Divided Britain
Sarfraz Manzoor is a study in integration: the son of Pakistani immigrants, married to a white Scot, raising mixed-race children. But in some parts of Britain, such stories are vanishingly rare. Manzoor went to Oldham to talk to people who don’t mix “We t
A am watching daughter,waitingthe five-month-oldEzra, sunny swings.in area playin springalsomy Laila,line My park five-year-oldwithto baby,day wife patientlygo me, andon and I and Parents childrenslides, the run chat park hurtle throughas is downtheir busy. tunnelsin that the could sandpit.and be mess takingIt is arounda place scene anywherein this park in in Britain, Hackney, but north London, the daughters of burkawearing Muslims are queuing with the sons of Hasidic Jewish fathers with long beards, ringlets and black hats. Turkish kids shoot down the slides followed by Afro-caribbean children, and alongside this multicultural melting pot is a generous helping of middle-class white British parents.
There is also my own family. I am of Pakistani Muslim heritage and my wife is a white Scot who was raised with woolly Christianity by English parents. We have two children with dual heritage. I want Laila and Ezra to grow up in a country where they feel at ease with both sides of their religious and ethnic inheritance, but we live at a time when Britain feels ever more divided. Many question whether it is even possible to integrate Islam within mainstream society. That fear is renewed with each killing in the name of Islam – the attack in Westminster and the bombing at the Manchester Arena being two examples that took place while I was writing this piece. Last December, Dame Louise Casey published a controversial study into social integration that found, among other things, “high levels of social and economic isolation in some places, and cultural and religious practices in communities that are not only holding some of our citizens back, but run contrary to British values and sometimes our laws”. In this dark time in which we live, when radicals blow up young girls going to their first pop concert, it isn’t always easy to believe that there need not be a clash of cultures. But, for the sake of my children, I want and have to believe that what binds us together as British is greater than what divides us. In order to find out what we might all do to work towards a more united kingdom, I decided to step out of my north London metropolitan bubble and head north.
Imran runs a general store in Glodwick, a part of Oldham that has one of the highest concentrations of Muslims anywhere in the country. The store sells a range of things, from canned foods to children’s toys and mobile phone accessories. Imran is behind the till and, during the couple of hours I spend with him, he serves a succession of customers who are young and old, male and female – but every single one is Asian. That is not surprising: a study last year found that Oldham was one of the ten most segregated places in Britain. “If a white person was to walk down the street, I swear nine out of ten people would crane their neck to look at them,” Imran says. He doesn’t mince his words when describing
the attitudes of some in his community. “There are lots of advantages to living here. We have our mosques and a real sense of community. But we are not mixed in – we don’t integrate with people. We don’t do it and it’s wrong.” It isn’t easy to integrate with white people as there hardly seem to be any left in Glodwick. “The only white people you see are the oldtimers,” Imran says, “people who’ve lived here for years and can’t afford to move from here.” The
Muslim community in Glodwick has its origins in Pakistan and Bangladesh, and some of the outdated attitudes and traditions from over there have been imported into this country. “I have mates who don’t take their wives to town,” Imran tells me. “They’ll take them out twice a year, on their birthdays and their anniversaries. You have Asians where the men will walk yards ahead of the wife.”
I recognise the world he describes, because it is the one I grew up in. My childhood was spent in Luton – initially in Bury Park, an area that is overwhelmingly Muslim, like Glodwick. Everything from the shops we frequented to my parents’ social circle was Asian. “The thing about parallel lives is that this segregation is at all levels,” says Ted Cantle, who wrote a report into the 2001 riots in Oldham, Burnley and Bradford. “Kids go to school in a different environment, parents work in separate areas, residential areas were also separate, and so were social and cultural lives.” That pretty much sums up what my childhood looked like in the 1980s, and it is how some communities in Britain continue to live. When one grows up segregated from mainstream society, it isn’t always easy to know which country one is living in, or where to pledge allegiance. In the shop with Imran is his cousin Eyaz. “Ask him where he has been in the world,” says Imran. “Pakistan,” replies Eyaz. “That’s our country, isn’t it?” “See what I mean?” says Imran. “Typical. ‘That’s our country.’ No, it’s not. You were born here.” “Our parents come from there,” Eyaz says. “Our parents do,” counters Imran. “But you don’t. Why don’t you move there if it’s your country?”
The Fatima Women’s Association is a four-minute walk from Imran’s store. Inside, more than a dozen women are waiting for me. They are mostly in headscarves, are of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin and have lived in Britain for anything from eight months to 33 years. In her report, Casey found that “by faith, the Muslim population has the highest number and proportion of people aged 16 and over who cannot speak English well or at all”. The women in the room are among about 100 women from Glodwick who attend thrice-weekly English language classes, funded by BBC Children in Need. “We can’t survive here without learning English,” says one (in Urdu). “If I
want to go to the doctor, I don’t want to use an interpreter – I want to learn to speak for myself.”
There seems to be no lack of enthusiasm to learn the language, but there is also deep apprehension, bordering on fear, of what English culture is and how it may damage their families. “We tell our children to make friends, but make sure they are Asian friends and not white ones,” one woman says. “Why? Because they have a different culture.” I ask what they think constitutes British, or English, culture. “Their culture is drinking, partying, boyfriends, sex and tolerating things that are not allowed in Islam,” says another. “As parents, we don’t want our children to follow that, so we try to limit their freedom. We are scared they will lose their culture.” When I ask the women to raise their hands if they have a white friend, not one does.
When I was eight years old, we moved from a very Asian area of Luton to a very white area. I met white kids who became my friends, and I met their parents. I learnt that the things I’d been told about the otherness of white people were untrue. After university, I entered an industry – the media – that isn’t exactly overflowing with minorities. When I got married, I chose a love marriage with a white woman rather than an arranged marriage with an Asian woman. My own integration was due to where I lived, was educated, worked and, finally, who I married. Each of those choices put me in situations where I interacted with white people.
When I travelled up to Oldham, I was looking to find a community that felt the polar opposite of the one I live in now – as closed and monocultural as Hackney feels open and multicultural. The truth is more nuanced. Even in places that may appear dismayingly conservative and closed, there are reasons to feel hopeful. At the Fatima Women’s Association, when one of the women starts claiming that English culture is all about alcohol, she is immediately challenged by another woman, also a devout Muslim, but who has actual experience of white people because she works in a Manchester city centre bank. “When I go out with the people at work, we will have soft drinks or coffees,” she says, “but they are still British.” When I ask the women for their views on marrying outside their faith, there are some who say it is against Islam, but others who think it acceptable. Again, there is no single, settled opinion. Imran, the shop owner in Glodwick, is married to a white woman. He has not been ostracised by his family and, he tells me, it is happening more frequently. “It is good to marry outside of your community. It can open your mind,” he says, adding: “Never mind marrying English, just marrying outside your family can widen your thinking! There are still loads of first-cousin marriages going on here.”
Another reason for hope is that places like Glodwick are rare. “Eighty percent of the wards in Britain are 90% white,” says Eric Kaufmann, professor of politics at Birkbeck College, University of London, “and there are 500 heavily diverse wards where minorities are in the majority. If you take the big picture, what we are seeing is that minorities are moving out of their areas of concentration and winding up in mixed-minority or super-diverse areas where you have lots of groups living side by side.” Hackney, then, may not be a bubble, it may be the future.
“To help bind Britain together,” wrote Dame Louise Casey in her review, “we need more opportunities for those from disadvantaged communities, particularly women, and more mixing between people from different backgrounds.” Few would argue with that, but how do we achieve it? It is not fair to place the blame exclusively on minority communities. It can be hard for them to become more integrated if the white British keep leaving or aren’t interested in mixing. “We recently signed up for a partnership project,” Shabana from the Fatima Women’s Association tells me. “I said, ‘Get the white girls to come and we can do some cultural cooking.’” Nine Muslim girls came, but only three white English. She tells me about another instance where they tried to run a cohesion project in an arts centre. They brought ten Asian women, but the only white people who attended were the mother and daughter who ran the arts centre, and a cleaner. “It is always the Asian side that makes the effort,” Shabana says. “We never see anything from the white side. It has to work both ways, or it won’t work at all.”
Teaching English to Muslim women is laudable and important, but for Ted Cantle, such classes are also a missed opportunity. “I would use these schemes to bring people together,” he says. “Every Muslim woman should be assigned a buddy from another community who helps with conversational English, who takes them into their home for a meal.” Bangladeshi and Pakistani women would not only have the opportunity to improve their conversational English, they would also begin to build relationships across communities. “There is no reason why schools cannot be more mixed,” adds Cantle. “They could set limits from certain communities and have catchment areas that cut across communities, as well as having feeder schools into secondary schools that deliberately mix up the school population.” Outside formal education, schemes such as the National Citizen Service – in which 100,000 young people take part annually – could be extended. “The resources we are talking about are tiny,” Cantle says. “What it costs to arrange English classes in a different way, or to talk to schools about encouraging diverse school populations, is relatively small, but it could pay big dividends socially, culturally and economically.”
There is no simple way to combat radicalism, but to me it seems obvious that part of the solution is to encourage everyone to believe that this country is their home. As with any home, there will be things one may not like, but if you truly believe it to be your home, you are unlikely to want to blow it up, or to kill those who share it with you. The path to a greater sense of belonging requires many things, but most importantly it needs us to find a place between blame and victimhood; the rest of the country has to stop blaming all Muslims, while Muslims need to stop retreating to victimhood each time anyone suggests there may be some issues that need confronting.
When I imagine the future, I see two possible roads: one in which communities pull further apart, tensions keep rising and things turn increasingly violent. The other is where we fight for what we have in common – fight for every heart and mind – and in so doing, this country will be strengthened and enriched. This is the new battle for Britain. And for the sake of my children, the other children playing together in that sun-drenched Hackney park, and the coming generations in the country beyond, it is a battle that must be joined and won.
A longer version of this article first appeared in The Sunday Times. © The Sunday Times/news Syndication.