Stranger to History (3 page)

Their children were unrecognisable to them and to me. Some were dressed in long Arab robes with beards cut to Islamic specifications. They lacked their parents’ instinctive humour and openness; their hatred of the West was immense and amorphous. One appeared next to his father, carrying a crate into their corner shop. He had small, hard eyes, a full black beard, and wore a grey robe with a little white cap. He seemed almost to be in a kind of fancy dress. I asked him why he was dressed that way.

‘It is my traditional dress,’ he answered coldly, in English.

‘Isn’t your father in traditional dress?’ I asked.

‘Yes, but this is Islamic dress.’

His father looked embarrassed.

An older man standing next to me chuckled. ‘I was complaining to my neighbour that my son never did any work and the neighbour said, “You think that’s bad, mine’s grown a beard and become a
maulvi
[priest].”’ The joke was intended for me especially because the
maulvi
on the sub-continent is a figure of fun and some contempt.

Walking around Beeston, it was possible to feel, as I had for most of that year, meeting second-generation British Pakistanis in England, that an entire generation of
maulvi
s had grown up in northern Britain. The short exchange with the men at the corner shop was a view in miniature of the differences between the two generations. Though neither felt British in any real sense, the older generation had preserved their regional identity and an idea of economic purpose and achievement. The younger generation was adrift: neither British nor Pakistani, removed from their parents’ economic motives and charged with an extranational Islamic identity, which came with a sense of grievance.

A large, solemn man, the owner of a convenience store, who knew the bombers, said, ‘They were born and raised here. We did the work and these kids grew up and they haven’t had a day’s worry. They’re bored. They don’t do any work. They have no sense of honour or belonging.’

Later that week, on the train home, I considered their story. It began in rootlessness, not unlike my own, and led to the discovery of radical Islam, which was largely unknown to me. I had encountered it for the first time the year before when I had met Hassan Butt, a young British Pakistani who had been a spokesman for the extremist group Al-Muhajiroun and active in recruiting people to fight in Afghanistan. (Butt later recanted these views, although in 2008 he was arrested while boarding a flight to Lahore.) We had sat in an Indian restaurant on Manchester’s Curry Mile. Butt was short and muscular, with a warm but intense manner. He was exactly my age, and took me into his confidence at least in part because he saw me, on account of my having a Muslim father, as Muslim.

His ambition for the faith was limitless. ‘Fourteen hundred years ago,’ he told me, ‘you had a small city state in Medina and within ten years of the Prophet it had spread to Egypt and all the way into Persia. I don’t see why the rest of the world, the White House, Ten Downing Street, shouldn’t come under the banner of Islam.’ It was Butt’s nearness to me in some ways – in age, in the split worlds he had known, in the warmth he showed me – that drew me to him, and the faith he had found that created distance between us. At last, I said, ‘So what now? You’re as old as I am, where do you go from here?’

‘First things first,’ he replied. ‘Fight to the utmost to get my passport back [the British authorities had impounded it]. The quicker I get it, the faster I get my plan of action together that I have with a group of guys who . . . Since leaving Muhajiroun I’m focusing on them. There are about nine of us now and we’re not willing to accept anybody else because we have the same ideas, same thoughts. Each one of us will maybe play a different role from the other, but all collectively to gain a wider picture. Once I get my passport back, I definitely see myself,
inshallah
, not out of pride, not out of arrogance, not out of ambition, but rather because I believe I have the ability – I pray to Allah to give me more ability – to become a face for Islam in the future, something Muslims have been lacking for a very long time.’

His answer put still greater distance between us. My small sense of being Muslim, gained so haphazardly over the years, was not enough to enter into the faith that Butt had found.

Now, travelling back from Leeds to London, I realised how short I was on Islam. I knew that the young men I had met in Beeston, and Butt, felt neither British nor Pakistani, that they had rejected the migration of their parents, that as Muslims they felt free of these things. But for me, with my small cultural idea of what it meant to be Muslim and no notion of the Book and the Traditions, the completeness of Islam, it was impossible to understand the extra-national identity that Beeston’s youth and Butt had adopted. I wouldn’t have been able to see how it might take the place of nationality. My personal relationship with the faith was a great negative space. And despite this, I was also somehow still Muslim.

So, with only an intimation of their aggression; their detachment and disturbance; and some sense that Islam had filled the vacuum that other failed identities had left, I came back to London and wrote my article. It was an accumulation of my experience with radical Islam in Britain. I wrote that the British second-generation Pakistani, because of his particular estrangement, the failure of identity on so many fronts, had become the genus of Islamic extremism in Britain. The article appeared on the cover of a British political magazine alongside my interview with Hassan Butt and, proud to have written my first cover story, I sent it to my father.

I received a letter in response, the first he’d ever written to me. But as I read it, my excitement turned quickly to hurt and defensiveness. He accused me of prejudice, of lacking even ‘superficial knowledge of the Pakistani ethos’, and blackening his name:

Islamic extremism is poisonous, as is that of the IRA and the RSS [a Hindu nationalist party]. The reason why it is on the rise is because of Palestine and Iraq. If Hindus were bombed, occupied and humiliated you may find the same reaction . . . By projecting yourself as an ‘Indian Pakistani’ you are giving this insulting propaganda credibility as if it is from one who knows it all.

Cricket, that old dress rehearsal for war on the sub-continent, came up: ‘Look at the way the Lahore crowd behaved after losing a Test match and compare that to the “Lala crowds” in Delhi. It seems the Hindu inferiority complex is visceral.’ A
lala
was a merchant, and here my father articulated prejudices of his own, textbook prejudices in Pakistan, of Hindus as sly shop-owners, smaller, weaker, darker and more cowardly than Muslims. ‘Oh, I’m so glad you weren’t a little black Hindu,’ my half-sister would laugh, or ‘I hate fucking Hindus, man,’ my half-brother once said. Pakistanis, for the most part converts from Hinduism to Islam, lived with a historical fiction that they were descendants of people from Persia, Afghanistan and elsewhere, who once ruled Hindu India.

I wasn’t sure which side my father placed me on when he wrote his letter, whether he thought of me as one of them or, worse, as a traitor he had spawned. He did say, ‘Do you really think you’re doing the Taseer name a service by spreading this kind of invidious anti-Muslim propaganda?’ To me, that was the most interesting aspect of the letter: my father, who drank Scotch every evening, never fasted or prayed, even ate pork, and once said, ‘It was only when I was in jail and all they gave me to read was the Koran – and I read it back to front several times – that I realised there was nothing in it for me,’ was offended as a Muslim by what I had written. The hold of the religion, deeper than its commandments, of religion as nationality, was something that I, with my small sense of being Muslim, had never known.

When I came to the end of my father’s letter, I felt he was right: I couldn’t have even ‘a superficial knowledge’ of the Pakistani, but more importantly Islamic, ethos. I had misunderstood what he had meant when he described himself as a cultural Muslim. I took it to mean no more than a version of what I grew up with in Delhi – some feeling for customs, dress, food, festivals and language – but it had shown a reach deeper than I knew. And the question I kept asking myself was how my father, a professed disbeliever in Islam’s founding tenets, was even a Muslim. What made him Muslim despite his lack of faith?

For some weeks, during a still, dry summer in London, the letter percolated. It prompted a defence on my part in which my back was up. My father responded with silence that turned colder as the weeks went by. His wife and daughter tried to intervene, but I wasn’t willing to apologise for something I’d written. And although I minded the personal attack, I didn’t mind the letter: it aroused my curiosity. Caught between feeling provoked and needing to act, I thought of making an Islamic journey.

My aim was to tie together the two threads of experience from that summer: the new, energised Islamic identity working on young Muslims and my own late discovery of my father’s religion. My father’s letter presented me with the double challenge to gain a better understanding of Islam and Pakistan.

But I wanted a canvas wider than Pakistan. Something deeper than national identity acted on my father, something related to Islam, and to understand this, I felt travelling in Pakistan alone would not be enough. Pakistan, carved out of India in 1947, was a country founded for the faith. But it was also a lot like India, and I felt that unless I travelled in other Muslim countries I would not be able to separate what might be common Islamic experience from what might feel like an unexplained variation of India. I also wanted to take advantage of the fact that the whole Islamic world stretched between my father and the place where I read his letter. A strange arc of countries lay on my route: fiercely secular Turkey, where Islam had been banished from the public sphere since the 1920s; Arab-nationalist Syria, which had recently become the most important destination for those seeking radical Islam; and Iran, which in 1979 had experienced Islamic revolution.

In a classical sense, except for Turkey, the lands that lay between my father and me were also part of the original Arab expansion when the religion spread in the seventh and eighth centuries from Spain to India. I decided on a trip from one edge of the Islamic world, in Istanbul, to a classical centre, Mecca, and on through Iran to Pakistan. The first part of the trip would be an old Islamic journey, almost a pilgrimage, from its once greatest city to its holiest. The trip away, through Iran and Pakistan, was a journey home, to my father’s country, where my link to Islam began, and, finally, to his doorstep.

‘Homo Islamicos’

I
t was November. The sky was damp and heavy. I waited for Eyup outside a Starbucks on Istiklal. It was an old-fashioned European shopping street, with a tram, in central Istanbul. The road was being resurfaced and rain from the night before spread a muddy layer of water over the newly paved white stone. The youth that filled the street, sidestepping wide, wet patches of sludge and splashing brown sprinklings on the ends of jeans, were of remarkable beauty.

Here, it seemed, was a confluence of racial attributes that produced tall men with high central-Asian cheekbones, light European eyes and the olive colouring of the Mediterranean. They were narrow-waisted and muscular, in close-fitting jeans, small T-shirts and dark jackets. The haircuts were short with cleanly shaved edges and sloping, bristly backs. They walked with a strut, looking ahead, seeming a little vain. The women’s painted faces and peroxided hair took away from their looks. Still, the abundance of idle, well-dressed youth gave the street a heady, sexual character.

Istiklal, like its youth, was a hybrid: European archways, fashionable shops and stone apartment buildings, with little balconies and pilasters, ran down its length, while its side-streets led into Eastern bazaars, selling fish and vegetables. It had seen better days, then worse days, and now again its fortunes were turning. There were pick-up bars, cafés, bookshops, an Adidas store, nightclubs, gay saunas, health clubs, embassies and offices. Varied music poured into the street from all sides, not just popular music but Sanskrit chanting with hidden techno undertones.

I had arrived a few days before by train, dropping south from Budapest to Sofia and then to Istanbul, a slow movement through the ghostlands of the old Ottoman Empire. Very little remained of its once deep European reach: in Budapest, a reconstructed, tiled shrine, Europe’s northernmost Muslim monument, dedicated to a Turkish dervish; and in Sofia, the last of its sixty-nine mosques: small and slightly run-down, it sat at an angle to a busy main road with one stone pillar stepping gingerly into the pavement.

In Istanbul, I was staying in a squat, modern hotel on a central square with a view of the Bosphorus. On the morning after I arrived, I witnessed an amazing scene on the strait’s leaden waters. I had come down to the shore, and next to me a few soldiers and old men sipped coffee at a kiosk doing steady business. Then everyone stopped what they were doing and looked at the water. The man at the kiosk turned off his stove and looked too. The soldiers jittered.