Empires of the Mind

by Robert Gildea

  Four years later the storm that swept the city was international. In The Satanic Verses Gibreel, a Bombay film star, who has survived a plane crash, imagines himself to be the Archangel Gabriel, abandoned by God. He speaks diabolic verses to the sleeping Prophet Mohammed which are dictated to the English-educated author, a thinly-disguised Rushdie, who confesses, ‘there I was, actually writing the Book, or rewriting, anyway, polluting the word of God with profane language’. Bradford Muslims considered that atheists were portrayed in a good light while people of faith were mocked. They petitioned the publisher, Viking/Penguin, to have the book removed, only to be told that it was a work of fiction, universally acclaimed by literary critics. In response they took to direct action, and on 14 January 1989 two thousand angry people in Bradford publicly burned the book. Similar book-burnings took place in Rushdie’s home town of Bombay and in Kashmir, Dacca and Islamabad. A month later, on 14 February 1989, Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeni issued a fatwa enjoining true Muslims to kill the author and his publishers, ‘so that no one will dare insult the sacred beliefs of Muslims henceforth. And whoever is killed in this cause will be a martyr.’ Rushdie went into hiding under the protection of the Special Branch and the British government broke off diplomatic ties with Iran.24

  The debates triggered by these incidents were ostensibly about freedom of speech. At a deeper level, however, they were about British national identity. The case was made that freedom of speech had been won over the centuries by Protestant reformers and Enlightenment thinkers and defended against tyranny and totalitarianism in two world wars. The Daily Mail called the Bradford book-burning a reaction ‘in the fashion of the ayatollahs’. The Independent argued that the Muslim book-burning followed ‘the example of the Inquisition and Hitler’s National Socialists’, and that if Rushdie were killed, ‘it would be the first burning of a heretic in Europe in two centuries’.25 Shabbir Akhtar, a Cambridge graduate who was Community Relations Officer in Bradford and spokesman of its Council of Mosques, received hate mail calling him ‘a Fascist, the British Ayotollah seeking to establish a theocracy in the middle of Yorkshire’, and telling him to leave the country.26

  For British Muslims, on the other hand, the debate was about their right to practise their faith in the host society without fear of attack, and to feel that the host society genuinely welcomed them. Akhtar criticised what he called the ‘Liberal Inquisition’ of the intellectuals and press that was legitimating popular and often violent attacks on ‘Muslim Fanatics’:

  The word ‘Muslim’ became a term of abuse […] mosques were stoned […] There was talk of deporting Muslims who publicly supported the fatwa. Muslims were regularly portrayed as trouble-makers refusing to assimilate while other ethnic groups were appropriately applauded for their good sense and cooperation. Many leader writers openly began to doubt the very possibility, let alone the wisdom, of creating a multicultural society in the first place.27

  He was not the only Muslim who, caught between their family and culture of origin, and the intellectual life of their adopted country, now felt alienated from the latter. Yasmin Alibhai Brown, of Ugandan Asian heritage, who wrote for the New Statesman, said that she was

  shocked by the way that liberals, who proclaimed their belief in freedom of thought and expression, were completely unwilling to listen to the voice of very powerless people who were offended by the book. These supposedly dangerous people were my mum, my aunts and my uncles […] But it was not just the hatred that angered me. It was also the way liberals totally misunderstood people’s continuing need for religion. Particularly among members of Muslim groups who are still finding it hard to find their place in British society.28

  The debate soon moved on explicitly to what it meant to be British. In 1991, of a total British population of 50 million, 3,625,000 or 7.2 per cent were foreign-born. But how many, Conservative politicians wished to know, were really British? In April 1990 Norman Tebbit, formerly a minister under Mrs Thatcher, gave an interview to the Los Angeles Times in which he registered concern about how far Asian immigrants might be considered British. He applied what he called the Test Match ‘cricket test’ and observed, ‘A large proportion of Britain’s Asian population fail to pass the cricket test. Which side do they cheer for? It’s an interesting test. Are you still harking back to where you came from or where you are?’29

  Tariq Modood, a young researcher of Pakistani origin, took issue with Tebbit, underlining how British nationalism and the weight of its colonial past served to exclude Commonwealth immigrants from British society rather than to integrate them.

  Many young Asian people – especially if they have visited the country of their parents and grandparents – know how thoroughly they are a part of British society, outside of which they would be lost. Yet they do not, indeed cannot, glory in their Britishness. For what, after all, is their status here? How can they when they are constantly told, not least by the Tebbits of this country, that they are not really British, that they do not belong here […] If we care for social harmony and national unity, the priority must be to dismantle the legacy of imperial racism and to develop some forms of Britishness that go beyond narrow nationalism. What we don’t need are facile tests of loyalty that reinforce the social divisions they are supposed to eliminate.30

  The debate delicately sidestepped the underlying question of Islam, but this was rapidly made explicit. Charles Moore, an Eton-educated journalist, made a deliberate contrast between the barbarians who had overrun the Roman Empire and those who were now at the gates of what remained of the British Empire. He argued in October 1991 that ‘the foundation of any British immigration policy should be that immigration is a positive good, but only if it enhances, and does not undermine Britishness. You can be British without speaking English or being Christian or being white’, he went on, ‘but nevertheless Britain is basically English-speaking, Christian and white, and if one starts to think that it might become basically Urdu-speaking and Muslim and brown, one gets frightened and angry’. If Europeans did not have enough babies, he warned, ‘the hooded hordes will win, and the Koran will be taught, as Gibbon famously imagined, in the Schools of Oxford’.31

  Debates about free speech and Islam generated renewed obsessions about immigration and national identity. After 1981, when the British Nationality Act withdrew the concept of citizenship of the United Kingdom and Colonies, migration from the Commonwealth became much more difficult. The main route now tried was to request asylum under the 1951 UN Convention on Refugees of which Britain was a signatory. Numbers of asylum seekers rose from under 4,000 in 1988 to nearly 45,000 in 1991. The Asylum and Immigration Act of 1993 tried to deal with this and in 1995 Peter Lilley, the Secretary of State for Social Security, told the Conservative Party Conference that he would ‘deter the hordes of people who were arriving in these shores under the guise of students or tourists, only to announce later that they were refugees’. This gesture was described by one journalist as attempting to close ‘the gates of Fortress Britain’.32 Asylum seekers whose applications were turned down, or other illegal immigrants arrested for minor offences without proper documentation, were likely to be interned and deported. In 1993 an Immigration Removal Centre was opened at Campsfield House in Kidlington outside Oxford, built like a prison with razor-wire topped walls, surveillance cameras and guard dogs, run by a private security service. This was the first instance of a British gulag, entrusted to the private sector, in which unwanted immigrants of non-European origin were held arbitrarily for undefined periods, stigmatised and often maltreated.33

  Debates about British national identity often revolved around two fantasies: the beneficence of the Empire and the ‘good’ Second World War. Rushdie’s Satanic Verses was in fact as critical of Britain’s view of its colonial past as it was of religious fundamentalism. In the novel, the whisky-drinking film producer S. S. Sisodia asserts that ‘the trouble with the Engenglish is that their hiss hiss history happened overseas, so they dodo don’t know what it
means’. Meanwhile for Gibreel, London was ‘a wreck, a Crusoe-city, marooned on the island of its past, and trying, with the help of a Man-Friday underclass, to keep up appearances’.34 Britain continued to wallow in nostalgia about the beneficent Empire, particularly the Raj. In 1984 Granada Television had a huge success with The Jewel in the Crown, based on the novels of Paul Scott, who had served in the British Army in India during the Second World War, while E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India hit the screen as a major film by David Lean.

  The Second World War had been fought to defend that Empire and the British habitually fell back on the narrative of victory in the Second World War to boost their sense of national and indeed imperial pride. The fiftieth anniversary of the Normandy landings in June 1944 and of VE Day in 1995 provided opportunities to rehearse this story. ‘This year we will commemorate the 50th anniversary of the landing of the Allied armies’, Norman Tebbit told the Bruges Group on its fifth anniversary, ‘overwhelmingly English-speaking armies, from the United States of America, the Empire and the Kingdom itself, which liberated Western Europe from the Nazi darkness’. This narrative, however, was not the experience of immigrants whose families had fought in the Allied armies. The independent fortnightly Muslim paper, Q News, founded in 1992, pointed out that ‘A large proportion of the armed forces of the British Empire was made up of Muslims, with some very famous Army regiments containing a high percentage.’ Moreover, it continued, ‘the Free French had North and West African troops, most of whom were Muslim’.35

  ‘No More Paki. Me a Muslim’

  The generation of young immigrants born around 1970 in Britain and France faced alienation on two sides. On the one hand they were increasingly part of a global culture which was defined by the mass media and expanding higher education and they felt estranged from their families and communities who seemed narrow-minded and traditional. On the other hand these young immigrants were repeatedly told that they were not fully French or British because of their origin in former colonies or other parts of the developing world. They were antagonised by what remained of colour bars, by religious discrimination and growing Islamophobia, and by national narratives of empires and wars that divided them from the host country. Immigrants of Muslim origin who had often been attacked as Arabs or Muslims now found that the teaching of Islam gave them a powerful sense of identity, honour and mission. In Hanif Kureishi’s 1995 novel The Black Album, a young man, Chad, asks a friend, ‘Earlier, did you say Paki to me? […] No more Paki. Me a Muslim. We don’t apologise for ourselves neither.’36

  This turn to Islam might have reconciled older and younger generations but too often they clashed when the pragmatism of the former came up against the idealism of the latter. At a UK Islamic Mission conference in Bradford in 1991 Bangladeshi vice-president Dr Wasti called for practical measures against discrimination in housing, education and jobs, Muslim schools and accommodation with Muslim law, while also voting for mainstream parties in the forthcoming 1992 election. He was confronted by Munir Ahmed, Bradford president of Young Muslims UK. He scorned what he called ‘petty little things’ and ‘reforms’ and instead offered ‘the greatest gift, Islam and the Qur’an, a light for all to “save ourselves and the whole of humanity from the fire”’.37

  New music bands sprang up expressing protest and resistance, such as Fun-da-mental, led by Bradford-born Haq Qureshi, otherwise known as Aki Nawaz.38 It hit the scene at the 1991 Nottingham Carnival with its mixture of hip-hop and bhangra combined with an overtly political stance. A Melody Maker review said that ‘their live performances are more like political rallies than gigs. Samples of Louis Farrakhan, Malcolm X and Enoch Powell’s famous “Rivers of Blood” speech, and the fact that a couple of the group dress like PLO fighters further fuel the excitement.’ Their tracks offended Muslim elders and were banned from two Asian television channels because they openly supported the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. Haq retorted:

  Forget the image of Asians as passive, happy people. Listen man, there are gangs of young Indians and Pakistanis like us on the streets of Bradford, Birmingham, Manchester, everywhere, who refuse to put up with the shit our parents and grandparents have lived with for years […] But this group aren’t just speaking for Asians in Britain, we’re speaking for all non-whites all over the world. Black people have been fucked over for centuries, and it has to end. If the western powers don’t back off, we are heading for one huge war. Maybe not just yet, maybe not for another twenty years, but at some stage in our lifetime.39

  In reality the war came more quickly than anticipated. Second- or third-generation immigrants who had previously identified as British might now identify with Pakistan and the struggles that were being played out there. For example, Moazzam Begg was born in Birmingham in 1968. His mother died when he was six and while he was still a child he travelled to meet an aunt in Karachi. Back in Birmingham, as a teenager he joined the Lynx gang of English, Irish, Indian, Afro-Caribbean but mostly Kashmiri youths who battled against local racists and neo-Nazis. After leaving school he worked in his father’s estate agency but thought of becoming a soldier, since his father had told him that ‘Begg’ meant leader or chief, and that ‘We are the descendants of Tatars, Mongols who settled in Central Asia and established the Great Mughal Empire in India.’ He then worked for the Department of Social Security (DSS) and took a part-time law degree. The 1991 Gulf War politicised him. He took to wearing a Palestinian scarf and returned to Pakistan in 1993 where he met mujahideen who were fighting in Afghanistan. Becoming a practising Muslim, he took part in a relief convoy to embattled Muslims in Bosnia. He converted to the idea of the jihad as a Muslim obligation, left the DSS, learned Arabic and in 2001 travelled to Afghanistan, where al-Qaeda was now active. He would be waiting when the British and American forces arrived.40

  The Veil Controversy and the Crisis of French Identity

  In France also there was a cause célèbre in 1989. On 3 October that year three female Muslim pupils, aged between thirteen and fifteen, were excluded by Ernest Chenière, headteacher of the Collège Gabriel Havez in Creil. Forty miles north of Paris, Creil was an unremarkable town of 32,000 inhabitants established in the nineteenth century on the railway line to Belgium. Its immigrant population from North Africa was attracted by the availability of industrial work and concentrated in the poor neighbourhoods of Rouher and Les Cavées. As in Bradford, industrial decline from the 1970s made life tougher but Creil was one of the many banlieues d’Islam drawn to the attention of the public by political scientist Gilles Kepel in his 1987 book of the same name. He showed that in 1965 there were only four Muslim places of worship in France but prayer rooms multiplied in factories, SONACOTRA hostels and the council flats of the suburbs, and by 1985, promoted by missions from Pakistan and oil money from the Middle East, there were nearly a thousand. They were concentrated in the north-east of Paris and old industrial towns in the Paris region and provincial cities where North African and sub-Saharan Muslims concentrated.41

  The Collège Gabriel Havez was in an educational priority area, ethnically mixed and described by the head himself as ‘a social dustbin’.42 The pupils, however, were excluded not for educational underachievement but for refusing to take off their headscarfs in the school. Chenière argued that this garment violated the principle of laïcité, the doctrine that the republican school was a religiously neutral space. He cited an education circular of 1937 that declared: ‘State education is secular. No form of proselytism is permitted in its schools.’ The young women replied that the Qu’ran forbade them from showing their hair in order to preserve their purity. Politicians and the media backed the teacher. Le Monde agreed that the school of the Republic must be ‘the same for everyone’ and warned against what looked like an attack on it: ‘French people see fanaticism in anything that looks, even from a distance, like a chador.’43 The French Muslim community rallied around the girls and on 22 October about a thousand Muslims, veiled women followed by men, marched from Barbès in northern Pa
ris to the Place de la République, demonstrating in defence of their right to wear the veil. Film footage showed some of them wearing Khomeini masks, which encouraged fears that the Islamic revolution was coming to France.44

  Ostensibly, this was a debate about the republican principle of laïcité or secularism. Secular education was pioneered by the Third Republic in the 1880s as a way of clipping the wings of Catholic education, which had supported the rival regimes of monarchy and empire and had destroyed the republics of 1792 and 1848. It required children to leave their religious identities at the door of the republican school in order to learn to become citizens, to put their own beliefs and interests behind them in pursuit of the common good of the Republic. The doctrine had often been mitigated in the interests of Catholics, not least in June 1984 when the socialist government was forced to withdraw plans to abolish state subsidies to private Catholic schools after a million Catholics came onto the streets to demonstrate. Laïcité, however, overlay much deeper issues about French national identity and indeed colonialism, which were challenged by Islam. Whereas compromises had been possible with Catholicism, and whereas the Jewish minority had generally espoused the principles of laïcité, with Islam things were different. It was argued that no compromise was possible because Islam was essentially a foreign religion and tolerance of Islamic practices in public spaces prevented the integration of immigrant communities. Journalist Christian Jelen said that ‘frightening pictures’ of the 22 October 1989 demonstration ‘made it look as though Paris was one or two metro stops from Teheran or Beirut’.45

  There were traditionally two forms of laïcité, one which allowed religions to flourish freely in the private sphere and another that was hostile to religion as such. The socialist Education Minister Lionel Jospin accepted that the school was a neutral space in terms of religion. However, he said that laïcité should not be ‘a laïcité of combat’. On the contrary it should be ‘a benevolent laïcité, designed specifically to avoid wars, including wars of religion!’46 This weaker version was not to the taste of French intellectuals. Alain Finkielkraut joined forces with Régis Debray, who had campaigned during the Bicentenary of the French Revolution for a return to revolutionary values, and Elisabeth Badinter, who had just published a book on the Enlightenment philosopher Condorcet, to write an open letter to Jospin on 2 November entitled, ‘Teachers, don’t capitulate!’ ‘The future will tell’, it began, using powerful references to France’s disastrous Second World War, ‘whether the year of the Bicentenary will have witnessed the Munich of the republican school’. If France was not to become ‘a mosaic of ghettos’, the republican school must be a neutral space in which its citizens were forged. ‘Neutrality is not passive, nor is liberty tolerance […] Should we abandon what you call ‘laïcité of combat’ in favour of kindness just when religions are spoiling for a fight? Laïcité is and remains a battle by its very nature.’47