TAHIR ABBAS
MICHEL ELTCHANINOFF
Islamophobia and Radicalisation
A Vicious Cycle
Inside the Mind of Marine Le Pen
HURST & COMPANY, LONDON3
3
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Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
© Tahir Abbas, 2019
First published in the United Kingdom in 2019 by C. Hurst & Co. (Publishers) Ltd
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ISBN 9780190083410
To the pioneers, forever in your footsteps
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book took nothing less than every fibre of my being. I began with the aspiration of intersecting two aspects of my work that have evolved separately over a two-decade period, namely my studies of Islamophobia and radicalisation. I wanted to traverse the parallels, to see, feel and recall, understanding their development over time, reflecting on the recent past.
I began writing this book during my time at New York University in late 2015. This opportunity furnished me with the necessary time and space to think and engage with the history, arts and culture of Manhattan while contemplating the issues I was investigating. Little was I to know that a certain well-known neighbour on my street would be elected president of the United States less than twelve months later. After returning to Istanbul in January 2016, where I was a professor of sociology, I continued to develop my thoughts during a period of growing political and ethnic conflict across the Middle East that had also begun to affect Turkey. However, when President Tayyip Erdoğan took measures to crush the foundation that supported my university, I hurried to the relative safety of London and the offices of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in Whitehall, London. I arrived in the UK a few days after the Brexit vote of 23 June 2016. In the following year, as my work on countering violent extremism at RUSI went on in earnest, five terrorist attacks were carried out on UK soil.With Islamic
State’s (ISIS) Caliphate collapsing in Iraq and Syria, copycat terrorists were causing havoc and misery in British society. I wrote the bulk of this book during the periods immediately after those heightened phases of alarm and disquiet caused by terrorism, a migration phenomenon that created considerable political discord across the Global North, and the folly of Brexit, which was generating unremitting tensions at home. I finished this book in The Hague, where I currently live, work and teach.
I would like to thank my colleagues in New York, Istanbul, London and The Hague for their listening ears and warm smiles as I ranted and raged at the wickedness around me. I thank the Institute of Security and Global Affairs of Leiden University for allowing me the opportunity to work with my ebullient colleagues here, for the space to think and write, and also to engage with incisive and determined students. Last but not least, I would like to thank Michael Dwyer for agreeing to take on this book project over a fine sushi luncheon one spring afternoon in Covent Garden, and Farhaana Arefin for her meticulous editorial work. Any errors that remain are of my own making.
CHRONOLOGY
1973–4 Arab Oil Crisis—neoliberalism takes over as the postwar welfare system faces pressures from states looking to the financial sector to shore up indigenous growth and domestic demand; Western powers take further steps to secure their interests in Middle East oil
1975 Fall of Saigon, at the hands of the North Vietnamese Army
1978–9 UK Winter of Discontent
1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan
The Siege of Mecca
Iran, last of the classical social revolutions moves to a theocracy
Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto hanged by General Zia-ul-Haq, who introduces Islamisation to Pakistan
Conser vative Party wins power in the UK, Margaret Thatcher becomes prime minister
1980s Reaganomics in the United States and Thatcherism in the UK introduces privatisation of public utilities and further deregulation of the banking sectors
1980–8
Iran–Iraq War, both sides armed by the West
1981 Presiden Anwar Sadat of Egypt assassinated by Islamic Jihad
1981 Inner-city r iots in Handsworth, Toxteth and Brixton
1982 Falklands War victory over Argentina
1983 Second ter m for the Conservative Party
1984–5
UK miner s’ strike
1987 Blac k Monday, due to Hong Kong-led global stock market crash
1989 Salman Rushdie Affair erupts
The Berlin Wall falls, precipitating the end of the Cold War
1991–5 Bosnian War
1992 Exc hange Rate Mechanism debacle causes a run on the pound
1995 Srebrenica Massacre
1997 New Labour elected, applying ‘The Third Way’ doctrine
2001 ‘Nor thern Disturbances’ in Burnley, Bradford and Oldham
The events of 9/11, followed by the ‘war on terror’ and the invasion of Afghanistan
2003 Invasion of Iraq to eliminate ‘weapons of mass destruction’
2004–5 ‘Home-g rown’ terrorist attacks in Madrid, Amsterdam and London
2008
Global financial cr isis due to subprime mortgage collapse
Barac k Hussein Obama elected as forty-fourth US president, and first African American to take office
2010 UK Conser vative–Liberal Democrat coalition introduces austerity in public spending
2011 Occupy movement in the West, Arab Spring in the MENA region
Fall of Gaddafi government in Libya
2014
Emergence of the Islamic State as self-declared Caliphate in Iraq and Syria
2015 Ger many accepts 1 million refugees
2016
2017–present
Assassination of Jo Cox MP by Thomas Mair
UK Brexit vote defined by hostility to immigration and the EU
Election of Donald Trump as forty-fifth US president
Islamist-inspired attacks in the United States and the EU grow as the Islamic State’s Caliphate collapses
Centre ground in politics hollowed out
Far-left and far-right discourses in the ascendency
A sustained rise in Islamophobia and far-right extremism
Muslim groups and other minorities face heightened levels of racism and discrimination
Rampant neoliberalism creates a backlash against globalisation, which is organised locally, but is misdirected at the centre of politics
Growth of hyper-ethnic nationalism and white supremacism as forms of political mobilisation from both above and below in an age of psychopolitics across North America and Western Europe
PREFACE
A TRYST WITH DESTINY
Being and becoming are in a perennial state of transition and transformation. This is no less true in my own case, having been born in a city that designed the shackles and invented the steam engines that made the Atlantic slave trade a highly efficient but deadly instrument of power. I am the grandson of a British Indian merchant seaman who risked his life for the ‘mother country’ during the Second World War during the Battle of Singapore in 1942. I am the son of a man who drove an omnibus every day for forty years. This book is both a personal and intellectual journey of the mind, the soul, of my being and my becoming. It is also the story of the concepts of Islamophobia and radicalisation—two themes that have led to a reinforced focus on Muslims, both in Britain and elsewhere in the West.
Sometime in the mid-1700s, Allah Ditta and his two brothers migrated to an area in what was haughtily called British India. This group of three men established a village known as Ankar-Bachlakra, located in the expansive city of Dadyal, in what is now Azad Kashmir. Ankar is a cluster of ten villages, with Bachlakra situated at the centre of this constellation. Altogether, seventy or so other villages are spread across a plain on this mountainous terrain. The Ditta brothers were of
PREFACE
Bhatti Rajput descent. Their ancestors converted to Islam in the 1600s, during the time of the Mughals. Since the inception of the village some years later, these Bachlakrans gradually multiplied, establishing thirty-two households. Today, the village is all but empty—a ghost town, with mere flickers of a once-thriving community that had longstanding relations with the local geography and its people. Emigrating Bachlakrans were pioneers in the first waves of migration following the reconstruction of Britain in the late 1940s. Over time, subsequent Bachlakrans migrated west, as did many others from Dadyal, in the process becoming a transnational community. They established multigenerational diasporas, primarily in the city of Birmingham, with some Bachlakrans subsequently moving and starting a new life in New York City in the 1970s.1
Life in Kashmir is generally unforgiving. The norm is for sizzling summer months, heavy tail-end monsoon rains and biting frosty winters, followed by a brief but cool spring. In the past, Kashmiris maintained their existence in subsistence-level economies, and if the harvests failed, the villagers suffered immeasurably. When the crops became insufficient to meet Bachlakra’s dietary and economic needs, and with no other economic opportunities, the early generations began searching for a better life. Perhaps they also wanted to see the world. In the 1930s, with India still under British colonial rule, word spread that the Bombay-based British Merchant Navy was recruiting workers to stoke the fires of its fleet. In the hope of a brighter future, a few of the men from Bachlakra made the long trek to Bombay seeking work on the ships. Demand from the recruiters was so great that they encouraged many more to join the band of committed labourers.2 The British, however, also showed signs of racial prejudice. They believed that Indian men were somehow inferior, making them perfectly suited to work in poor conditions, in the face of red-hot coal-furnaces that powered the steam ships that carried the goods to service the empire. British seamen also exhibited signs of resistance towards South Asians on the steamships themselves.3 Yet, ultimately, while the toil was harsh and difficult, it was eminently more secure than life as a humble farmer.
My paternal grandfather Zaman Ali and his close relative Ghulam Rasool were so keen to join the Merchant Navy that they hitchhiked their way from Kashmir to Bombay sometime in the early 1930s. It
was a trek of over 1,100 miles. On the ships, away for many months at a time sailing on the high seas, they visited all the world’s major ports. As the Second World War progressed, the British Merchant Navy was obliged to take an active part in supplying important equipment to service the war effort in affected areas. Unsurprisingly, these two brothers and many others from Bachlakra who worked as lascars found themselves caught up in the action. During the Battle of Singapore (1942), the Germans torpedoed their steam ship, and they jumped into the waters to save their lives. The Japanese fished both brothers, along with other Bachlakrans, out of the sea but then incarcerated a few in the infamous prisons of Burma, where they were forced into hard labour, building roads and railways until they were liberated once the war ended. After the war, most were back on the high seas, labouring on the SS Empire Fowey, which was managed as a troopship by the P&O from 1946.
The end of the Second World War precipitated the end of empire, and British India was destined for a new dawn—a tryst with destiny, no less.4 But partition in 1947 saw the beginning of a different era. Many of the villages in and around the area of Ankara were Muslim, but there were also some that were Hindu and a few that were Sikh. It was the time of Hari Singh and of the Dogra zamana (era). Maharajah Hari Singh, ruler of Kashmir, dithered over which side to join after partition. Was it to be Pakistan or India? Around 80 per cent of the territory of Jammu and Kashmir was Muslim, but influenced by Nehru, of Pandit Kashmiri origin, and Sheikh Abdullah, a Kashmiri Muslim dubbed the ‘Lion of Kashmir’ and a staunch secularist, Hari Singh did not want Kashmir to join Pakistan. Sheikh Abdullah believed that feudalism would reign and did not consider Mohammed Ali Jinnah capable of alleviating it. Hari Singh wanted Kashmir to be independent from India and Pakistan, but with the ‘K’ in Pakistan representing Kashmir, Pakistan was incensed. Communal violence ensued. Although the elders of Bachlakra rarely spoke of the women and young girls on both sides who were captured and raped, official and personal accounts state that, throughout Kashmir, from the announcement of partition to the time when Hari Singh finally made his decision to join India less than two months later, killings and plunder were frequent occurrences.5 Outnumbered, the Hindus around Bachlakra left for the
Indian side. Other Muslims emerged from the surrounding villages and took over Hindu- and Sikh-owned land as their own.
The idea that there was an indivisible unified Kashmir in the first instance, however, is a misnomer. The territory is divided now, as it was then, although both India and Pakistan have claimed it and fought each other over it three times. In 1947, Pakistan formally annexed a section to the east and north of the region, Jammu, known as Azad Kashmir. Neither Kashmiri nor Pakistani, Azad Kashmir has its own distinct identity but no international legal status. Well before partition, Azadis from Jammu started the movement that led to the struggle for unification with Pakistan. The level of violence and conflict was greater in the Azad Kashmir region (as a proportion of the population), but a forgotten history of its people endures, as historians and political scientists tend to focus on the numerically significant dislocation of the people of the Punjab. Partition occurred at the heart of a greater India torn in two, causing the flight of 10 million people and the loss of 1 million lives on both sides. It was the largest forced exodus of the twentieth century.6
After the Second World War, domestic demand began to increase in Britain. Indigenous workers did not want to work in the less desirable employment sectors and instead sought higher standards of living in other roles. While many returned to Kashmir as partition was looming, many other Bachlakrans came to Britain in 1945 to find employment in Birmingham’s engineering and manufacturing sectors, often jumping ship at the ports in Dover and Liverpool, too. Others joining these pioneers of the late 1940s and 1950s formed a wave that continued for two decades, peaking in the early 1960s. In 1957, my father arrived in Birmingham at the age of seventeen. Two years later, his uncle Abbas Ali came to the UK, aged sixty-one, but his father Zaman Ali stayed behind. A decade older, Zaman Ali held the responsibility of being the village lambardar—a hereditary, state-appointed position in which he was responsible for collecting taxes and resolving any local land disputes. The now Birmingham-based Bachlakrans worked in the older parts of the city, living in multiple-occupancy dwellings, with up to ten to a house. Many worked night shifts and slept during the day while the day
workers were out at work.7 They hoped to save all their money to send ‘back home’ as remittances to their families, but, importantly, they also viewed their stay as temporary. Without doubt, majority British society shared this view.8 Men from numerous other Azad Kashmiri villages also settled in towns and cities such as Birmingham, Bradford and Bolton, and they too worked in the industrial, manufacturing and engineering sectors of the economy. Many had links to the former British Empire through their time in the Indian Army or as merchant seamen. African Caribbeans, including those of the Windrush generation who came as British citizens from 1948 onwards, were largely forced to live in the poorer parts of West and South London to take up employment, mainly in the transport and health sectors.9
In the early 1960s, Pakistan set about building the largest dam in South Asia in the Mirpur area of Azad Kashmir. The Mangla Dam megaproject, however, led to immense dislocation and relocation. As the submergence of over 200 villages was necessary to build the dam, villagers received compensation for the loss of their land and property. Now with the money to buy an airline ticket to Britain, some of the younger men also began to join the others now establishing themselves as British Pakistanis all over the country in a chain migration process. The common academic and policy parlance was to refer to these groups as British Pakistanis, but they were a burgeoning Azad Kashmiri diaspora, largely because of the creation of the dam and due to the link to the Merchant Navy. Despite the historical linkage to empire, the visible presence of groups in parts of towns and cities generated alarm among British policymakers in general and among the white English working class in particular, which was beginning to exhibit a form of racism inherited from British colonialism and the civilising missionary zeal of days past.10 In 1961, Abbas Ali had a tragic traffic accident that left him mortally wounded. He died on the way to hospital. He was one of the first British Pakistanis flown back to their family villages for burial, in his case in the ancestral burial grounds of Bachlakra. By 1962, legislation prevented primary economic migration, replacing it with a voucher system where additional workers entered the country only if existing workers sponsored them. This accelerated the process of chain migration. In 1963, my father made the decision to return to Azad Kashmir to marry my mother, who hails from a village to the west of Azadi territory—in the city of Jhelum.11
PREFACE
When British policymakers changed the legislation again in 1968, ending the voucher system, single Azad Kashmiri men were left with the choice of staying in Britain on their own or bringing over their remaining dependants. Many chose the latter option; however, doing so meant the inevitable concentration of populations in the same poorer parts of towns and cities, with increasing demand for housing, education and health in under-resourced areas. The policy was designed to halt immigration, but in practice it did the exact opposite. Nor did it abate the racial tensions between poor white groups and ethnic minorities. From the 1940s to the 1960s, young men continued to leave the village of Bachlakra, with spouses joining husbands who had migrated earlier. Presently, the graveyard that sits in one corner of the village contains numerous unmarked graves, including those of the elders. With a few exceptions, the dates of those who passed away end at around the early 2000s. Later British-born generations are now burying their loved ones in increasingly expansive cemeteries in the Midlands and the North.
At present, Birmingham-based grandparents are slowly disappearing, but some Bachlakran grandchildren continue to extend the chains of familial relations. The future of the village is of a thriving transnational community of Bhatti Rajput Bachlakrans, who are closely connected but far away from their origins, never to return on a permanent basis. The British Bachlakran diaspora is currently in its fourth generation. Around 5,000 people are now the direct descendants of the three brothers who began the journey over 300 years ago. As many as 4,000 or so live in Birmingham, the city of my birth, with a few hundred spread over various towns and cities in other parts of the Midlands, and around 100 in Bradford and the surrounding areas, and thirty or so in Brooklyn, New York.
On the fateful morning of Tuesday, 11 September 2001, I was working on my computer in my study, getting ready to shadow the visits of a researcher to various homes in Coventry. I had been employed to help carry out a large national survey funded by the Home Office in London, my employer at the time. In stepping downstairs from my study, a newsflash interrupted the general gamut of irreverent daytime
television. Unfolding before my eyes was the ghastly aftermath of a terrible freak accident in New York City—or so I thought. Moments later, a second plane hit the second tower of the World Trade Center. Soon after, pictures emerged from Washington revealing the impact of another plane attack, this time striking the Pentagon.
Looking in amazement at these images, vivid but scrambled thoughts rushed through my mind: had someone declared war on the United States? How had a foreign entity been able to invade US airspace with such ease? Surely, no one in the world had the means, the logistical capability or the sheer gall to strike out at this colossus caught sleeping. At the time, the idea that some deranged so-called Muslims had carried out a suicide-attack on the ‘Great Satan’ seemed utterly implausible. If that were the case, Muslims across the globe would now be at the mercy of the angry response that would undoubtedly ensue. Other immediate questions also came to the fore. The ‘why’ question was easy to answer, as any number of countries across the world had gripes against the United States for all sorts of deep-rooted grievances affecting their peoples, nations and civilisations. Answers to the ‘how’ question, which focused on the mechanisms and processes, on the other hand, only became apparent in the clear light of day.12
Since the end of the Cold War, the Muslim world has faced its own internal challenges of democracy and development. The US and Western European countries no longer had a single enemy that could be defined in straightforward ideological terms, as had been the case with the former Soviet empire. During the 1990s, conflict in Algeria, Somalia, Sudan, Nigeria and Bosnia, together with Russia’s military intervention in Chechnya and the internal struggles within Afghanistan and Pakistan, suggested there were deep-seated problems within these countries. The events of 9/11, with fifteen of the nineteen hijackers having Saudi origins, furthered the impression that something deeply problematic was going on in the Muslim world. As the ‘policeman’ of the world, the United States now had the necessary rationale to take action in defence of the rest of the ‘civilised world’.13
Immediately after 9/11, British Prime Minister Tony Blair joined forces with President George W. Bush to assure the world of the need to react swiftly and expeditiously in seeking out the global threat, which was soon identified as Al-Qaeda. Osama bin Laden and his followers,
operating out of the mountainous regions of northern Afghanistan, were the prime targets in an effort to protect the ‘free world’ from an imminent attack on Western targets. The renegade Saudi multimillionaire with a grudge against his own country, presented as the chief architect of 9/11, was ‘Wanted: Dead or Alive’. A war on terror led by a ‘coalition of the willing’ was almost immediately launched in Afghanistan, followed by Iraq two years later. These military interventions were part of a coordinated effort to ‘root out the evildoers’ and eliminate the threat that Al-Qaeda posed to the world. The coalition attacked Afghanistan because the Taliban would not give up Osama bin Laden. Two years later, the invasion of Iraq began because the country allegedly possessed ‘weapons of mass destruction’ (WMDs).14 By November 2001, Britain was fully immersed in the war on terror, sending troops to Afghanistan as part of Operation Enduring Freedom. People watched the news for information and read reports from journalists embedded in the conflict, but the first casualty of war was the truth, as the maxim goes. In May 2011, US Navy Seals assassinated Osama bin Laden, having found him living in a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, less than a mile away from the Pakistan Military Academy. Questions around his killing still linger.
As the war in Afghanistan commenced largely unchallenged, the powers in Washington projected Saddam Hussain and Bin Laden as one, and claimed that Iraq had WMDs ready to strike Western targets with impunity. Tony Blair had to convince the UK Parliament of the need to maintain military efforts, now in Iraq, in the hope of finding and destroying these WMDs, which could ‘strike British targets within 45 minutes’.15 Today, there is little discussion about eliminating the Al-Qaeda threat. Nevertheless, the war in Afghanistan rages on, even though ISIS, formed out of the conflicts in Iraq and its neighbour Syria in the aftermath of the invasion of 2003, has come and gone as a territorial entity. The Afghans saw the British and the other forces as invaders, not liberators—just as they viewed the Soviets in the 1970s and 1980s and the British in the 1840s.
After a painful process of cajoling and manoeuvring MPs, Parliament voted for what many now see as an illegal war, and in 2003, Baghdad faced the ‘shock and awe’ of a potent military force. After the invasion, various US-led forces worked to ‘modernise’ Iraq using the country’s
own natural resources and physical infrastructure. The Iraqis paid for their own reconstruction with their own resources, while profits moved to corporations in the West. In late 2003, the Americans found Saddam Hussein hiding in a hole in his hometown of Tikr it; eventually put on ‘trial’, he was executed by hanging. The power base in Iraq, now inverted, without the ability to establish itself organically, destabilised the country and the entire region. The ensuing conflict led to the deaths of over half a million Iraqis and the displacement of many millions more. In 2007, after much public and private criticism, the UK government had little choice but to announce that it would begin removing British troops from Iraq. This whole episode caused immense damage both to Iraq and to the credibility of Britain as a global player. Britain had yet again aligned too closely with US foreign policy interests. The Arab Spring and the further destabilisation of Iraq and later Syria led to the emergence of the evil death cult, Islamic State.
In the summer of 2001, the UK experienced its worst inner-city race riots for over two decades. These so-called northern disturbances were the result of frustrations borne out by second- and thirdgeneration British South Asian Muslims who were facing ongoing patterns of racism, discrimination and prejudice in localised settings.16 The lack of education and employment stemmed from limited local investment rather than having anything to do with the community’s lack of motivation or aspiration. The government response, however, was to focus on the idea of ‘communities lacking cohesion’ rather than on the specific resource needs of a region that had suffered from deindustrialisation and a lack of inward investment for the best part of the preceding three decades.17 By the end of 2001, when Britain was at war, it became clear that matters would become worse for various racial and ethnic groups now viewed as religious and cultural groups, especially British Muslims. The 2003 Iraq invasion was making young Muslims in Britain at home angry and agitated. No one was listening to them, let alone the community leaders whom New Labour had wooed into conformity.18 Problems were emerging in local communities, and there was a genuine sense that media reporting and misreporting on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was causing considerable angst.19
The disturbances demonstrated that young second- and thirdgeneration British Muslims were bitter and resentful of the racism, intolerance, bigotry, exclusion and vilification they were facing in their local communities. Their fury exploded on the streets in five locations that summer: Bradford, Oldham, Leeds, Stoke and Burnley, with significant violence and physical destruction in parts of Bradford, Oldham and Burnley.20 After local newspapers printed the photographs of the assailants, fathers and uncles turned in their young. These young men received up to five years’ imprisonment for throwing stones at the police, even for first-time offenders, increasing the resentment felt by many local Muslim communities towards the policing services. In late 2001, David Blunkett, as the incumbent home secretary, established a commission to look at these problems. The solution, presented as ‘communities lacking cohesion’, overlooked the real issues and offered an opportunity for politicians retreating from multiculturalism to return to an assimilationist ideal that had originally been promulgated three decades earlier.21 The dominant paradigm that subsequently emerged focused on ‘values’ at the expense of an emphasis on institutional racism, discrimination and the need to rebuild physical infrastructure. British Muslims in the North of England received a raw deal, and their plight remains unaddressed to this day.
As these domestic policies came into effect, and the war on Iraq unfolded, matters on the ground took a turn for the worse. Radicalisation of young Muslims in inner-city areas was becoming a growing concern.22 There was huge intergenerational disconnect, as young Muslims realised that their elders were not listening to them. Imams were out of touch, the media was biased and the government was intent on war and pursuing its external interests, while the elites in the Muslim world turned a blind eye. Young British-born Muslims began seeking violent political solutions to their concerns. Some of these disillusioned, disenfranchised and isolated Muslims became the new radicals. As confirmed by the Madrid train bombings in March 2004 and the assassination of Theo van Gogh in November 2004, some second-generation Muslims were prepared to kill others or annihilate themselves in the pursuit of local and global political goals.23
The question was: would such acts happen in the UK? It was clear that some young Muslims were prepared to carry out martyrdom
