by Maajid Nawaz
“But why are you still there, then?” I naively asked.
“Because Libyans like Pakistanis,” he assured me.
I didn’t understand this. As an ex-pat he was very well paid for the time, and we eventually moved into a large six-bedroom house as a result. Why didn’t Gaddafi consider him British? What I didn’t know then was that in 1974 Gaddafi had gone to Lahore and publicly supported Pakistan’s right to pursue nuclear weapons. In turn, Pakistan named Lahore’s main sports stadium after Gaddafi. I had no idea how this pursuit of nuclear weapons would go on one day to affect my own life so profoundly.
My father went in for the whole oil look. This was the era of Dallas with J.R. and Bobby Ewing. We all loved to watch Dallas; in fact, I still catch myself sometimes humming its catchy theme song. Typical of charming, worldly-wise Pakistani men of his day, my father didn’t shy away from flaunting his style. He’d wear a Stetson, cowboy boots, a big belt buckle with his name embossed into the leather at the back, and an expensive diamond-encrusted gold watch; these days you’d call that bling. Like any child growing up, I didn’t rate my father’s fashion sense, but I did inherit his love for cultivating an individual style.
My father’s job gave me something of a polarized childhood. He would alternate between spending a month in Libya, and then having three to four weeks at home. When he was away, Abi would be in charge, and her more liberal outlook would prevail. When my father was back, we lived under stricter, more traditional house rules. This created conflict between my parents—a clash of backgrounds, really, as well as a generational difference. My father was socially liberal but with traditional family values. Abi was fiercely independent and free-spirited, always the first to dance at weddings and the last to sit down.
Though work was the focus of my father’s life, politics was the way in which he socialized with friends at home. This was a typically Pakistani and typically Muslim way of going about things. His stance toward the pressing questions of his day was essentially a “plague on both your houses”; he was very much anti-colonial, but having lived and worked under Gaddafi, he was also anti Arab dictators. Importantly, and unlike many of the “old” European left, he wasn’t pro Arab tyrants just because they stood up to Western imperialism. He was well aware of Gaddafi’s record of torture long before it became public knowledge in the West. He knew of the hatred that everyday Libyans bore their leader.
It’s hard not to look at Nana Abu, Abi, and my father without thinking that something from each of them has rubbed off on me. Although they are very different characters, what unites them is the way they have gone against the grain: Nana Abu leaving a newly independent Pakistan for Southend to pursue a dream; Abi’s liberal views challenging those of her community; my father taking on a leading corporation to set up the company’s first trade union. Apart from all the other traits that I have been lucky enough to inherit from them, it is this instinct to rattle the status quo that strikes me as their most significant influence.
CHAPTER TWO
This Game’s Not for Pakis
I first encountered and became properly aware of racism at around eight years old. I was having lunch at my primary school, Earl’s Hall, and as usual I was lining up with my tray to get my food from the dinner lady. This particular day, it was sausages on the menu. Now, I knew I wasn’t meant to have sausages. I wasn’t quite sure why, but I was aware that my father didn’t want me to eat them. When my brother Osman and I had started at the school, Dad realized that the food served there might be a problem. So to avoid it becoming an issue he’d said to us, “Eat anything you want, even if it is not halal. The main thing is, keep from eating pork. So no sausages.”
The dinner lady put my lunch down on my plate.
“What is this?” I asked.
“Sausages,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” I said politely, handing the plate back. “I’m not allowed to eat them.” At this stage I was still very much a timid little boy.
“What do you mean, you’re not allowed to eat them?” the dinner lady snapped back.
“I’m . . . I’m not allowed to eat them,” I repeated nervously, but stood my ground. “My dad told me I wasn’t allowed sausages.”
“Why on earth not?”
“I don’t know,” I replied, quivering. “All I know is that I’m not allowed to eat them.”
At this point, I remember being very scared, not just as a small child standing up to an adult, but also over why I wasn’t allowed to eat the sausages. I didn’t really know what they were, but my dad had been so insistent that I thought I might have some reaction if I ate them. I could feel everyone in the canteen looking at me.
“Stop being so fussy!” the dinner lady shouted, shoving the plate back at me, so I had to take it. “This is your lunch, and you’re going to eat it.”
The dinner lady came out from behind the counter to where I was sitting and insisted that I ate them in front of her. Now I was crying. I felt the eyes of everyone staring, as if I was some sort of freak. I didn’t know what to do.
“What a fussy little boy,” she snapped again. “You will eat your sausages.”
With fear rising up like a lump inside my throat, caught between parental and school authority, I addressed the immediate threat and put a piece of sausage in my mouth. At which point, fear took its revenge and pushed out the offending morsel, along with everything else in my stomach. I vomited all over my plate. As I continued to cry, the dinner lady’s stance changed.
“Oh goodness me,” she said. “You’re allergic to sausages. That’s why you can’t eat them.”
I shook my head, tried to tell her otherwise, but she was convinced. “You should have said,” she continued. “You should have said you have an allergy.” And she escorted me off to the medical office, where despite my protestations I spent the rest of the afternoon lying down until Abi came to pick me up after school.
Things have changed in the last twenty or thirty years. I don’t think the dinner lady was being deliberately racist: I suspect her attitude was well-meaning in an “eat your vegetables” way, but there was a lazy cultural ignorance behind it that said much about attitudes of the time. It did not even cross her mind that there might be a religious reason behind my refusal to eat pork.
Earl’s Hall was almost universally white: the only other non-white child I remember was a Sikh called Satnam. For the first few years I was there, I was generally happy. There was an annual art competition at school, and I won first prize for several years consecutively. I remember a picture I did when I was eleven, which I copied from a photograph of a boy on a drum barrel, writing and sticking his tongue out. My picture was then printed in sepia for a school exhibition, and it made me hugely proud. I acted in the school plays, including one about refugees during the Second World War. I even had a little girlfriend named Sarah. We mostly just held hands, and I think I kissed her once on the cheek. I would go to her parents’ house, and her family was always incredibly hospitable. Later on, on our first day of secondary school, I would leave Sarah, telling her “there are too many new girls here to choose from.” I was eleven. She cried and I felt pangs of guilt, believing her lovely parents would hate me.
Maybe because I had managed to make many friends, I became too “prominent” for some kids. My mother’s attempts to integrate us into British culture all felt quite natural until that point. I even joined the Cub Scouts and really enjoyed it. But when I was about ten or eleven, the atmosphere at Earl’s Hall suddenly changed. Almost overnight, the color of my skin defined me to friends who had previously seen only a happy, sociable boy. When a child sees the world, he doesn’t see his own face, only everything else around him. It’s often all too easy for children to imagine that others don’t see their faces either. The mid-eighties permanently changed this for me. Concern about AIDS had risen sharply in the public imagination. For all the govern
ment education films about the disease, its rise led to all sorts of rumors and accusations in the playground about its origins. One day, a big lad called Tony, who had been a good friend for years, suddenly turned on me.
“AIDS is your fault,” he told me. “It’s people like you that caused the disease.”
At the time, there were stories going around saying how the disease originated in Africa. Not that I was African, but I wasn’t white, and as far as this boy’s knowledge went, that was close enough. For the first time since the incident with the dinner lady, I felt like all eyes were on me. The kids had started whispering about me behind my back. Children were scared to touch me.
“You lot have sex with monkeys,” he continued. “That’s how AIDS started.”
The accusations would have been laughable, had it not been for the anger in his eyes.
“That’s rubbish,” I said.
“It’s true,” the boy sneered. “My dad told me.”
I tried to reason with him: this was a boy who’d been my friend, whom I’d been playing with normally just the day before. But he wasn’t having any of it. “My dad told me I am not allowed to speak to you any more. Now get lost, bugger off, and don’t talk to me again.”
Not long after, my friend Patrick was playing football* at lunch break, and I went over to join in.
* Soccer.
“Can I play?” I asked. What usually happened is that you’d turn up wanting to take part, and those already playing would assign you to one or other team, depending on which was short of players. On this occasion everyone was ignoring me. So I went over to Patrick and asked him what was going on. He suddenly turned around and punched me hard in the stomach. I doubled over in agony, unable to breathe. The inability to draw breath totally petrified me, as I had never experienced such a sensation before.
“This game’s not for Pakis!” he shouted. “Don’t ask to play again.” He wandered off back to his team, leaving me confused and gasping for breath, as I used the railings to support myself from falling to the ground. Once I caught my breath again, I looked up and saw that I was truly standing alone. My friends were all playing football. It was this feeling of being completely alone, rather than the pain, that hurt the most. As I fought back the tears with all my willpower, I resolved there and then that when I grew up I would never stand alone.
It was this incident more than anything else that destroyed my childhood innocence. Standing in a playground with secret tears rolling down my cheeks, I decided that the world is like an obstacle course, to climb and sit on top of. A child is often judged in the playground by how well he can play, and a social pecking order based on the game quickly arises. After that incident I never took part in football again. The kids at primary school wouldn’t let me. By the time I got to secondary school I was embarrassed that I couldn’t play; the rejection rang in my ears and I didn’t even try to join in. I would have to work doubly hard to climb that obstacle course without the advantage of playing football.
My parents’ response was to turn the other cheek. There was a feeling among previous generations that they did not have a right to fight back, because they were visitors, immigrants.
“So what if they call you a Paki?” they’d tell me. “Just say you are a Paki and you are proud of it, and walk away.” Now, that’s confusing advice for a child. Children have a very strong sense of right and wrong at that age: here was something that was manifestly unfair, yet I was being told to accept it. Even though the names and accusations were unacceptable, was I really expected just to take the abuse and walk away?
The fact that my skin color hadn’t been an issue for those early years of schooling says everything about where racism originates: it is a cultural issue, a societal and familial problem that children soak up as they become more aware of the world. But while my generation began by following the stance of their parents, there was one very noticeable difference that separated those coming of age in the late eighties from earlier times: the level of violence that we faced.
What had changed, particularly in places like Southend, was the rise of the skinhead revival culture. Some skinheads adopted an exclusively white, aggressively racist line. By the mid-eighties, these violently racist skinheads were the ones who had taken over, and they dominated the football clubs.
In Southend the shin-high Doc Marten boots of the skinheads stomped with authority. Their green bomber jackets acted as their visible insignia, a uniform for hate, which was truly on the march. The casual racism of my primary school years had suddenly gained a sharper and more sinister edge. Those children began to believe that football was “no game for Pakis.” The compromise choice of earlier generations was no longer available to us; turning the other cheek was no longer an option. It was either time to retreat within the community, to keep off the streets and cower out of sight, or it was time to stand in the path of these thugs, with dignity and honor.
CHAPTER THREE
The Doctor Who Said “Fuck tha Police”
It was my Uncle Nasir, Abi’s brother, of all people, who got me into hip-hop. By the early 1990s he was a doctor in Newcastle. Nasir had ended up marrying my cousin from my dad’s side, Farrah, the daughter of Tai Ammi, who told the fascinating bedtime stories. Nasir was my favorite uncle, a soft-spoken, deeply intelligent, and insightful man. His marriage to Farrah, someone I consider a sister, made this family my special relatives to visit, and their kids Raheem, Alia, and Habiba became my closest cousins.
In his mannerisms, dress, career, and proper English, Nasir is the opposite of the street culture I eventually embraced. But what was so impressive about him is that he had empathy for those who were less fortunate. I remember how he would always go out and talk to the roughest neighborhood kids, who were otherwise stealing cars and picking fights. I asked him once why he did this, and he replied: “My surgery’s located here; the majority of my patients are from this estate. If I don’t speak to them, who will?” I loved him even more for that, and so did these dangerous youths. His car never got stolen, and I learned a valuable lesson.
In the summer of 1989 we went up to Newcastle to visit, and Nasir decided that he would play Osman and me a type of music that we had never heard before. With a glint of mischief in his eyes, he put on a track called “Fuck tha Police” by N.W.A (Niggaz With Attitude), and pumped up the volume. A year earlier N.W.A had released Straight Outta Compton, their debut album, on which Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, Eazy-E, DJ Yella, and MC Ren had laid the foundations for what would later become known as “gangsta rap.” By introducing this one rap track to us, and without realizing what he had just unleashed, Dr. Nasir helped his two young nephews find their voice.
“Fuck tha Police” is a statement as much as it is a record. It gives it to the police for treating black communities like dirt, targeting them and lazily assuming that anyone with a car or a bit of money must be a drug dealer. It slams them for their prejudice and for their violence, and N.W.A promises to mete out its revenge, fantasizing about “takin’ out a cop or two.” All of this is delivered by the various MCs with an aggression, a passion that grabs hold of the listener, a raw, seething anger coming from one of LA’s roughest ghettos, Compton. It’s a history lesson with a booming drum track and packed into five minutes.
I was never the same again. The track quite simply blew me away. It was the attitude and confidence that I took to immediately. This was definitely not the sound of someone turning the other cheek: this was the sound of a community finding its voice, and using it to say that they weren’t simply going to lie down and take it. They were saying you treat us like that, and we’re going to take the fight straight back to you.
My uncle was of the same generation as my mother, who’d grown up by giving way and stepping back when confrontation arose. This doctor’s love for N.W.A and the fact that he was sharing it with me spoke volumes; it must have given vent to all his frustr
ations growing up. He could turn up “Fuck tha Police” and even now as a respected doctor, he could find strength in their stand. For me, the N.W.A attitude had more practical connotations: unlike my uncle, whose job had taken him away from having to face such situations, I had my teenage years ahead of me. The experiences of racism at primary school had scarred me, and the thought of having to accept more years of the same was a frightening one. Listening to N.W.A, I realized that I didn’t have to. Others were fighting back, and so could I.
The fact that rap lyrics rubbed everyone the wrong way made me love such groups all the more. People’s offense at the expletives helped make the band feel cool. I remember listening to “Fuck tha Police” in the car, on a cassette player, and my parents being completely shocked. “What the hell is this?” my dad asked, as Eazy-E rapped about his “bitches” providing him with sexual favors, while Dad tried to concentrate on the road. New music is often popular for the very fact that earlier generations find it shocking: this was “our” music, misunderstood by others.
What most people heard was just a load of shouting and swearing; they thought the music appealed because of its shock value. They couldn’t have been more wrong. These rappers were bright, street smart, and articulate. Their rhymes encapsulated the experience of being young, male, and black in a way that simply didn’t exist elsewhere in the media. This was a time when banana skins were still being thrown at black players at football matches, when Nelson Mandela was still in prison, and when the beating of Rodney King by LAPD officers was about to send shockwaves around the world. The sense of disenfranchisement, that you couldn’t rely on the state for help, was very real.