Our tolerance let Islamist enemy within thrive
London has long been the world’s most cosmopolitan city, with a large proportion of its population foreignborn. But who would have thought that Manchester, too, had become such a centre of migration, with the largest concentration of Libyans in Britain?
And how do we explain the murderous hatred that the Manchester bomber, British-born child of refugee Libyans, felt for the society that sheltered his family?
For me, growing up in Bombay in the Fifties and Sixties, Britain was the centre of the European enlightenment ideas and culture we had imbibed through our British-established schools. Our parents’ independence movement had been inspired by British liberalism and the Mother of Parliaments at Westminster.
When I first visited London and met my parents’ cosmopolitan friends, I became aware that Britain had become a refuge for political and cultural exiles, ranging from central European intellectuals such as Arthur Koestler to the Indian dancer Ram Gopal. Britain offered a political tolerance, sexual freedom and intellectual creativity. Later, at Oxford, I learnt about waves of refugees from wars and political or religious persecution, from the 17th-century French Huguenots to 19th-century Jews fleeing Russian pogroms.
Left-wing revolutionaries had sheltered here, using Britain as a base for political agitprop. Karl Marx spent the second half of his life in Highgate, where he promoted his Communist Manifesto and wrote Das Kapital. Lenin spent years here, researching in the British Library and organising conferences of his socialist movement.
By the mid-20th century, Britain drew refugees fleeing despots, not just those seeking to escape with their lives, such as German Jews, Poles and Czechs fleeing Hitler and Stalin, but also political refugees, including those from the revolutionary Left seeking to overturn regimes back home. Despite their often extreme – even violent – beliefs directed homeward, however, an unwritten code of conduct followed by all such political refugees was to observe the rules of hospitality and offer no threat to their host country.
This has been under challenge since the Sixties, when the Trotskyist Pakistani leader Tariq Ali led demonstrations threatening the US embassy in London. Since then, immigration from the Muslim world has brought the conflicts of the Middle East to the UK in a way never envisaged by the architects of Britain’s liberal asylum laws.
The majority of post-Second World War immigration has been from the Indian subcontinent, supplemented by the many thousands of East African Asians fleeing Idi Amin. Most were Hindus and Sikhs from the Punjab and Gujarat, who have been remarkably successful career-wise while generally avoiding political agitation.
The East African Asians have led the way in providing the skilled doctors on whom the NHS relies and thriving local corner shops.
The story of Muslim migrants from Pakistan and Bangladesh is very dif- ferent. Their levels of education have remained relatively low and their place in the job market limited. Key factors holding back their integration have been the repression of Muslim women and the far stronger authority of their mosques and religious leaders.
In the Nineties, the hold of religion on UK Muslims was reinforced and inflamed by Islamist migrants from the Arab world. “Londonistan” became a hotbed of fundamentalist preachers and terrorists, plotting attacks in France and the Middle East. This influx of Islamist radicals feels no gratitude or loyalty. For second-generation British Arabs like Salman Abedi, Britain is a running dog of the great American Satan and its Jewish client state and is therefore a legitimate target.
Is British foreign policy, as the Corbynites claim, really a cause of terrorism? No doubt British involvement in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya figures prominently in propaganda. But there isn’t a shred of evidence to suggest that British withdrawal from such conflict zones would make an iota of difference to the enemy within.
The tolerance, secularism and liberalism that have allowed entry to such Islamist groups makes Britain a target, whatever its foreign policy. The diverse populations of cities such as London, Manchester and Birmingham are the product of a millennium in which Britain was the most culturally curious, adventurous and welcoming country in the world. The Islamist vipers in our bosom are the inevitable price of being both a global player and a tolerant, open society. No change in foreign policy can alter that reality.
Zareer Masani is a historian and author of (The Bodley Head, 2013)