“SHE: Time waits for no-one
So lover make haste
Don’t be the slow one
Love’s not to waste”
“HE: Yes, time flies
But I’ve watched it crawl
The wall paint dries
Patience is all”
From Much Urdu About Nothing by Bachchoo
On Wednesday last week, April 13 Channel 4 television transmitted as a documentary a statistical survey entitled “What do British Muslims Really Think”. The channel was at pains to tell us that the survey was independently conducted, was as broad as they could get and the interviews took place in homes after creating circumstances in which honest answers would be given. The survey was at pains to get at a truth that has long been ignored and whatever its consequences will stimulate liberal and bigoted debate and may result in the formulation of policies. Even before transmission, the statistics were issued and the debate is on.
The names Bradford, Dewsbury, Oldham and, perhaps, 30 others, will mean nothing to the readers of this publication. They are the mill-and-mosque towns of Yorkshire and Lancashire. Their mills, from the 19th century produced the textiles which were consumed in Britain and exported to the colonies. After the Second World War there was a quiet revolution in Britain. In 1946, the British electorate rejected their great war-hero, Winston Churchill, at the polls and elected the Labour Party under Clement Attlee. The men and women who had fought and suffered great loss for the king and country wanted a new dispensation. They demanded social and material advance and an overhaul, or evolution through the ballot box, of the dominant class system.
Part of this revolt of the working classes was a rejection of the underpaid, gruelling jobs such as the night shift in textile mills. This rejection of the menial jobs was the prime mover of immigration to Britain from the ex-colonies — from India, East and West Pakistan and from the still-to-be-independent West Indies. In the towns I named above, there came Pakistani labour from Sylhet in East Bengal and largely from Mirpur in the Pakistan-occupied part of Kashmir.
Their numbers grew. They established communities and, in the decades that followed, became numerically, visibly, culturally significant proportions of the populations of these towns. The mosques and madrasas, the restaurants and high street shops catering to the first and then second and third generation of immigrants began to dominate these towns and others.
In the ’80s, the mills of the north, subject to competition from the cheaper textiles of India, Bangladesh and other countries, closed down. Thousands were thrown out of employment. The white populations, with greater social and economic mobility, moved out of the centres of the mill-and-mosque towns which as a consequence became more and more enclosed and isolated from the dominant cultures of Britain.
The isolation, through lack of intervention by successive governments, bred alienation and bitterness and resulted in the growth of an isolationist culture.
The evidence of this alienation is in the results of this survey which used a statistically valid sample of the three million Muslim population of Britain. Let’s start with the most startling statistic: Only four per cent of the sample said that they were in sympathy with suicide bombings and the actions of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. This would mean 96 per cent are against any such atrocious thing. But these numbers, when translated from percentages, tell us that 120,000 British Muslims would support the actions and ideology of the death cult.
The other statistics don’t translate directly into a threat to British safety or values. A few more than a third of those surveyed said they supported the idea that a Muslim should be allowed to have four wives. Their opinion, expressed by men as well as women in the survey, is unlikely to seep past British feminists and is in no danger of changing British law,
More than half of those questioned said that homosexuality ought to be illegal. It has been legal in Britain since the 1960s and the last coalition government legalised gay marriage. The documentary, though it was not much more than the statistical numbers, came to the unsurprising conclusion that there was a chip of society which had grown apart from the old block. The programme recognised the menace in this conclusion and asked how the isolation could be ended and the multicultural, multi-religious society could have a compatible, if not uniform, set of values within and framed by liberal democracy.
One of the contentious solutions was to tackle the next generation of Muslims by forcing them to mix with the white populations by limiting the “ethnic” or Muslim intake of every school in Britain to 50 per cent. Such a “solution”, which presumes that proximity will breed integration, would force some 100 per cent white schools to take in 50 per cent Muslim pupils in towns with demographics such as those I have named. It will cause resentment.
This tampering with the intake of schools is a speculative measure. What Britain needs, to demolish this cultural equivalent of the Berlin Wall, is a change of heart within the Muslim communities and vigorous, positive intervention by governments to bring this about. The government could, for instance, prohibit Saudi Wahhabi money from funding the mosques and Islamic institutions within these communities, as the money comes with preconditions and in the person of poisonous preachers.
