A bad time to be Asian in Britain
By MARY ANN SIEGHART Sept 27 2001 The Times
Revulsion at Muslim extremism has expressed itself in violence
and hostility against Britain's Asian communities - whatever their faith or
views. A
couple of years ago, Sukhpreet Grewal’s teenage brother, Sundeep, had to make
a big decision. Would he start to wear a turban and grow a beard, as his father
had done before him? He knew it would attract attention at his Hillingdon
school, but he wanted to be a good Sikh. What he did not know was that, by the
age of 16, it would lead people to look at him as if he were Osama bin Laden.
“You
can see it in people’s eyes,” explains Sukhpreet, his protective older
sister. “Even at the supermarket. He stands out because he wears a turban. But
I don’t think terrorists are going to go shopping in Sainsbury’s on a Friday
afternoon.”
Her
parents have now insisted on changing Sundeep’s routine. His mother drives him
to college and back every day instead of letting him take the bus. He has to
ring home at break and at lunchtime just to reassure them that he is unharmed.
“We’re feeling very threatened,” says Sukhpreet.
So
is almost every member of Britain’s Asian community, whether Muslim or not.
Sikhs in particular wince every time a picture of bin Laden or an Afghan mullah
appears in the media. For to the untrained Western eye, one turban or long beard
looks much like another.
Indians
find themselves explaining to suspicious whites that they are Hindu, Buddhist,
or Sikh — then feeling guilty that they have shuffled blame on to an equally
blameless community. Supporters of bin Laden, after all, number only the tiniest
fraction of Britain’s two millionMuslims. Most are horrified by the terrorist
attacks.
Yet,
when they venture out on to the street, many Asians are insulted, spat at and
attacked. Women have had their headscarves torn off and have been beaten up.
Mosques have been set on fire, ringed with pigs’ heads and daubed with racist
graffiti. This is a bad time to be Asian in Britain.
Suresh
Grover, a 42-year-old Hindu married to a Sikh, runs the Monitoring Group in
Southall, an organisation which supports victims of racial harassment. Soon
after the terrorist attacks, his emergency service was handling 35 calls a day,
three times the usual number.
“Everyone’s
talking about how people are looking at them,” he explains. “I normally look
people in the eye, but I’ve seen hatred there, so I’ve been looking away.”
He is helping local restaurateurs and taxi-drivers who have been threatened.
“There is a massive amount of anxiety that you will get attacked.”
For
Asians in Southall, the response has been to stay at home if at all possible;
and if they have to go out, not to venture beyond the predominantly Asian town
centre. Grover took his elderly mother out of the area to Ealing Hospital last
week, and was amazed to see that the other Asian patients had disappeared.
“Normally, there are about 100 people; this time there were perhaps 25, almost
all white.”
This
fear of mingling in white society has spread right to the top of the Muslim
community. Siraj Salekin, 35, is the director of the East London Mosque, on
Whitechapel Road. Not only is he struggling to keep the place of worship safe
— two new security guards and loads of CCTV cameras after a bomb threat last
week — but his wife is scared to go to her hospital appointment alone, just
100 yards from their home. He cancelled a trip to Swansea to accompany her.
“We’re
like hostages now,” he claims. “The community are all talking about it.
It’s crazy because we condemn the terrorists totally.”
Like
most British Muslims, he is furious with hardline fundamentalists in London who
give succour to bin Laden. Of Sheikh Omar Bakri Muhammad, who issued a fatwa
against President Musharraf of Pakistan for cooperating with America, Salekin
says, “He’s a nutter, one crazy man. It’s jihad here and jihad there. But
there are rotten eggs everywhere.” On the afternoon that I visited Salekin at
the mosque, he had been forced to eject a couple of young men shouting “We
want jihad!” after Friday prayers.
His
wife’s fear is not unjustified, though. A new departure since the American
bombings has been the attacks on Asian women as well as men. “We’ve never
had whites attacking women before,” says Salekin. “They have been abused and
spat at but not attacked. Last week one of our volunteers was beaten up on her
way to college by two white thugs.
“These
are very passive and peace-loving women. Yet they have been called
‘murderers’. They’ve been told ‘Go back to your country!’ But this is
their country.”
Many
young Asians I spoke to feel confused about their national identity. Grover
says, “This is the first time for ages that I haven’t felt I belonged
here.” Sukhpreet agrees. “I don’t think we’re feeling part of mainstream
Britain any more. I used to feel Asian British. But because of the experiences
I’ve had, if I’ve not been accepted as being British, it’s very difficult
for me to feel British.”
As
a second-generation immigrant, on my father’s side at least, I have some
sympathy. He arrived in this country from Austria, aged 12, with a
German-sounding surname and a German-sounding accent, just months before Britain
went to war with Germany. The subtleties of his position — that he was a
refugee from the Nazis and hated them just as much as the English did — were
lost on his schoolmates, who bullied him cruelly.
But
at least he was able wholeheartedly to support Britain’s side in the war that
followed. Today’s Asian community feels far more ambivalent. Unlike Austrian
refugees in 1939, their home countries (unless they are Afghans) have not been
invaded by an alien force that needs to be ousted.
Some
of the Asians I spoke to are still unconvinced that the terrorist attack was
carried out by Muslims. Those who concede that it was remain doubtful that war
is the answer. All have a fellow feeling for South Asian civilians likely to be
caught up in the fray.
Dalawar
Chaudhry, the owner of a Southall restaurant, asks, “If the ploughing fields
are turned into killing fields, what then?” He wants to see “proof beyond
reasonable doubt” that bin Laden was behind the attacks. And, he claims, “If
President Bush and Tony Blair bomb Afghanistan, it makes them no different from
any other terrorist.”
Even
Najia Ahmad, a 23-year-old graduate student at King’s College London, who
leads a cosmopolitan life outside London’s Asian community, is uncertain which
side she would be on. “I don’t want it to go to war. If it does become an
issue of the Muslim world against the Western world, then I would feel like
I’m a Muslim first, even though I hardly practise my religion and even though
I was born and brought up here.”
Superficially,
those Asians who have thrown themselves into the Western way of life seem to
have suffered least. Ahmad claims: “I’m not getting hassled at all. But the
area I live in and the college I go to are so international that I’m sheltered
from all that.”
The
degree of fear and harassment reported to me seemed to correlate almost exactly
with the degree of difference in hairstyle, dress and accent. The more
traditionally Muslim, Hindu or Sikh an Asian Briton looks and sounds, the more
likely it is that he or she will have been abused.
Sukhpreet
Grewal is living proof of this. A pretty, bespectacled, Western-looking young
woman with a London accent, she confirms that when she steps out in her salwar
kameez, the traditional dress, with her uncut hair in a Sikh plait, she is
treated differently. “It’s subtle, but I do notice it.”
I
venture, diffidently, to suggest that integration into the host community helps
to reduce tension, that my father learnt this lesson pretty soon after his
arrival. The Muslims at the East London Mosque argue vociferously.
They
don’t want to lose their culture or their traditions, they say. They don’t
want to become part of a homogenised society: “Saris and trainers! Curry and
chips!” jokes Salekin. They can’t help it if the education in Tower Hamlets
is segregated; that is because the white parents won’t send their children to
predominantly Asian schools.
But
most of all, they argue, they can look as Western as they like, but they can’t
change their skin colour. It is one thing, they say, for continental European
immigrants to assimilate, quite another for sub-continental Asians.
Abdal
Ullah, a 25-year-old member of the Metropolitan Police Authority and a
worshipper at the East London Mosque, is as modern and Western-looking as you
get. He was offered the chance by a BBC documentary team to be made up as a
white person for a week to see how different life would be.
“It
was a really interesting concept,” he says, and he would have accepted had he
been able to take the time off to do it. For he believes that skin colour is the
biggest bar to assimilation: “As an Asian person, there’s a difficulty in
trying to fit in. If someone’s hell-bent on not accepting you, there is
nothing you can do.”
And
how much worse this will all become if and when we go to war. Salekin is filled
with gloom. “There will be a lot of fear. The white community will be angry.
They won’t have Taleban near them; they’ll only have look-alike Taleban to
attack. That’s worrying me a lot.”
Grover
agrees. “The talk is of a battle against uncivilised nations and the image you
see is someone who looks like me! Asians are going to feel more marginalised and
alienated in this society if Britain goes to war. It will be a psychological
blow. Even if you come out on the radio and say you support the war, you’ll
still be treated as different. We always have to demonstrate that we’re on the
right side, just because we’re a different colour.”
Salekin’s
solution has been to try to bridge the ethnic divide through understanding
rather than integration. At the East London Mosque, he has open days for the
non-Muslim local community. Some 300 to 400 people attend and, at a recent
opening, “One lady said, ‘We didn’t realise you are just like us!’.”
Last
weekend, though, he had to cancel the open day for security reasons. And he is
hardly likely to be able to restart it in the weeks ahead. The clouds of racial
hatred are reforming above Southall and Tower Hamlets, as they are over other
parts of Asian Britain. When war comes, the casualties will not just be in
Afghanistan, but on our own streets too.
Sukhpreet Grewal, whose brother is still defiantly wearing his turban, is bitterly apprehensive. “We see ourselves as the truly dispossessed. I don’t see India as my home, but I don’t think we’ll ever be accepted in Britain.” It is a grim message for a country that used to pride itself on racial tolerance, and a sobering one for a country about to wage a war in defence of the open society.