If, for E. M. Forster, the Empire was about power rather than mixing, its effect was permanently to alienate and separate people from one another. At the end of A Passage to India, the Englishman Fielding and his Muslim friend Aziz are out riding. Forster writes: ‘Socially they had no meeting place. Would he today defy all his own people for the sake of a stray Indian? Aziz was a memento, a trophy, they were proud of each other, yet they must inevitably part.’ Aziz himself cries, ‘Clear out, all you Turtons and Burtons.’ And, ‘We shall drive every blasted Englishman into the sea!’
George Orwell takes a scalpel to this subject, telling us that political domination can only lead to humiliation, on both sides. In his essay ‘Shooting an Elephant’, the opening line of which is, ‘In Moulmein, in Lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people — the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me,’ Orwell draws an uncompromising picture of how this humiliation works. Sent to kill a rogue elephant, a crowd of ‘two thousand’ begins to follows him, fascinated by how the Englishman will act. He feels himself to be ‘an absurd puppet’; all that the natives want to do — ‘the sneering yellow faces’ — is laugh at him. But how could they respond otherwise? Later, writing about Kipling, he says, ‘He does not see that the map is painted red chiefly in order that the coolie may be exploited.’
It is clear, in both Forster and Orwell, that the ‘coloured’ man is always inferior to the Englishman. He is not worth as much; he never will be. When it comes to character as well as colour, the white man is the gold standard. However, Orwell also saw that the Empire — and I guess he’d have applied this to immigration — was primarily economic. This was how countries enriched themselves. If the Empire wasn’t supposed to be a moral crusade with the aim of making everyone alike, the only way to do it was to be ruthless — not half-hearted, as he was when called upon to dispose of the elephant. If the elephant is the Empire and Orwell the representative Englishman, he has to remove something that cannot easily be got rid of. And the elephant is with us still.
During my childhood and youth, differences in British society were always based around class and the conflicts they gave rise to. The Labour Party grew out of such clashes; its existence was based on them. But technology and consumerism became our gods. Now people are not even divided over politics, as there is only one party, and the opposition is fragmented, disorganised and without passion or direction. The real differences in Britain today are not political, or even based on class, but are arranged around race and religion, with their history of exploitation, humiliation and political helplessness.
Forster’s Aziz got his wish: the British left the subcontinent. But in the vacuum following this hurried departure, there was political failure and dictatorship. Who, there, was seriously addressing the needs of the poor? For me, visiting Pakistan in the early 1980s, it was bewildering to hear older people wishing that Britain still ruled. Pakistan was becoming a theocracy and no one knew how to stop it. The Americans had been afraid of the Left, and hadn’t noticed the significance of the mosques.
One of the most significant reasons for the rise of Islamic extremism in the Third World is the presence of financial and political corruption, along with the lack of free speech, and the failure to make a space for even the mildest political dissent. Pakistan, for instance, was a country constantly on the verge of collapse. My family in Karachi, along with most of the other middle-class families, hoarded their money in the West ‘just in case’, and educated their children in Britain and the US.
If the political class and the wealthy stole money, promoted their relatives — my Uncle Omar, a journalist in Pakistan, called it ‘the son-in-law also rises’ culture — and ensured that they had a route out, political dissent for those who did not have such privileges became organised around the mosque and the outspoken clerics there. As with many revolutions, the route to freedom from oppression also became the route to more oppression, to a familiar tyranny — that of the ‘just’ as opposed to that of the ‘unjust’.
Young British Asians, the committed Muslims of My Son the Fanatic and The Black Album, were aware of this corruption at home and often felt guilty that they were in a better situation in the West. Corruption in their parents’ land was also an injustice they wanted to repair.
The downfall of the Shah and the Iranian revolution of 1979, followed by a religious dictatorship, showed, at least, the effectiveness of Islam in fomenting political change. However, most people in the West became aware of the force and determination of radical Islam during the period of the fatwa against Rushdie, in 1989. Young Muslims told me that although they didn’t succeed in either suppressing The Satanic Verses or eliminating its author, they were aware of how powerful their disapproval could be, and what energy they could create when organised. The Muslim writer Shabbir Akhtar admitted in Be Careful with Muhammad that, ‘The Rushdie affair is, in the last analysis, admittedly about fanaticism on behalf of God.’
These young men were highly politicised and passionate. Believing they had unique access to virtue — and virtue was to be had only through submission to God — they were prepared to give up their lives for a cause. Forgetting how zealous we had once been about our own description of equality — socialism — we could only be shocked by their commitment and solidarity, and by their hatred of injustice, as well as their determination to bring about social change. We had not seen religious revolutionaries for a long time. Apart from liberation theology in South America — the church being used as an outlet for Left opposition — the only significant religion we saw for a long time was the soft New Age, as well as other right-wing cults, like the Moonies. Even Martin Luther King was considered by us to be a black leader rather than a religious one.
For us, religious commitment, particularly if it was political too, entailed not emancipation but a rejection of the Enlightenment and of modernity. How could we begin to deal with it? You respect people who are different, but how do you live with people who are so different that — among other things — they lock up their wives?
For young religious radicals, extreme Islam worked in many ways. It kept them out of trouble, for a start, and provided some pride. They weren’t drinking, taking drugs, or getting into trouble like some of their white contemporaries. At the same time, they were able to be rebels. Being more fervent Muslims than their parents — and even condemning their parents — kept them within the Muslim fold, but enabled them to be transgressive at the same time. It’s a difficult trick, to be simultaneously disobedient and conformist, but joining a cult or political organisation can fit both needs. The puritanical young can defy their fathers, but keep to the law of the ultimate Father. They are good, virtuous children, while rebelling.
Not that these young people are either representative or anything like the majority of Muslims in Britain. Earlier this year, making a short television documentary, I took a camera around the country and interviewed numerous Indian waiters. Having eaten in Indian restaurants all my life, I was fascinated by what these normally silent and unnoticed figures might say. To me, Indian restaurants with their sitar music, flocked wallpaper and pictures of the Taj Mahal on the wall, reproduced the colonial experience in this country for the ordinary person; the experience, of course, was ‘Disneyfied’, made bland and acceptable for the British, while retaining some of its charm.