Menace in Europe: Why the Continent's Crisis Is America's, Too

by Claire Berlinski

  The historic origins of the divide between native Britons and Muslim immigrants are often held to be equally significant: the immigrants were once the colonized, and the native Britons, the colonizers. In White Teeth, describing his obsession with Poppy Burt-Jones, Samad reveals the greatest source of his shame: Poppy Burt-Jones is English.

  “That is the worst of it,” said Samad, his voice breaking. “English. White. English.”

  Shiva shook his head. “I been out with a lot of white birds, Samad. A lot. Sometimes it’s worked, sometimes it ain’t. Two lovely American girls. Fell head-over-heels for a Parisian stunner. Even spent a year with a Romanian. But never an English girl. Never works. Never.”

  “Why?” asked Samad, attacking his thumbnail with his teeth and awaiting some fearful answer, an edict from on high. “Why not, Shiva Bhagwati?”

  “Too much history,” was Shiva’s enigmatic answer, as he dished up the Chicken Bhuna. “Too much bloody history.”

  That bloody history, it is often said, is why Britain is unable to integrate its immigrants as the United States does. But it is not the fact of colonization per se. Non-Muslim immigrants from the Indian Subcontinent in Britain—Hindus, Parsis, Sikhs, Jains—are wealthier and better educated than other ethnic groups in Britain, including whites and Jews. 17 Nor is this a function of national origin. Although most Hindus in Britain come from India, Hindus from Bangladesh—a minority so small that they scarcely register on the census—are by every socioeconomic measure as successful as those from India. The 1.2 million Hindus in Britain are never found rioting in the streets of industrial towns as their Muslim counterparts do. Nor do they bomb London’s subways. Yet the obstacles to political and economic success in Britain that apply to Muslims should in principle apply to Hindus, should they not? All have dark skin, and thus presumably encounter the same degree of institutional racism. All come from countries that were colonized. All come from vastly different, non-Western economic traditions. When I pointed this out to Zia, he replied that I was asking the wrong question. “The proper question is whether, all other things being equal, outcomes for this cohort of Hindus are as good as those of their white counterparts. The fact that they have done well tends to mask what studies show, which is that as a group they would have done even better but for discrimination. (Also, it’s important to bear in mind that discrimination has mutated in Britain; if people can discern the difference between a Vindaloo and a Madras curry, it should come as no surprise if most people can tell a Muslim name from a Hindu one.)”

  Perhaps. But the crucial difference is not discrimination, nor even any beliefs or habits of mind particular to Islam. It is that, as Zia remarked, the Muslims come from villages. Through a series of historical contingencies, Muslim immigrants for the most part arrived in Britain poor and uneducated, whereas other immigrants from the Indian Subcontinent did not.

  Consider this: For nearly 800 years India was ruled by Muslims, and it is for precisely this reason that British colonizers smashed their privileged political, social, and cultural position. This policy was above all driven by a practical power logic—and justified as a liberation of Hindus from the rule of an oppressive minority—but ancient religious antipathy clearly made the task a pleasure. While Islam and Hinduism were of inherently equal theological anathema to British Protestantism, Islam was viewed by colonists and colonized alike as the old, familiar enemy of Christendom—the Crusades here shaping the recent past, and by this means the present. Hinduism, by contrast, was viewed as a quaint, faintly contemptible, and unthreatening paganism.

  Having crushed the Sepoy Mutiny in 1857, Britain abolished the East India Company, placing India under the direct control of the Crown. British administrators, incorrectly attributing the mutiny to the Muslims alone, confiscated Muslim properties and restricted Muslim employment in the army, revenue department, and judiciary. Advertisements inviting applications for government jobs noted specifically that Muslims would not be appointed. The Inam Commission, appointed to study Mogul legal structures for landholding and revenue farming, concluded by seizing some 20,000 Muslim estates, ruining countless ancient Muslim families. The British built schools in India designed specifically to cultivate Western habits of thought, making no provisions for religious education. A new Hindu elite, the Bhadralok, emerged from these schools, swiftly filling the vacancies in government offices formerly held by Muslims. Muslims, having been given excellent reason to fear the destruction of their culture, refused to be educated in these institutions, further withering their political role in the colonial system. It is not really a surprise that Hindus were more willing than Muslims to accept the adulteration and Anglicization of their religion as the price of power. Historically, Hinduism has always profited from its polytheistic syncretism and ability to assimilate foreign influences; it is common, for example, to find Christ images or the Virgin Mary among the pantheon of deities in a Hindu household.

  Following decolonization, and in many cases much before decolonization, Hindus—as well as Jains, Sikhs, and Parsis who profited similarly under the British Empire—came to Britain as highly qualified teachers, doctors, businessmen, and army officers, often with several degrees apiece. They spoke excellent English and had generations of experience with administrative and commercial institutions modeled on British ones. They were in consequence at a tremendous assimilative advantage.

  Indian Hindus were, moreover, active traders in East Africa, where they dominated the banking and financial services. Muslims, owing to Islamic prohibitions on usury, have never evidenced much of a flair for these industries. Upon achieving independence, African states nationalized banks and private businesses, strictly regulating their economies, and in the early 1970s, Idi Amin confiscated the property of Indian businessmen and expelled them from Uganda. The urbane, commercially experienced Hindu immigrants who came to Britain as a consequence have become, unsurprisingly, remarkably prosperous.

  Muslims, however, for the most part arrived in Britain as unskilled rural laborers. The partition of India in 1947 caused the displacement of large rural populations from Pakistan, including Bangladesh, particularly in the Punjab and Mirpur. The simultaneous construction of the Mangla Dam in Pakistan displaced another 100,000 people. While some relocated to other parts of Pakistan, many immigrated to Britain. In this, they were encouraged by the British government, which hoped to preserve British textile mills in the north and midlands through the import of low-cost Commonwealth labor. Britain deliberately encouraged unskilled, uneducated, politically unsophisticated Muslim immigrants to fill its factory jobs. So did most other European countries: Germany, for example, imported a massive labor force of unskilled Turks to do the jobs Germans no longer cared to do. They came from the least-developed areas of rural Turkey. Moving to Istanbul would have been a great shock; Germany might as well have been the moon. This was true as well of the North Africans who immigrated to France, Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands. Throughout Europe, the vast majority of Muslim immigrants were already the poorest citizens of their native societies—this, precisely, is why they migrated. As Zia remarked, traditional village life is poor preparation for economic advancement and civic integration in a modern, secular city.

  In Britain, the focus of the modernizing economy soon shifted from labor-intensive industries to those requiring specialized skills and education. Unskilled immigrants consequently found themselves not only unemployed but in natural competition with Britain’s white underclass, who predictably failed to embrace them. It is obvious why this group of immigrants has fared poorly in Britain, as have their offspring.

  Here is a critical point: Education and social class upon arrival in Britain, above all, appear to account for the radically different markers of assimilative success evidenced in these communities, far more so than religious belief. The evidence? Muslims whose parents were educated, English-speaking professionals upon arriving in Britain seem to fare quite well—just as well as Hindus, in fact. There just don’t ha
ppen to be very many of them.

  Hassan Alam, who also studied with me at Oxford, is the son of Muslim physicians from a comparatively prosperous northern province of Bangladesh.16 He finds Zia’s descriptions of immigrant life unrecognizably angst-ridden. He wondered in a letter to me,

  Why do you think he paid so much heed to the prejudices and idiosyncrasies of his parents? Not going out with your girlfriend in public is a Bangladeshi rite of passage. It’s like puberty (except it’s still happening in your 30s). No reason for him to get so hung up on it. We all go through it. He should have just lied to his parents and listened to Morrissey in his bedroom like the rest of us.

  Hassan is quick to emphasize his admiration for Britain, for its tolerance and pluralism. His Bengali relatives can visit Britain, wear clothes that distinguish them as Muslims in a predominantly Christian country, find and eat halal food, and worship at a mosque without harassment. In Saudi Arabia, he notes, no Christian would enjoy a similar freedom. Britain’s ethnic diversity, he says, is “fantastic.”

  Hassan didn’t much care for White Teeth; he found it unconvincing and overwritten. He wondered why all these comely first-generation immigrant novelists felt compelled to write about Islamic radicalism, forced marriages, and social alienation. Why, he asked, did these novels insist on depicting abusive, hypocritical male characters, men who were inevitably secret fornicators despite their ostensible piety? Why so many long-suffering, oppressed women who by the end of the novel enjoy a feminist awakening? “Why can’t they do us the courtesy,” he asked, “of portraying us as unique, complex people?” These, I thought, were an interesting echo of Zia’s words, but their premises and implications were remarkably different.

  Most immigrants, he insisted, were not destined for unwanted arranged marriages or wracked with anger about their alienation or plotting to blow up buildings. Immigrants were capable of thinking about other things, normal things, the things Bridget Jones thinks about. He was toying with the idea of quitting his job as a management consultant and writing a book about the real Bengali immigrant experience.

  This alone seems to be the universal constant of the Bengali immigrant experience: the desire to write a novel about it.

  HOW TO RAISE A GOOD LITTLE EUROPEAN

  On my last visit to London, I found myself chatting with Phiroze in his consulting room, an opulent study with drawn brocade curtains and a coal fire. Sculptures on the mantel of his fireplace represent different aspects of the emotional world. There is one for depression, one for the gentle mother, one for the hurt child. Socrates depicts wisdom. Until recently, I had thought it striking that none of the sculptures had Asian faces. On this visit, though, I noticed the addition of a placid Buddha’s head.

  Psychotherapists of Asian descent are extremely rare in Britain, as are Asian patients. Almost none of Phiroze’s patients have been other Asians. Even middle-class Asians are unlikely to consider practicing or entering psychotherapy, a discipline intimately linked to the core of Western intellectual culture, to its art and literature and high drama, to representation and abstraction, to the enlightenment ideals of selffulfillment and the pursuit of personal happiness. Immigrants of his background, Phiroze surmised, had little patience for these concepts and were uncomfortable discussing feelings and the self, particularly sexual feelings. The admission of rage and resentment toward one’s parents would be unthinkable in many Asian families, and spending money to talk about oneself would be an unacceptable self-indulgence.

  Phiroze lives and practices in a massive, somber stone manor on London’s Blackheath, an upper-middle-class neighborhood of carefully tended rosebushes, manicured lawns, and white professionals. He has lectured, conducted seminars, and performed analytic work throughout Europe, and his private practice is full. He is not angry about his relationship to Britain, though he concedes that notwithstanding his achievements, he is regularly “identified in the street as some kind of wog or Paki.” Strictly speaking he is neither; he is a Parsi. His parents were born to Bombay’s upper-middle-class Parsi community and came to London in the 1950s after completing their university education in India. His grandfather was a prison warder in India who was killed in a riot, dying a hero.

  Upon arriving in Britain, Phiroze’s parents saved every penny they earned to send him to elite British schools, where he was bullied and beaten, as Zia was. This experience appears to be universal among British immigrants, although as Orwell made clear, this has long been a tradition among native Britons, too. Phiroze recalled that the ring-leader among his tormentors, curiously, was another Asian. He now supposes that the boy “was beating up a part of himself—the Asian, black, nonwhite part.”

  Although his experience of Britain has been in some ways similar, Phiroze, unlike Zia, pronounces himself satisfied with the progress immigrants have made. “It seems not too difficult for blacks and Asians in Britain to advance in law, medicine, politics,” he said. “I’m quite satisfied with the way Asians have been penetrating senior echelons in the past forty years. It would be greedy to want more MPs, more judges, more bishops. I think it’s going quite nicely; I have no complaints.”

  The first Parsi was elected to the British Parliament in 1892. By 1922, there were three seated Parsis. Even now, there are no more than 5,000 Parsis in Britain, so this achievement can only be considered remarkable—particularly considering that only two Muslims have ever been elected to Parliament, and both of them only in the past five years. “Admittedly,” said Phiroze of his sanguinity, “I’m such a sheltered, middle-class public-school boy.”

  To have middle-class parents changes neither Britain’s racism nor its unemployment rate, but it appears to change a child’s attitudes toward those obstacles to success, and to spare him from a schizophrenogenic internal conflict about upholding his ethnic and religious identity. Phiroze’s parents, unlike Zia’s, were not conflicted about their son’s assimilation. “My parents came over thinking, ‘We want Phiroze to be a good little European. We won’t teach him our language, we’ll send him to public school, we’ll give him a taste for European art, culture, and literature’—which is exactly what happened; look around.” He gestured toward the sculptures on his wall. “‘And then he will become a kind of middle-class, Jaguar-driving fellow—a very posh-sounding, well-spoken guy.’

  “My parents wanted me to have almost nothing to do with their culture. They didn’t show any interest in taking me back home. It seems to me fundamentally foolish to go to a new country and refuse to have anything much to do culturally with the people who live there. It’s going to be a recipe for neurosis and disaster and intergenerational conflict. It’s a terrible thing. I’m really glad my parents didn’t put me through that experience.”

  “My heart goes out to them, really,” he said of children whose parents resisted their assimilation. “It must be very painful to exist like that. You see the parents saying, ‘We don’t want you to marry a white girl, we don’t want you to go to McDonald’s, we don’t want you to hang out on the corner with those smoking, glue-sniffing white boys. You’ll stay at home, you’ll marry a nice girl from our community, and you’ll maintain a bloodline and a tradition that means that we will somehow be here even when we are not here.’ And their kids hate it and they resent them, and most of their kids rebel, and hang out on the corner and smoke cigarettes and have white girlfriends, and sometimes— this was in the press recently—sometimes the fathers will kill the daughters.” Just seconds before, he had said that he had “no complaints” about the way immigrants were adapting to British life. I asked him: Surely this was cause for complaint? “Yes. But this isn’t just about integration—it’s about crazy, mad, murderous parents as well, which is a separate issue.”

  I wasn’t convinced. I’m not sure he was either. But I think it was the first time he’d given the question much thought.

  If you are an immigrant in Britain, it seems, the education level of your parents will determine your likelihood not only of professional succes
s but of sexual success as well. Phiroze has never had a relationship with an Asian woman. All of his romantic partners have been upper-middle-class white women. This is also true of his Asian friends, who come from similar backgrounds. “All my middle-class Asian friends have married white girls. But their parents already had degrees, were already doctors. . . . All my friends are Indians, Parsis, Bahá’ís. The three Bahá’ís I know are superb achievers. Parsis are the world’s most highly educated community—on average they have three degrees each. Every Parsi I know in this country is highly educated.”

  But no degree is protection against prejudice. His own practice, Phiroze remarked, would have grown twice as quickly had he advertised under the name Jack Stevens. “I wanted to succeed as an Asian. I wanted to raise the esteem profile of my group. There are Asians in medical practice in Britain, but they tend to be seen as eccentric doctors who trained abroad, in places like Calcutta and Bangalore and Madras. Many of them still have very strong Indian accents and many of them are disrespected by their white colleagues.” He himself has a public-school accent, just as his parents intended. “I wanted to succeed as someone of that genetic stock and skin coloring, while maintaining standards of excellence that would be the equal or better of any white man here.

  “And no, I don’t feel like a white man and I never shall.”

  WHY AMERICA SUCCEEDS WHERE BRITAIN FAILS

  Why is it that Bangladeshi and Pakistani immigrants to America tend to be less alienated, economically marginalized, and emotionally anguished than those in Britain, and why do they show less inclination to antisocial behavior, including Islamist violence?

  American immigration policy certainly accounts for this to a degree. The United States gives immigrants with high levels of educational and professional achievements priority in the immigration queue. In the United States, immigrants from Bangladesh and Pakistan are on average far better educated than those in Britain, which deliberately encouraged unskilled laborers to emigrate. Nonetheless, many rural refugees and economic migrants from the Indian Subcontinent have come to America—uneducated, unskilled, and unprepared for modernity—and have succeeded nonetheless.