JUST after I had started interviewing two young Muslims in the East End yesterday afternoon, the strangest thing happened. Both their mobile phones rang simultaneously. One of them, Abdul Gulmul, 19, a student, answered his. He then began to scan the net-curtained windows and bicycle cluttered balconies of Pattison House, the low-rise council block overlooking us.
“Where are you?” he asked the caller repeatedly. He then began explaining who I was and what I wanted. Whoever Abdul was speaking to did not want him to speak to me.
When he rang off, he and his friend, Ali Shake, also 19, strode off smartly. Beyond their names and ages, all they said was that the bombings were “terrifying, shocking, not a good thing”.
Mr Gulmul and Mr Shake’s departure left the street deserted once more. Occasionally, women in headscarves, a few in full burkas, would hurry across the threadbare grass between the blocks pushing buggies, looking at the ground and answering questions with a harassed shake of the head. One woman, weighed down with shopping, went as far as to grin shyly and say: “I saw it on the news, very bad, no English, sorry.” But that counted as forthcoming.
Several older men gave me big helpful smiles and apologetic shrugs but their English was insufficient for a conversation. Now moving towards its third generation since the initial Bengali immigration, this community remains, as far as I could see, utterly unassimilated.
“I’ve got mates who are Indians, Russians, West Indians,” Terry Higgins, 39, a local white builder, told me, “I haven’t got one who’s from Bangladesh.”
Kissan, 29, a trainee accountant, a Hindu who didn’t want to give his full name because his mother runs a grocery shop nearby, said that he’d seen the streets this clear only once before.
“It was the same after September 11,” he said. “They [the Muslims] pulled everyone off the street. A lot of them are decent but the younger ones would come in the shop and be rooting it — bin Laden this, bin Laden the other.”
Nicky, his cousin, agreed: “These people, they hate us, man. If I’m Hindu or white and you are Muslim, we can’t talk.”
Kissan said: “If it weren’t for the mortgage on the shop, we’d just leave the key on the mat and walk away.” They certainly do not want to talk, that much is obvious.
Pattison House, on the corner of Wellesley Street and Stepney Way, is the last known address of Hassan Oulad Akcha, whose two brothers were in part responsible for the Madrid train bombings last year.
From the stairwell on the top floor, stained by damp and pigeon droppings, you can just see the top of the Gherkin building above Aldgate Tube. The sirens of the ambulances pouring into the Royal London Hospital on the Whitechapel Road were just about audible above the throb of the air ambulance helicopter overhead. I knocked on every door (or at least the ones that I could reach through the heavy security grilles) in the block — many of them decorated with shiny stickers depicting mosques and minarets. Only one door answered. Abdul Hafiz said: “The CID or the police should be finding out who did it.” He gave his age as “41 or 42, something like that”.
If the women won’t talk to you and the older men cannot, you fall back on young lads in their Schott and McKenzie hoodies, and they are not necessarily representative of the whole community.
Out on Aylward Street, Kadar Duale, 19, and Hussain Amir, 18, both Muslims, both A-level students in nearby Newham, both born in Stepney to families originating in Somalia and Bangladesh respectively, stopped to talk, albeit briefly and reluctantly. “I feel bad, obviously,” Mr Duale said, “some people are dying. I phoned to check my friends were OK. They shouldn’t do this to get their point across. I don’t think it’s al-Qaeda, I think it’s someone more powerful, like the Israelis.”
Mr Amir agreed. “They’ve been ignored. To commit suicide is the only thing they can do to get their point across.” Mr Amir was grinning throughout this exchange.
As we talked, cars cruised by, four or five young men per car, checking out the stranger in the suit. There was no mood of jubilation apparent. I asked Mr Duale and Mr Amir if they were worried about hostility.
“Not really,” Mr Duale said. “We will lose respect a bit. After September 11 we got a bit of abuse outside the mosque at Friday prayers — white guys in cars.”
“There’s not many white people around here to make a backlash,” Mr Amir said.
What about at college? “Not many there either. There may be a backlash in places up North,” Mr Duale said, “places like Leeds, but not here.”
This isn’t the sort of area where you see the cross of St George defiantly plastered in white people’s upstairs windows. I saw only one Union Flag, furled on a balcony on, appropriately enough, Jubilee Street. The BNP hasn’t had much of a presence in the East End for several years now.
The drinkers, all male, all white, in the Peacock pub opposite agreed with Mr Duale about the likely aftermath of the bombings, even if it is found that Islamic terrorists were responsible. “We aren’t the types to cause race riots or anything like that,” said Andy Frayne, 49, a builder who had been working near King’s Cross when the bomb exploded there. “Maybe if you knew someone who’d been hurt and then one of these Muslim kids said something walking along, you’d get a bit fiery. But we’re mostly not like that. And anyway, they go around in gangs their lads and you’d worry about getting stabbed.” One man, younger than the rest, said that he was “very, very angry” but that was as far as it went, and he was not typical.
Talk in the Peacock centred on traffic chaos, whether flights to Alicante would be affected and Polar Magic’s chances in the 2.30pm at Newmarket.
The men here resented the insularity of their Muslim neighbours but none expressed the notion that they were harbouring terrorists.
“Only the stupid people would support what happened,” Mark Borg, 38, a cab driver, said. “There won’t be any trouble here. It’s not the London way, is it?”
