This is the start of Ramadan, on a sweltering Sunday afternoon last September. I am sitting in a burger bar in Newham, east London, where the air is thick with the stench of stale fat. My companion, Omar, in white flowing robes, is the publisher of an online Muslim newsletter, and so visibly religious that the owner asks us to leave. Not an act of bigotry, but because, in these days of fasting, Omar is putting off embarrassed Muslim customers. Two years ago, Omar began publishing Islamic Events & Notices, a listing of social, sporting and spiritual events (the Muslim Time Out). Its contents are by turns pious – a talk on “fear of Allah” – and funny – “sisters’ aloe vera party” – and unfathomable, as in a workshop on the “ideal Muslim personality”; but he won’t plug anything aggressive, divisive or “unhelpful”.
Using the newsletter as my guide, I joined Muslim speed-daters, professional networkers, scouts and self-defence teachers. Sadly, I never got through to the woman auditioning for a Muslim performing-arts school (I doubt it was Fame in burkas), and today’s event at Omar’s local community centre is frustrating for its organiser. “To learn about fostering,” he complains, “not many turn up, but for a debate on Armageddon the place will be packed. That’s Muslims.”
The day after the July bombings in London, I travelled on the capital’s Underground, watchful for preoccupied Koran-readers. Daubed over an advertisement in my carriage were the words “Arabs are shit”. The insult was really aimed at Muslims: people some fear are living in thrall to an irrational, omniscient, feudal religion and who therefore might be capable of anything in its name, whose belief is rippled with a sort of madness, who are – whatever else they appear – soldiers in the furtherance of a holy war, a reverse Crusades. Muslims are growing faster than any other minority, arriving from Africa, Chechnya, Jordan, Kosovo, united in a faith that supersedes national frontiers. A community leader in Leicester talked proudly of the young community in which one-third are under the age of 15; he talked of Muslims in Britain being “the future”. Not unnaturally, we are suspicious of this virile tribe, which has a stronger identity than the British sense of self, and an unbending rigour. Maybe we are also hurt that it doesn’t want to join in. Yet of the estimated 1.8m Muslims (an extrapolation from the last census) who live in this country, only the thinnest paring are political, and even fewer committed “jihadis”. What do the others do when not unsettling the natives? Live just like us, as the liberal Establishment would love us to believe? Not at all, actually.
At the small room upstairs in the Froud Community Centre, part of the church of St Michael & All Angels in the impoverished borough of Newham, I make my first mistake. I walk in quietly, a little late, and sit on the right side of two sets of chairs. It takes me a few minutes to feel the discomfort welling around me: I have chosen the men’s side. I quickly cross the 2ft gap and sit with the sisters in headscarves: the hijabi. On the stage is Ismail Amaan of the Islamic Fostering Service, and a social worker who also happens to be a Muslim scholar, ascetic-looking with a fiery intensity to his gaze that I will meet many times on this journey; you might see it as a fanatical gleam, or evangelical zeal; at times I think it’s just the absence of alcohol and other numbing palliatives in the system, a turbo-charged wide-awakeness.
They are trying to recruit parents to the Islamic tradition of kafala, a cross between fostering and adoption. The latter is tricky, since sharia law dictates that children must retain their original name and inheritance rights; moreover, when the child reaches puberty in a religious family, the rule of purdah applies: the foster mother must cover her head in the presence of her foster son. If the family adopts a baby, some women take medication to induce lactation: once the baby is breast-fed, it is considered to be her own and the complications are avoided. “Local authorities are worried about us making the girls wear headscarves,” says Amaan. “They’re worried we’ll make the kids do strange things. We say, ‘Don’t be scared of us – we are not monsters.’”
On my chair is a leaflet citing the case of “Ruxana” – who, I later discover, doesn’t exist – a 12-year-old Muslim girl placed in a non-Muslim home for a year while her parents recovered from an accident. When she returned home, she dressed “immodestly”, ate forbidden – haram – food, refused to fast; a scare story to motivate the pious. The need for foster carers is growing – many children on the agency’s books are unaccompanied asylum seekers – but I subsequently learn that none of the 20 people present volunteer for training.
Outside, a mile away, the second demonstration against the publication of the Danish cartoons is taking place. Only days ago, there were scenes of violence, with young Muslim protesters dressed as suicide bombers. If we think we are damning of such extremism, you should hear these young professionals gathered at the Russell hotel in central London on the subject. They can’t wash their hands fast enough of the hardliners who are simply “ignorant”, and the word is spiked with a disdain no educated westerner would dare voice.
Today this crowd is more concerned about its romantic shelf life. Times are changing in their world: once marriages were arranged by parents, but these young people – mostly in their twenties, some early thirties – have come to an event organised by Haras Ahmed’s company, Speed Intros, to find love. There are doctors, civil servants, lawyers, research scientists. Girls with glossy coal-black hair are queuing to register, paying their £30 fee; only one headscarf among them, but they’re dressed soberly, mainly in black.
The anonymous conference room is laid out with little tables to seat four and with red plush chairs and, since there are not enough men – always at least 20% less, apparently – two girls must sit out each round, surplus to requirements, while the men move around the tables for timed five-minute bursts of conversation. “Turn off your phones unless you are a doctor,” requests Haras before they begin; people smile, proud that such esteemed professionals are waiting to be snagged. “Please keep the conversation respectful and tasteful,” he adds unnecessarily; in a setting as theologically “iffy” as this, involving free mingling and talk of procreation, decorum is all.
Speed Intros has notched up 15 marriages in its 31/2 years, but Haras and his wife, Ayesha, are not invited to the weddings; their clients tell parents they met partners “through friends”. Despite the Arabian Nights Chill Out Classics warm-up music, the tension in the room is fizzing, and I imagine the first date of new romance unaided by alcohol, when pubs, clubs and wine bars are banned or at least uncomfortable. “That Bridget Jones socialising isn’t an option for us,” a Home Office civil servant tells me.
Each participant has a compatibility profile before them; if both daters tick the “interested” box, their e-mail addresses will be forwarded within 24 hours. The two most asked questions are “What do you do?” and “Where are you from?”, by which they do not mean Putney or Golders Green, but country of origin. And where, within that? They are here in defiance of their parents’ businesslike attitude to matrimony, but the pragmatism is inbred: they need to know that their families will gel.
To my right, a small, manically vivacious woman is telling all her male interlocutors about her PhD and her work in medical research. They look impressed and terrified. “I want someone who I can wake up in the morning with and say, ‘Tell me about the Reformation.’” She would rather be at Tate Modern than here today, but, at 37, needs must. She doesn’t go to a mosque, or fast; why can’t she find a nice intellectual of any, or no particular, faith? “My parents… It would hurt them.”
Schweb is a tall, broad-shouldered man of 33 with burnished skin and a sleek, shaved head – fashion rather than faith. He looks supercool, slightly menacing, but is a pussycat. His parents wanted him to go to Pakistan for a wife. “But going there to find someone… it’s no better than the Thai-bride thing. Is that what we are about?”
