In the eighties when Shehzad Tanweer (22) was growing up my mother was still teaching Junior school in nearby Huddersfield. Her students were mostly Pakistani, then. Often they would turn up to school with swollen fingers where the Imam had hit them with a stick at the "mocks [mosque] school". They had to chant the Koran by rote with their hands flat on the desk in front of them so that he could rap them with a stick when they got it wrong. The Imam, all visitors from Pakistan, would be rotated so they did not go native.
When I was a child, Pakistanis were hated by many white Loiners, and were isolated as a community. As the indigenous working class's economic position fell, they hung on more tenaciously to the racial divide, dreading the Pakistanis as the personification of decline. The first generation of Pakistanis were culturally conservative, but politically, Labour Party voters, and generally avoided confrontation with the white community.
But in the late eighties and nineties some of those divisions were breaking down. First the recessions of the 1980s demolished the organisational solidarity of the white working class. I can remember Leeds looking like Sarajevo in the early nineties, with corner houses burnt out, and gun crime on the rise.
Then, just as unexpectedly, the economy swung upwards, and Leeds was singled out as a success story, the city centre renovated. All across Britain, attitudes to Asians (collective term for Pakistanis, Indians and Bangladeshis here, not Koreans, of whom there are few) were shifting. Living in Manchester and Birmingham, I could see there were many more mixed-race couples, more or less alien in the Leeds of my early years. In some circles, Asian was cool, crossover music like Kula Shaker made the charts, novels by Monica Ali, Vikram Seth and Arundathi Roy were popular.
There were also conflicts as the second generation of Asians grew up resentful of their parents perceived servility. The conflict is rehearsed in Hanif Kureishi's story, My Son the Fanatic. I saw many second generation immigrants confuse their parents by embracing a political Islam that was oddly Western, much more ideological and less traditionally religious than their own faith. Islamic militants burned Salman Rushdie's 'blasphemous' novel, the Satanic Verses in the street. In Leeds, younger Islamic militants harassed prostitutes. Not all the Asians were religiously motivated, by a long chalk. There was a lot of secular advance, into the expanding higher education sector, and also more Asian gang activity, which was particularly high-lighted by the press.
Local authorities in Bradford and Leeds accomodated the rising aspirations of British-born Asians by extending the provision for publicly-funded faith schools to include Islamic as well as Jewish and Catholic Schools. Those white people that lacked the economic means to move out were particularly resentful at the way that a more assertive Asian population won influence over the provision of services like public housing and other community funds. A few years ago white and Asian youths fought pitched battles in Leeds over allegations and counter-allegations of assault.
None of this background explains the bombings. Hasib Hussain (19), Shehzad Tanweer (22), Mohammed Sidique Khan (30) and their last, as yet unnamed accomplice lived the same lives as many people who went on to do quite different things with their lives. Of course it is tempting to ascribe political motives to the bombings, because that makes more sense of them. But in the end, these suicide bombings are just the equivalent of what the Americans called 'going Postal', after Post Workers went to work and blasted all their colleagues - or a kind of Columbine Massacre on the Underground. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20050713/a26f39ea/attachment.htm>