is no guarantee that it will do so in time.
TOO MUCH BLOODY HISTORY
Let me make one thing clear: No one but a fool would argue that the United States is free of racial and religious tension, that immigration is an uncontroversial issue in America, or that there are no Islamic radicals in the United States. It is a difference of degree—but differences of degree can be so great as to amount to a difference of kind. The fundamental ethnic divide in the United States is not between established
Americans and recent immigrants but between whites and blacks. The historic origins of this divide are obvious: Black Americans came to the United States not as willing immigrants but as slaves. Relations between blacks and whites in the United States remain less than perfectly harmonious, but it is laughable to imagine that a significant number of black Americans would consider martyring themselves to destroy Western civilization.
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