After police stormed the house in Walthamstow and arrested terror suspect Asim Tariq, neighbors struggled to recall anything substantive about the family that had lived among them for 20 years.
The Tariq family was friendly to the mostly white neighbors on their leafy east London street, but their friends seemed to be exclusively Muslim, said next-door neighbor Jeffrey Matthews.
The father, an immigrant from Pakistan who worked for the Royal Mail, would wave, but he wasn’t the type to visit for tea, Matthews said. As a boy, Tariq, now 23, was often seen playing cricket in the street with other Pakistani kids.
But since the arrests, Matthews said he wonders if he had a distorted view of the family, and he finds himself becoming more suspicious of Muslims in general.
“I consider myself a pretty open-minded person–innocent until proven guilty and all that–but it seems in all these cases with Muslim terrorists, we don’t know a whole lot about the people,” Matthews said. “If what they [the police] have been saying is proved to be true, this may be the final nail in the coffin for the Muslims.”
The detention of 23 Muslim suspects in an alleged London-based plot to blow up U.S.-bound jets has added fuel to the long-running debate about the prominence of extremism in British Muslim society.
After the terror attacks that killed 52 London commuters July 7 last year, Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government has complained that Muslim clerics do too little to combat extremism in their mosques and neighborhoods.
But on the streets of Walthamstow in east London–particularly in the ethnic enclaves that have taken root around the neighborhood’s mosques and prayer halls–many Muslims blame the problem on British support of a U.S. foreign policy that is perceived as unjust to the Muslim world. That, they say, makes impressionable young men susceptible to the appeals of extremists.
A few blocks from Tariq’s home–in the part of Walthamstow with a heavy concentration of halal restaurants, Islamic bookstores and placards of prayers in Arabic that hang above the doors of homes–there is only outrage over the arrests and the certainty that the suspects are innocent.
After an evening of reading from the Koran, the young men at the Dar al-Uloom Qadria Jilania mosque and educational center sat on the prayer hall’s Oriental rugs with their imam leader and commiserated over tea and cookies.
It’s not that Muslims hate the West, explained Imam Sayed Gilani. But there is deep anger toward the governments of Britain and the U.S. because of their military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan and because of a foreign policy that seems unfairly skewed in favor of Israel, he said.
Gilani, 31, who moved to London from Pakistan in 1997 to become the No. 2 cleric at the mosque, said many of the problems for Muslims in the West are “because of the Jews” and media propaganda.
“I don’t believe everything they say [Osama] bin Laden’s done. It’s impossible,” Gilani said. He added, “You know there are CDs out there that tell us that the [World Trade Center towers] could not have collapsed because planes ran into them. The science shows that is not possible.”
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`Pretty good’ race relations
Few places in the world can have as many cultures, customs, languages and religions living elbow-to-elbow as Walthamstow, although four-fifths of the population of 80,000 is comprised of Muslims from South Asia. Along Hoe Street, the restaurants, cafes and take-outs tell the story: Caribbean, Chinese, Pakistani, Turkish, Polish, Irish, Cameroonian–and a McDonald’s.
Residents say race relations here are, in the phrase used by many, “pretty good,” although some Muslim youths say they fear discrimination.
No one denies that “extremist” elements exist among Walthamstow’s Muslims. Parliament member Neil Gerrard recalled that Omar Said Sheikh, an Al Qaeda operative convicted in Pakistan in the kidnapping and murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, grew up in a Pakistani family here.
Before Sept. 11, the British tradition of free speech exemplified by Hyde Park Corner made London the locus of the most extreme forms of Islam. In neighborhoods like Finsbury Park or Brixton, itinerant imams showed up to preach an incendiary doctrine that, among other things, called for stoning Jews and homosexuals to death.
The caustic rhetoric is not as evident these days, but there are still elements promoting terrorism in the name of Islam, according to British authorities.
Hanif Qadir, an activist who works with Walthamstow’s Muslim youth, said many imams “know a lot about religion” but little about life outside the mosque.
Many of the clerics speak limited English and deliver their Friday sermons in Urdu and Arabic and use fiery stories from the Koran that he worries are being used out of context.
These are “the same sermons that our prophet gave 1,400 years ago, about the issues surrounding the community at that time,” Qadir said.
“When you’ve got somebody 17 or 18 years old, it takes the right man half an hour to light the fuse,” Qadir says. “We really need to engage actively with our young people. Create more forums, create more resources.”
A survey conducted by the Federation of Student Islamic Societies, which represents about 90,000 Muslim students in Britain, found that most young people saw the clerics as out of touch and irrelevant.
Only 2 percent of the respondents said the mosque was their main source of religious knowledge; 7 percent cited the local imam. Twenty percent said they turned to their parents, but the vast majority cited books, pamphlets, Web sites, videos and informal study groups.
Integration idea questioned
Community leaders acknowledge that representatives of militant groups such as al-Muhajiroun and Hizb ut-Tahrir often show up at mosques to recruit, but they say they almost always receive a chilly reception.
As for those with truly malign intentions, community leaders say it is not realistic to expect the community to root them out, as the government demands.
“We don’t know who these people are. They don’t advertise. By nature, they are hidden,” said Mushtaq Ahmad, a community activist and former student union president in London.
Many of the young men who attend the Dar al-Uloom mosque wear their beards long as the Prophet Muhammad was said to have worn his, and sport long, flowing dishdashas.
One man, who would only identify himself as Mohammed, said he wears his beard shorter than the others to fit in at his day job downtown, and he’ll even occasionally have coffee with non-Muslim co-workers.
But Mohammed questions the need to integrate further.
“What do these guys want us to do to integrate? Go to the pub and get [drunk] like most Brits do? We don’t want anything to do with that kind of integration. We don’t want anything to do with that part of British culture,” he said.
In general, the British are far more open to Muslims practicing their religion than other Westerners, said Musab Bora, 29, who runs an Islamic Web site in Birmingham, a city with a large Muslim population.
“There are places in this country like Birmingham, where you can bank at an institution that doesn’t charge interest [in adherence with Islamic law], areas where none of the restaurants will serve alcohol out of respect to their customers,” Bora said. “People can live their lives without leaving their ethnic and religious community. That can also cause problems.”
Ahmad, the community leader in London, makes a distinction between integration, which he supports, and assimilation, which he argues is a “Eurocentric concept.”
“Muslims have to actively engage. They have to be part of this society, and that is what is sometimes lacking on our part,” he said.
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