by Maajid Nawaz
Matt turned to the skinheads. “Guys! Guys!” he said, causing them to turn around in surprise. Being white and having managed to get close enough to their circle, they had assumed he was with them. Who would be crazy enough to put themselves in the path of hammers, clubs, and knives for an unknown teenage Paki?
“Come on, leave it out, yeah?” he said, trying to pacify the situation. “Leave this kid alone.”
The skinheads looked at Matt. His intervention seemed to infuriate them even more.
“He’s a fuckin’ Paki,” one snarled at him, “and you’re a fuckin’ Paki lover!”
“Guys,” Matt said, slightly more nervous this time, yet still trying to mediate. “Come on, let’s not do anything stupid here. He’s just a kid, yeah?”
Perhaps it was the fact that he wasn’t part of our world that made him feel he could talk the situation down. Perhaps where he came from, an honest request and a bit of gentle reasoning were enough to resolve any situation. This was my world, though, not his. As they came charging forward, from all sides, I knew they would ignore him and stab me anyway. “Thanks, Matt,” I thought, “at least you tried, mate.” An honorable thing to do for someone you don’t know. And so I prepared to meet my end.
What happened next will haunt me till my dying day. In sudden horror, mixed with a perverse relief, I watched as the skinheads swiveled their attention away from me—and toward Matt. Like famished hyenas they descended upon him, plunging their knives deep into his torso, beating on his head with their clubs and knuckledusters.
“You fucking Paki lover!” they screamed.
The Paki was left by their side untouched. Matt’s arms were up, flailing, shielding his head with all the strength he could muster, collapsing under the sheer brutality of their vicious assault.
With penetrating shame I instantly realized that Matt was no Bruce Lee. Matt had no weapon. Matt had no plan. He was just doing for me what I was now failing to do for him. He stood up for me, and he was being beaten to a pulp for doing so while I was forced to watch. I knew that if I joined him I would probably die. My sense of honor urged me to fight. This was my fight, goddamnit, not his! But my common sense scolded me in return: I would have no effect, I was an unarmed boy! All that would be achieved by me joining in would be both our murders. So, I watched, frozen, as the C18 thugs clubbed him, stabbed him, and kicked at his head while he lay on the floor. And not one punch, and not one kick was turned my way. In the distance, police sirens were ringing out. Thank God someone was finally coming! Come, save us! The C18 thugs heard the sirens too, gleefully appraised the damage, and ran off without so much as looking at me again. It was as if I didn’t exist. And as I looked at Matt, all bones and blood on the floor, I felt like I didn’t deserve to exist. C18 had left me totally untouched while a white stranger lay bleeding profusely on the floor after taking my beating.
As the police and ambulance approached, Matt miraculously staggered up off the floor, walking in the direction of C18 and defiantly shouting back at them. As if to say, “Here I am, I’m still standing. You did not defeat me!”
I learned later that as well as the multiple stab wounds, he suffered a punctured lung. Somehow, he still found the resolve to wave his fist and shout after them until the effort was too much, and then he collapsed again. The paramedics surrounded him instantly in a fierce effort to save his life.
The police, meanwhile, were at their worst. They looked at the white guy lying in a heap of blood on the floor, heard shouts coming from the C18 lynch mob standing off at a distance, and decided to question the fifteen-year-old Pakistani B-boy. I was still locked in my place, my feet refusing to move. The police radioed in my identity code. I wondered why they always managed to classify me as an IC 2.3, the police code for mixed white-Mediterranean and Afro-Caribbean.
“No, you’re speaking to the wrong guy . . .” I tried to explain.
“I’m not going to ask you again,” the officer insisted. “I want you to tell me what your gang was doing to that man.”
I snapped out of my dazed state and quickly turned nasty on the policeman, shouting and swearing at him at the top of my voice.
“What’re you asking me questions for, you fucking pig? They’re right over there, the guys who stabbed him up! You can hear them laughing, you can see them, why aren’t you going over to arrest them before they leg it?”
“I’ll arrest you if you don’t calm down,” the police officer responded.
So I checked myself. My main concern was to convince them to arrest the guys who jumped Matt. I suffered the interrogation in the hope that it would speed up their work. It didn’t. The officer eventually saw that I was innocent, but by that time the skinheads were long gone in their white van, and the ambulance was carrying Matt to the hospital.
They left me standing right there in the street, confused, exposed, alone, and angry. I wondered if an angel had just descended to save my life. Was Matt real or had he been sent by God to shield me from murder? I half expected the skinheads to come back and finish the job. After failing to fight alongside Matt, I now believed that I deserved it. I had been unarmed, but so was he. Yes, I was outsized and outnumbered, but so was Matt; it didn’t stop him. Since that first day at Cecil Jones, I had always thought myself brave; now I was just full of shame. I found myself wandering back to recover my knife I had so foolishly hidden. If I hadn’t dumped it, maybe I could have helped him.
I never got the chance to thank Matt for intervening. I knew he hadn’t died, because it would have been all over the local papers, but I didn’t know his surname or how to get ahold of him. He’d just walked into my life, taken a stabbing for me, and then disappeared. The bungled police reaction may have made me more anti-establishment, but my own guilt drove me further away from my white friends.
By this point, our posse of B-boys was almost exclusively an ethnic group. Because there was only one and a half years between us, Osman and I began merging our two groups of friends. From my lot, the younger crew, there was Chill, Moe, and Andre from Southend, Ricky, Paul, Ade, and Yusuf from Pitsea. Ricky’s older brother Rowan headed the older lot. Rowan rolled with Will and Aaron, and Osman would join them when he could. Rowan was renowned throughout Essex. He was dangerous, and people knew his name. Our bonds of friendship were particularly close, forged through a common love of hip-hop, mad times at parties, and standing up for each other in armed confrontations against racists. The younger ones, my crew, felt like my true brothers, and we believed nothing could ever divide us. Most of the wider posse was Afro-Caribbean, but Osman and I had introduced a couple of other South Asians, like our cousin Yasser and our Bangladeshi friend Ronnie.
I was out late one evening with Osman and Ronnie, playing pool. Earlier that day, like many sixteen-year-old boys, Osman had been messing around with a plastic BB gun. Playing in open view, he hadn’t thought to conceal what he was doing. In those days terrorism was mainly associated with the IRA. But someone had called the police, convinced that he was going to commit an armed robbery. The police took this accusation seriously and mounted an all-day surveillance operation. So by the time I joined Osman and Ron later on, we were already being secretly staked out by a host of armed officers. We finished playing pool about two in the morning and got into Ron’s car to drive home. Our stereo was, as usual, testing the frame of Ron’s old car with the heavy bass line.
“That’s weird, man,” I quipped from my backseat. “I guess pigs can fly after all!” Police helicopters were hovering above us.
“Someone must be in deep shit, man,” Ron laughed. “I guess they’re lookin’ for some real heavyweights.”
“Yeah, man, someone’s not gonna get much sleep tonight,” I laughed back.
“Look! It’s goin’ down,” Osman interjected as police cars sped past us at top speed with their sirens on.
But were we in for a surprise!
&nb
sp; Suddenly the police cars up ahead skidded to a halt, horizontally blocking the road in front of us. More cars had appeared from behind, blocking our escape. Ron slammed the brakes on.
“What the ffff . . .?” he muttered in disbelief as armed officers carrying submachine guns appeared from nowhere on either side of the car. “Stop the car!”
“Do not move your hands, do not move your hands!”
“Stay absolutely still! Do not move!”
We sat deathly still and in absolute silence. None of us found this even slightly funny anymore. As the helicopter spotlight lit us up, the armed officers rushed to the car doors and pulled Ron and Osman out of their seats, through their still-attached seatbelts, slammed them on the ground, and then held them in locked positions. As I watched police putting a gun to my brother’s head, my mind again focused on tangential details. The car was rolling forward slightly. That’s strange, why was it doing that?
“The brake!” I thought to myself. “Well done, Ron, you haven’t pulled your parking brake up!”
Just then a hand grabbed my collar and lifted me out of my seat and down onto the ground with a violent thud and another gun greeted me. Of course, it was to Ron’s credit that he didn’t reach down for the parking brake; they would have thought he was reaching for a gun, and he would probably have been shot dead.
None of this was making any sense to me. I hadn’t been with Osman in the daytime and didn’t know he had been playing with his plastic BB gun. But there was no time for thought, and certainly no time for questions.
“You,” the officer shouted in my ear, “are under arrest for suspicion of armed robbery.”
“Huh, wha . . .?” It wasn’t registering in my brain.
“In other words, you’re nicked, mate. Get ’im in the car.”
I was fifteen years old. I had no criminal record. They threw us all in the cells for the night while they inspected the “evidence.” Because I was under sixteen, they had to call and wake Abi up at 3 a.m., and tell her that both her sons had been arrested on suspicion of armed robbery. Crazy. In the morning, after all that, they handed Osman back his pellet gun in a plastic bag and let us go. On the way out, furious at being profiled, I decided to ask one last question, “Is there anything, anything at all that we did wrong?”
“No, you did nothing wrong. It was a misunderstanding. Sorry about that.” And that was it.
This mixture of police incompetence and ignorance made us both hate them and simultaneously fear their powers. The one time I did attempt to take things further with the police it blew back in my face. I went in to positively identify a suspect who had stabbed a friend of mine. I pointed out the right guy, but they had to let him go, apparently because of a “procedural error.” Worse, I was now exposed as the person who had made the positive identification. I have lost count of the number of knife attacks we were subjected to by racists, many of my friends had been stabbed, but the police rarely managed to make any arrests and hardly ever pressed charges. The gangs would always boast about “contacts” in the police. I have no idea if this was true, but the bottom line is we were not protected. And in the absence of any incentive to change our mantra, we kept singing it loud: “Fuck tha Police.”
Not trusting the police to protect us meant that we had to rely on our own protection, which we found among our crew and through fighting back. As our numbers increased and our confidence grew, the levels of violence we faced got worse. We’d be set upon suddenly, like once down on the seafront when pool balls were flying past our heads like cannonballs. Or when another white friend, Dan, was knifed, or that time at Southend Central Bus Station when Aaron got stabbed in the side, and Rowan fought off two men armed with kebab knives, using nothing but a crutch he’d “borrowed” from an old lady waiting for her bus. (Once they ran away, Rowan politely handed the crutch back to the startled old woman.) One of us once resorted to using a metal-tipped umbrella as a weapon, spearing a skinhead who had come down from London and decided to march up and down our high street shouting, “We hate Pakis!” He ended up on the floor in agony with a fractured skull. There was the time Ricky, Paul, Chill, and I had been hounded by a white mob chanting about not wanting “niggers” in their area “stealing their women.” Our entire crew returned in three cars the next week to bum rush the house of their ringleader. We were learning how to fight back, and the message was spreading.
One day, I happened to come across Patrick—the same Patrick who at eleven had punched me in the stomach because I dared to ask to play football. With that one act he had changed the little boy that I was; he made me see in color when before I saw only human beings. It felt like an eternity since my days at Earl’s Hall.
I was walking down the high street in my full B-boy gear: a red bandana, my Redskins baseball cap—because they used Red Indians as their logo—my Click suit and big trainers, the lot. And there, I saw him. That punch was something I had never forgotten. The moment he saw me coming he turned the other way; I could see that he also remembered what he’d done. This sparked the residues of anger within me, and I headed straight for him. I wasn’t with my crew on this occasion; I’d left them somewhere nearby. It was just Patrick and me again. I had my knife on my back as usual. Patrick, for all his cocky confidence back at primary school, was not a street kid in the way I’d become. He saw me, he saw the look in my eyes, and he began to cower.
“Please don’t hit me. Maajid, please don’t hit me.”
I hadn’t even said anything, and the kid was begging me not to do anything.
“I’m sorry,” he continued, starting to cry. “I’m sorry, just don’t . . .” It was the strangest sight—as if he were shriveling up in front of me.
Patrick wouldn’t dare repeat his comments now. Largely due to the reputation of us B-boys, it was no longer acceptable to be racist in the way it had been even just a few years earlier. The ball had bounced back, the power dynamic had shifted. I saw that, he saw that, and strangely that was enough for me. Despite all the violence I’d been involved in, I had always had a justification for it in my teenage mind; it was all a form of escalating self-defense. I’d never bullied or picked a fight with a defenseless, unarmed person, and I wasn’t about to start now.
“You’re a chump!” I shouted at him. “Get the fuck out of my sight.”
Patrick turned and skulked away. I didn’t need to attack him: it was enough to see his reaction when he saw me. I felt good about myself, pleased that I’d not become as bad as the racists. But there was something more there, too: a sense of satisfaction and vindication. I was on the right path. The incident that had begun my spiral of abuse had finally ended. I had won.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Green Backpack with No Bomb
If you haven’t felt the fear and helplessness that violent, organized racism makes you feel, it’s difficult to understand. Due to the color of your skin, your entire body is a moving target. And you cannot leave your skin behind, or pretend it doesn’t exist. At any moment, hammer-wielding hooligans could use you for target practice. In such extreme circumstances, self-defense must be a sacred right; the “turn the other cheek” philosophy would have gotten our skulls crushed. The sad reality is that it’s difficult for different ethnic groups to rub along with each other. I’m not saying that my kidult way of dealing with the situation was the answer, but it was an answer. At the time, it felt like the only option open to us.
Without support from the police or society at large, it felt as though it was the best way to respond—to stand up and take the fight to the racists, in the hope that they’d leave us alone. There’s a sort of brutal logic to that position, but once again it’s one that doesn’t go to the crux of the problem. It’s a kind of “Cold War” thinking, where an uneasy peace is created from the knowledge of what damage the other side could mete out.
To be fair, the police force did change. It wasn
’t an overnight thing—cultural shifts don’t work like that—but the general attitudes of the police have undoubtedly improved from where they were twenty years ago. Of course more can still be done, as the shooting by the police of innocent Jean Charles de Menezes on the London Underground in 2005 highlighted. This is partly because the police force is no longer exclusively white. Even one of my old family friends from a Pakistani background, Atif, is now a policeman with Essex Police.
Another form of identity politics was also lurking in the shadows, eventually to emerge as an even more intransigent challenge. Most young Britons of the Muslim faith were of South Asian origin, born and raised in crowded single-ethnicity British ghettos. Though tensions with non-Muslim communities did occur in these areas, part of the problem was a lack of contact with “the other.” As race began to take a backseat, and Afro-Caribbean communities began to enter the mainstream through popular music and culture, into these ghettos came war-torn Muslim North Africans, Arabs, and Somalis. A new generation of youth born in the ashes of conflict quickly found that they had one identity shared among them all: Islam.
Many British-born Muslims simply did not consider themselves part of the mainstream race debate. The Ayatollah/Satanic Verses affair helped this shift along somewhat. The communities adopted a more isolationist stance, a policy of self-exclusion. For many, the nature of how they identified themselves was changing. So instead of calling themselves “British Asians” as my parents had done, this generation now defined themselves as almost exclusively Muslim. They believed that their allegiance to the global Islamic community, the ummah, prevented them from defining themselves as being part of their birth country.