Last Thursday morning as I walked down Folkestone Road in Walthamstow to my home two streets away, I listened intently on my mobile phone to a friend tell me about the overnight police raids in his home town of High Wycombe. I passed a house that had been cordoned off by police, but it never occurred to me that something untoward had also happened in my neighbourhood.
Walthamstow is like any other anonymous London suburb flourishing from the overspill of city dwellers from areas such as Islington and Hackney. The streets are leafy and many homes sell for a handsome £500,000. We are an increasingly diverse community: despite the large number of Pakistanis who settled there in the 1960s and 1970s, it is no longer an exclusively Muslim area and there are a number of Polish, Somali and Turkish residents.
Yet when I got home and switched on the television, I realised we were now a town under siege, forever cloaked in suspicion and stained by the infamous terrorist label.
I do not know any of the people arrested last week; but since the July 7 bombings a year ago I have studied the behaviour of disaffected young Muslims in Britain who have been lured into the extremist snare.
When I investigated this issue for Channel 4’s Dispatches last autumn I concluded that the disaffected of this generation were frustrated by the restrictive clan system — called Biraderi — inherent in many Pakistani communities and the wider emphasis on individualism espoused by the state.
In Beeston, where two of the London bombers had lived, integration with the wider community was minimal, education poor and the job prospects bleak. The “orphans of Islam” who emerged were angry and directionless, susceptible to adopting a new political Islamic identity.
The arrests last week, however, have suggested something very different. Many of those arrested are middle class and well-educated. They do not appear to have been brainwashed by aggravating imams like Omar Bakri or Abu Hamza or by militant groups while travelling in Pakistan.
Many appear to have been following a sensible career path. If any of those arrested are subsequently convicted, does it mean there is a new class of extremist? Has the mindset of young British Muslims changed since last year? Can the bomber become mainstream? Despite all the government rhetoric in the post 9/11 era that better integration is the key to winning the war on terror, most of the people arrested last week were fully assimilated. We learnt that Oliver Savant, 25, who was arrested at his parents’ home in Folkestone Road runs an event management company with his brother Adam. He had only recently decided to convert to Islam and change his name to Ibrahim and he is expecting a child with his new wife Atika.
But he is now under suspicion for helping to plan what would have been the worst terrorist attack in recent history. Why would such a person, seemingly with everything to live for, allegedly want to engage in terrorism against his own country? If they are representative, the only plausible answer is to consider their supposed ideology. They have enjoyed the freedoms and reaped the benefits of our liberal democracy and capitalist economy, and we should consider that they are not acting entirely on the basis of an extreme religious conviction.
Instead, at the root of this ideology are the various wars in the Middle East. There is an incredible sense of betrayal and deep resentment among the Islamic community at the government’s failure to intervene in the Lebanon crisis, which is compounded by the number of civilian deaths in Iraq every day.
Those in their early twenties — like most of the suspects — have been caught up in the war on terror for much of their adult lives. They have seen their fellow Muslims being killed in wars conducted by their own government and they feel responsible.
Consequently, many young British Muslims live in a dual reality. They have had a good education and enjoy a great sense of personal empowerment, but they lack figureheads to help them unravel the burdens of their experience of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the 7/7 bombings and other trials, such as the Danish cartoon crisis.
Even in Walthamstow the Muslim community is still dominated by its elders. They control the mosques, they decide who gets elected to the local councils; yet despite everything that has happened since the 7/7 attacks, there is very little evidence of community initiatives to address the issues and concerns troubling young Muslims.
The kind of Islam practised here is a very passive. It focuses on personal responsibility, but it doesn’t properly address the reality of life outside the mosque. It’s theoretical, it’s old church and it’s suited to someone living in Pakistan.
The imams don’t understand the realities of living in contemporary British society. The imam at my local mosque, for example, insists on speaking Urdu instead of English during his sermon, although very few youngsters can understand him.
It is frightening to think of the consequences if the suspects did pose a genuine threat and were able to execute their alleged plan to blow up passenger planes over the Atlantic. Britain’s Muslim community does not deny that these people exist or that bigger problems lurk around the corner.
Last week’s events have turned the spotlight back on the Muslim community and there will be calls for us to root out any more alleged plotters lurking in the shadows. The problem is there is no specific Muslim community in Walthamstow. Like many other residents I work in the centre of London and mix with people from all persuasions. Walthamstow is not a ghetto in the mould of Beeston and we do not have an official representative or figurehead.
Instead, a number of disillusioned youngsters feel more attached to the global community via the internet than they do to their immediate community on the ground.
In general terms, as second or third-generation Britons, we are very patriotic: in every Pakistani community this summer people wore England shirts during the World Cup.
But the majority of British Muslims cannot forgive the government for embarking on a series of wars in which hundreds of fellow innocent Muslims have died.
Navid Akhtar was speaking to Peter Hall
