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British/Muslim

Simmering ethnic tensions are a fact of life in the hometown of three London suicide bombers

By VANESSA GEZARI
Published August 14, 2005

LEEDS, England - He stood in his streetfront office, staring out at shish kebab restaurants and stores selling Muslim head scarves, talking on his cell phone. The phone had been buzzing incessantly: ABC News, a documentary filmmaker, the New York Times. Nadeem Siddique had just about had it with them all.

Now he was talking to a guy from a local mosque. The guy had just given Siddique's number to CNN. Would he talk to them?

"Everyone wants to jump on the bandwagon now and do something positive," Siddique growled into the phone. "Where were you before the bombings?"

Nadeem Siddique knows where he was: right here, in his rough-edged, heavily South Asian and Muslim neighborhood in northwestern Leeds, trying to calm the tempers of young men like theones who bombed trains and buses in London last month. He and other kids grew up between working-class whites and a black community with Caribbean roots, in modest brick row houses smelling sharply of spices, speaking a mix of Pakistani languages and Yorkshire English. Here in Harehills, young men like Siddique consider themselves more Pakistani than British, eventhough they were born in Leeds.

"Someone says to me, "So what does it mean to be a British Muslim?' " said Siddique, a community outreach worker. "It's just a tag line to be British. I'm Pakistani. I don't act British."

He and other young men here condemn the bombings. But Siddique understands the anger and frustration, and he says they are nothing new. In recent weeks, Britons have questioned every aspect of this country's attempts at integration. How could British-born Muslims have attacked London? Where were the expected loyalties to the country that gave their parents refuge and granted them an education and a shot at First World prosperity? Has Britain done enough to instill a sense of Britishness in all its citizens?

"This is a question for British society as a whole," wrote the columnist Jonathan Freedland in London's Guardian newspaper. "For July stands as proof that our model of integration, the way that we absorb difference, has somehow failed."

This is not the first time the British model of integration has been scrutinized. In the summer of 2001, race riots burned across England, the product of simmering unease in white and South Asian communities in mill towns like Oldham, Burnley, Bradford and Leeds. Police marched out in riot gear as mobs burned cars and threw bricks and bottles.

A report commissioned by the government after the riots found communities split along ethnic lines. Its authors were "particularly struck by the depth of polarization of our towns and cities."

"Many communities operate on the basis of a series of parallel lives," they wrote. "These lives often do not seem to touch at any point, let alone overlap and promote any meaningful interchanges."

In the weeks since the London bombings, some in Britain are asking whether their country should be more like France, which recently banned head scarves in schools. Should it be more like America, which allows broad personal freedom but requires naturalized citizens to make public pledges of allegiance? Until about 18 months ago, British citizenship was granted to people who had been in the country legally for four years. They didn't have to speak English or know much about British culture, and there was no naturalization ceremony. The immigrant simply went to a lawyer's office and swore to obey the queen; his British passport would come in the mail.

On July 7, three British-born men of Pakistani descent traveled from Leeds to London and set off bombs that killed 52 people. Now everyone is looking for answers in neighborhoods like Harehills, where immigrants from Pakistan and elsewhere have built communities that seem entirely self-sufficient.

A hundred years ago, there was a coal mine in Harehills, and the brick row houses were miners' cottages. But by the 1950s, immigrants were arriving from the Caribbean and South Asia: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh. They worked in iron foundries and textile mills. In the last few years, Afghans, Bosnians, Iraqis and eastern Europeans have moved in, yet the greatest number - about a quarter of the council ward that includes Harehills - have come from Asia. Most trace their roots to Pakistan, and specifically to Pakistani Kashmir.

Harehills Lane, the neighborhood's main artery, snakes past a large blue-domed mosque at the center of the Pakistani enclave, between stores with signs in Persian and Urdu advertising cheap international calls and Indian movies, amid clotheslines draped with long Asian tunics and flowing scarves.

Down the hill, the window boxes sprout pansies, and T-shirts and brightly colored lace bras hang out to dry. At George Stephenson English Meat Purveyor, where a sign in the window says, "We Sell Great British Meats," they still cure their own bacon and make their own sausage. David Lemon, a 60-year-old butcher with a crew cut and an eagle tattooed on his forearm, showed a visitor a 1912 photograph of a May Day celebration on this street. The children in starched shirts and hats were all white.

"They call us white people racist, but they don't come to our shops," Lemon said, running a damp cloth along a counter top. "White people are moving out of the area, and they're coming in. We're not replacing our customers, if you know what I mean. From our point of view, they don't seem to want to integrate with us."

Up the street and around the corner, Loui Osborne sells newspapers and Pringles to women in head scarves, dark-skinned kids and pale men in checked caps. His parents came from St. Kitts; he was born here. On a recent day, he patiently added up handfuls of penny candy for South Asian kids who spoke one language to each other and another to him.

"They've kept to their own culture. They've brought their beliefs from back home, and they're still enforcing it in temples and mosques," Osborne said. When he mentioned Muslims, a brown-skinned boy looked up angrily from the other side of the counter. "What about the Muslims?" the boy said. "You don't know jack. I'll slap you up."

"You better have some manners," Osborne told him, "or I'll slap you up."

Most of the time, these communities get along. Some have even made friends across ethnic lines. But occasionally, the differences erupt.

Across the street from the mosque stands the charred hulk of the KPS Pound Shop. Run by an Afghan immigrant named Iqbal Khan, it used to sell small bouncing balls, cell phones, DVD players, sugar, tea bags, eggs. On July 22, the day after a series of attempted bombings in London, someone set it on fire. Police say they have no evidence that the fire was racially motivated, but Amjad Hussain, a recent immigrant from Pakistan who was behind the counter that day, says he saw four white men come into the shop, and one of them lit a cigarette.

"It is because of the London bombings," he said. "Simple."

Ash Majid, a 23-year-old taxi dispatcher, says he doesn't know who burned the shop. But he sometimes feels alienated here.

"No matter how much I feel British, I'm still treated as a foreigner," he said. "You never get treated the same."

On a June night in 2001, Majid, then 20, joined hundreds of young, mainly South Asian men who pelted police with rocks in a riot sparked by the arrest of a local Bangladeshi man. He threw a rock and helped tip over a car. His friend, Shazad Hussain, who was 21, hurled a couple of bricks at police. Both were arrested and spent months in jail.

In the wake of the riots, Nadeem Siddique, the community worker, formed a group called Visionz. They meet every Friday after prayers, a dozen young Pakistani-British Muslim men sitting around blowing off steam. They talk about the jobs they didn't get, and why they didn't get them, about the snide comment someone made on the bus. They play soccer together. Siddique says it was the first group of its kind in Leeds.

"Because we're all angry - I'm angry about stuff that goes on in Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan, but at the end of the day I'd never go and blow myself up," he said. "That said, I got a nice job, a nice car. A lot of young people don't have a good job. I've got a lot to lose, where some people must think, I've not got a lot to lose."

British foreign policy may upset young Muslim men, Siddique said, but ultimately, "it's a cocktail of everything" - including tensions closer to home.

"When everything builds up, some guys might kind of flip," he said.

Yet for all his anger - and his strong Pakistani identity - Siddique, 30, is a prime example of British-Asian fusion. Born in Britain to a Kashmiri father and a Pakistani mother, he grew up in Harehills, where Punjabi Bhangra music drifts through open doors. His mother, fearing the neighborhood's influence, sent him to a mainly white school in an affluent part of town.

"I learned more about their culture, and to be honest, the standard of schooling there was much higher," Siddique said the other day, seated in his office wearing a white crocheted skullcap, faded jeans and a sweat shirt that said MECCA.

Like the other kids in his neighborhood, he studied the Koran for two hours every afternoon as a boy, and later, in college, spent all his money on American R&B and hip hop. He DJ's occasionally in local clubs but doesn't drink or smoke. He lives with his parents and drives a silver Mercedes.

When he thinks about the kids growing up in Harehills, he worries. It's not just the drug dealing and the back-talk, he said; they have no good role models. When Siddique was a kid, he wanted to be a doctor, a dentist, a pilot. "Everyone around here wants to be a hip-hop star, wants to be bling-bling," he said.

Out in the alleys of Harehills, the kids were playing. Twelve-year-old Aqueeb Hussain, who idolizes British soccer players and the hip-hop artist Snoop Dogg, announced his intention to go to America someday.

"I just like it," he said. "The celebrities and all that."

Aqueeb said he had been to Pakistan, where his father came from. "There's snakes, and it be hot, and it be mosquitoes," he said. "People don't have much there."

He prefers England.

Vanessa Gezari can be reached at 727-893-8803 or vgezari@sptimes.com

[Last modified August 12, 2005, 17:58:01]