Stranger to History Read Free Page B

language was Punjabi, and although they were opposed to Britain’s involvement in the Iraq war and hated America, they were too balanced to be extremists, too aware of their hard-earned economic migration from Pakistan.
    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