RECONCILIATION KEY TO CURB HATE CRIMES

The word “revenge” may hold the key. Asked why the Manchester suicide bomber, Salman Abedi, 22, did what he did, his 18year-old sister, Jomana, replied her brother may have been reacting to US-led strikes in West Asia. “He saw the explosives America drops on children in Syria, and he wanted revenge.” Others may feel as strongly about Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, countries that have never recovered from US-led interventions.

This is not to say that the 6 per cent of Britain’s population that is Muslim is just waiting for a chance to attack white Christians. But the simmering discontent of the few that resulted in what is called 7/7 – the London bombings of 7 July 2005 in which 56 people, including the four perpetrators, were killed, and 784 injured – cannot be overlooked. As one of the four, 30-year-old Mohammad Sidique Khan, a married man with a child, said in his native Yorkshire accent, “We are at war and I am a soldier.” Khan, a teaching assistant and the oldest of the bombers, was thought to have taken the lead role in the murderous plot. His suicide mission sought vengeance for Britain's invasion of Iraq.

Khan was British by birth though of Pakistani origin. Abedi was also British-born but of Libyan parentage. Had they ever met, they would have had to speak in English. Islam was the only bond. The friction between these individuals and the state that gave them refuge cannot be elevated to some grandiose clash of civilisations. Shehzad Tanweer, the 22-year-old member of Khan’s group, cannot even have understood the implications of Samuel Huntington’s thesis, even if he had heard of it. That implies an historical cause and a well-defined mission to realise it. Khan, Abedi and the dozens of other young immigrants who are swept away by murderous fanaticism are unlikely to think in such logical terms. Other Muslims do. The Palestinian refugee is fighting for the tangible end of a lost homeland he hopes to recover. The avowed intention of terrorists who march under the banner of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant is to control a tract of territory in which their religion alone will dominate. Egyptian militants want to purge their country of Coptic Christians.

But immigrants like Abedi and Khan pursue a personal vendetta. Their problems are rooted in dislocation and maladjustment which is reflected in their frequent changes of attire – from Western clothes to long tunics, baggy trousers and turbans. They are torn between two identities. Friends from Khan’s teenage years recall a highly Westernised young man who insisted on being called “Sid”. Could it be that he felt rejected in his efforts to identify with the host country? Abedi thought the imam at the South Manchester mosque he attended wasn’t militant enough. He wanted to chant his prayers aloud in the street. He felt frustrated in the small things of daily life. A middleaged white man driving a van in Manchester the other day hurled a string of racist obscenities at a South Asian motorist, little realising that the latter was not only a third generation Briton (albeit of Pakistani descent) but a trauma and orthopaedic surgeon who spent all his time at the Salford Royal Hospital attending to the suffering victims of Abedi’s bombing. It should surprise no one if in future the surgeon, Naveed Yasin, is tempted to take a jaundiced view of whites he has always regarded as his own people.

The roots of Muslim disgruntlement in the West deserve study. James Baldwin, the black American writer, once said he would never know if the lift man kept him waiting because he was black or the lift really was busy. It’s the same with Muslims. Most Hindus believe that India’s British rulers pampered Muslims and urged the formation of the Muslim League in 1906 under the aegis of Nawab Sir Salimullah Khan of Dacca with the even more loyal Aga Khan III as first honorary president to counter the increasingly influential Indian National Congress which had been founded in 1885. But neither Hindu belief nor the participation in the Congress movement of some distinguished “nationalist Muslims” meant there were no exclusively Muslim grievances.

Some grievances may have lingered since the 1857 uprising and the final collapse of the titular Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar. He was an especially emotive figure for Muslims, and some simple members of the community argued even in 1947 that the British had taken sovereignty from Muslims and should return it to them. The British war against Turkey, the seat of the highest Islamic functionary (“the Shadow of God on Earth”), was another complaint that Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and others tried to take advantage of with the Khilafat movement to save the caliphate from extinction. Many Indian Muslim soldiers resented having to fight Turkey, which was one of the reasons why Indian Muslims in the 5th Light Infantry mutinied in Singapore on 15 February 1915.

This little known upsurge lasted seven days before it was suppressed by British forces and allied naval detachments. During that time it resulted in the deaths of eight British officers and soldiers; two Malay officers and a soldier; 14 British civilians; five Chinese and Malay civilians; and a German internee. The aftermath was almost as terrible as in India after the 1857 mutiny. More than 200 sepoys were court-martialled, and 47 were executed. Sixty-four mutineers were transported for life, and 73 sentenced to imprisonment ranging from seven to 20 years. The public executions by firing squad took place at Outram Prison, and were witnessed by an estimated 15,000 people. Who knows what message the gory scene sent back to Muslim communities in the Indian subcontinent and elsewhere?

It’s never easy to disentangle cause and effect, as Patrick Mercer, the British Conservative government’s homeland security spokesman, pointed out after the 2005 London bombings. Harking back to Margaret Thatcher’s famous comment that publicity is oxygen for terrorists, he felt concerned that by showing Khan reading out his last message, alJazeera TV gave the terrorists a platform. “AlJazeera has now specifically named Britain through two tapes, one by al-Qaeda number two Ayman al-Zawahiri and now by Mohammad Sidique Khan,” he said. “These messages are definite acts of war by our enemies to encourage suicide bombers.”

The doubling of anti-Muslim hate crimes from 24 to 56 after the May 22 bombing means they will be further encouraged unless Britain finds a way of reconciling Muslim immigrants to the British state and its values and culture. With some predicting that the UK’s Muslim population will increase to 26 million by 2051, it’s a warning the authorities cannot afford to ignore.

ABEDI and the dozens of other young immigrants who are swept away by murderous fanaticism are unlikely to think in logical terms. Other Muslims do. The Palestinian refugee is fighting for the tangible end of a lost homeland he hopes to recover. The avowed intention of terrorists who march under the banner of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant is to control a tract of territory in which their religion alone will dominate.