Radical (7 page)

By this point, our posse of B-boys was almost exclusively an ethnic group. Because there was only one and a half years between us, Osman and I began merging our two groups of friends. From my lot, the younger crew, there was Chill, Moe, and Andre from Southend, Ricky, Paul, Ade, and Yusuf from Pitsea. Ricky's older brother Rowan headed the older lot. Rowan rolled with Will and Aaron, and Osman would join them when he could. Rowan was renowned throughout Essex. He was dangerous, and people knew his name. Our bonds of friendship were particularly close, forged through a common love of hip-hop, mad times at parties, and standing up for each other in armed confrontations against racists. The younger ones, my crew, felt like my true brothers, and we believed nothing could ever divide us. Most of the wider posse was Afro-Caribbean, but Osman and I had introduced a couple of other South Asians, like our cousin Yasser and our Bangladeshi friend Ronnie.

I was out late one evening with Osman and Ronnie, playing pool. Earlier that day, like many sixteen-year-old boys, Osman had been messing around with a plastic BB gun. Playing in open view, he hadn't thought to conceal what he was doing. In those days terrorism was mainly associated with the IRA. But someone had called the police, convinced that he was going to commit an armed robbery. The police took this accusation seriously and mounted an all-day surveillance operation. So by the time I joined Osman and Ron later on, we were already being secretly staked out by a host of armed officers. We finished playing pool about two in the morning and got into Ron's car to drive home. Our stereo was, as usual, testing the frame of Ron's old car with the heavy bass line.

“That's weird, man,” I quipped from my backseat. “I guess pigs can fly after all!” Police helicopters were hovering above us.

“Someone must be in deep shit, man,” Ron laughed. “I guess they're lookin' for some real heavyweights.”

“Yeah, man, someone's not gonna get much sleep tonight,” I laughed back.

“Look! It's goin' down,” Osman interjected as police cars sped past us at top speed with their sirens on.

But were we in for a surprise!

Suddenly the police cars up ahead skidded to a halt, horizontally blocking the road in front of us. More cars had appeared from behind, blocking our escape. Ron slammed the brakes on.

“What the ffff . . .?” he muttered in disbelief as armed officers carrying submachine guns appeared from nowhere on either side of the car. “Stop the car!”

“Do not move your hands, do not move your hands!”

“Stay absolutely still! Do not move!”

We sat deathly still and in absolute silence. None of us found this even slightly funny anymore. As the helicopter spotlight lit us up, the armed officers rushed to the car doors and pulled Ron and Osman out of their seats, through their still-attached seatbelts, slammed them on the ground, and then held them in locked positions. As I watched police putting a gun to my brother's head, my mind again focused on tangential details. The car was rolling forward slightly.
That's strange, why was it doing that?

“The brake!” I thought to myself. “Well done, Ron, you haven't pulled your parking brake up!”

Just then a hand grabbed my collar and lifted me out of my seat and down onto the ground with a violent thud and another gun greeted me. Of course, it was to Ron's credit that he didn't reach down for the parking brake; they would have thought he was reaching for a gun, and he would probably have been shot dead.

None of this was making any sense to me. I hadn't been with Osman in the daytime and didn't know he had been playing with his plastic BB gun. But there was no time for thought, and certainly no time for questions.

“You,” the officer shouted in my ear, “are under arrest for suspicion of armed robbery.”

“Huh, wha . . .?” It wasn't registering in my brain.

“In other words, you're nicked, mate. Get 'im in the car.”

I was fifteen years old. I had no criminal record. They threw us all in the cells for the night while they inspected the “evidence.” Because I was under sixteen, they had to call and wake Abi up at 3 a.m., and tell her that both her sons had been arrested on suspicion of armed robbery. Crazy. In the morning, after all that, they handed Osman back his pellet gun in a plastic bag and let us go. On the way out, furious at being profiled, I decided to ask one last question, “Is there anything, anything at all that we did wrong?”

“No, you did nothing wrong. It was a misunderstanding. Sorry about that.” And that was it.

This mixture of police incompetence and ignorance made us both hate them and simultaneously fear their powers. The one time I did attempt to take things further with the police it blew back in my face. I went in to positively identify a suspect who had stabbed a friend of mine. I pointed out the right guy, but they had to let him go, apparently because of a “procedural error.” Worse, I was now exposed as the person who had made the positive identification. I have lost count of the number of knife attacks we were subjected to by racists, many of my friends had been stabbed, but the police rarely managed to make any arrests and hardly ever pressed charges. The gangs would always boast about “contacts” in the police. I have no idea if this was true, but the bottom line is we were not protected. And in the absence of any incentive to change our mantra, we kept singing it loud: “Fuck tha Police.”

Not trusting the police to protect us meant that we had to rely on our own protection, which we found among our crew and through fighting back. As our numbers increased and our confidence grew, the levels of violence we faced got worse. We'd be set upon suddenly, like once down on the seafront when pool balls were flying past our heads like cannonballs. Or when another white friend, Dan, was knifed, or that time at Southend Central Bus Station when Aaron got stabbed in the side, and Rowan fought off two men armed with kebab knives, using nothing but a crutch he'd “borrowed” from an old lady waiting for her bus. (Once they ran away, Rowan politely handed the crutch back to the startled old woman.) One of us once resorted to using a metal-tipped umbrella as a weapon, spearing a skinhead who had come down from London and decided to march up and down our high street shouting, “We hate Pakis!” He ended up on the floor in agony with a fractured skull. There was the time Ricky, Paul, Chill, and I had been hounded by a white mob chanting about not wanting “niggers” in their area “stealing their women.” Our entire crew returned in three cars the next week to bum rush the house of their ringleader. We were learning how to fight back, and the message was spreading.

One day, I happened to come across Patrick—the same Patrick who at eleven had punched me in the stomach because I dared to ask to play football. With that one act he had changed the little boy that I was; he made me see in color when before I saw only human beings. It felt like an eternity since my days at Earl's Hall.

I was walking down the high street in my full B-boy gear: a red bandana, my Redskins baseball cap—because they used Red Indians as their logo—my Click suit and big trainers, the lot. And there, I saw him. That punch was something I had never forgotten. The moment he saw me coming he turned the other way; I could see that he also remembered what he'd done. This sparked the residues of anger within me, and I headed straight for him. I wasn't with my crew on this occasion; I'd left them somewhere nearby. It was just Patrick and me again. I had my knife on my back as usual. Patrick, for all his cocky confidence back at primary school, was not a street kid in the way I'd become. He saw me, he saw the look in my eyes, and he began to cower.

“Please don't hit me. Maajid, please don't hit me.”

I hadn't even said anything, and the kid was begging me not to do anything.

“I'm sorry,” he continued, starting to cry. “I'm sorry, just don't . . .” It was the strangest sight—as if he were shriveling up in front of me.

Patrick wouldn't dare repeat his comments now. Largely due to the reputation of us B-boys, it was no longer acceptable to be racist in the way it had been even just a few years earlier. The ball had bounced back, the power dynamic had shifted. I saw that, he saw that, and strangely that was enough for me. Despite all the violence I'd been involved in, I had always had a justification for it in my teenage mind; it was all a form of escalating self-defense. I'd never bullied or picked a fight with a defenseless, unarmed person, and I wasn't about to start now.

“You're a chump!” I shouted at him. “Get the fuck out of my sight.”

Patrick turned and skulked away. I didn't need to attack him: it was enough to see his reaction when he saw me. I felt good about myself, pleased that I'd not become as bad as the racists. But there was something more there, too: a sense of satisfaction and vindication. I was on the right path. The incident that had begun my spiral of abuse had finally ended. I had won.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Green Backpack with No Bomb

If you haven't felt the fear and helplessness that violent, organized racism makes you feel, it's difficult to understand. Due to the color of your skin, your entire body is a moving target. And you cannot leave your skin behind, or pretend it doesn't exist. At any moment, hammer-wielding hooligans could use you for target practice. In such extreme circumstances, self-defense must be a sacred right; the “turn the other cheek” philosophy would have gotten our skulls crushed. The sad reality is that it's difficult for different ethnic groups to rub along with each other. I'm not saying that my
kidult
way of dealing with the situation was the answer, but it was
an
answer. At the time, it felt like the only option open to us.

Without support from the police or society at large, it felt as though it was the best way to respond—to stand up and take the fight to the racists, in the hope that they'd leave us alone. There's a sort of brutal logic to that position, but once again it's one that doesn't go to the crux of the problem. It's a kind of “Cold War” thinking, where an uneasy peace is created from the knowledge of what damage the other side could mete out.

To be fair, the police force did change. It wasn't an overnight thing—cultural shifts don't work like that—but the general attitudes of the police have undoubtedly improved from where they were twenty years ago. Of course more can still be done, as the shooting by the police of innocent Jean Charles de Menezes on the London Underground in 2005 highlighted. This is partly because the police force is no longer exclusively white. Even one of my old family friends from a Pakistani background, Atif, is now a policeman with Essex Police.

Another form of identity politics was also lurking in the shadows, eventually to emerge as an even more intransigent challenge. Most young Britons of the Muslim faith were of South Asian origin, born and raised in crowded single-ethnicity British ghettos. Though tensions with non-Muslim communities did occur in these areas, part of the problem was a lack of contact with “the other.” As race began to take a backseat, and Afro-Caribbean communities began to enter the mainstream through popular music and culture, into these ghettos came war-torn Muslim North Africans, Arabs, and Somalis. A new generation of youth born in the ashes of conflict quickly found that they had one identity shared among them all: Islam.

Many British-born Muslims simply did not consider themselves part of the mainstream race debate. The Ayatollah/
Satanic Verses
affair helped this shift along somewhat. The communities adopted a more isolationist stance, a policy of self-exclusion. For many, the nature of how they identified themselves was changing. So instead of calling themselves “British Asians” as my parents had done, this generation now defined themselves as almost exclusively Muslim. They believed that their allegiance to the global Islamic community, the
ummah,
prevented them from defining themselves as being part of their birth country.

What had caused this shift was a mixture of mutual discrimination and suspicion at home, and a growing awareness of events overseas. Bosnia was particularly crucial in bringing about a shift in identity among Britain's Muslims. In Bosnia, white, blond-haired, blue-eyed indigenous European Muslims were being massacred just because they were Muslim. The slaughter did the opposite of its intended effect. In reaction to these atrocities, Muslims in Europe began reasserting their religious identities even more. It was a natural defense mechanism. But it also exacerbated self-segregation and triggered the shift in our self-identity to
politically
Muslim.

Into this fray jumped groups advocating politicized Islam, the Islamists. No other phenomenon has contributed to the rise of Muslim identity politics as much as these groups. Emerging in a postcolonial Middle East and South Asia, these groups quickly realized that an ideology that utilized (rather than undermined) the Islamic emotions of the people would be far more potent than Arab socialism. Islamist groups quickly spread and multiplied, arriving in Europe along with Arab asylum seekers and South Asian immigrants.

I would later believe passionately in this approach to politics. But that would be later. Essentially, the rise of Islamist groups was a key factor in shifting Muslims away from their national identities toward a more exclusively Muslim one. It has taken me awhile to resolve many of these pressing challenges posed by identity in our globalized world. Initially, retreating into group identities can be a useful tool for lobbying to overcome legal and institutional discrimination. However, there comes a point when class, economic, and cultural divisions can only be bridged by increasing mutual
integration
and participation among all in society. Instead of mutual integration, however, we witnessed a shift from ethnic communalism, where only a brown person is assumed able to represent brown people and so on, to religious communalism, where only a Muslim is assumed to be able to represent other Muslims. Such entrenched communalism and its advocates, who have abused the original intentions of multiculturalism, have brought nothing but division and the balkanization of Western, and other, societies.

This is where I am now on these issues. But there's a long way to go before I reach this conclusion. First, I need to explain how I became an Islamist in the first place.

I was back in the same park with the usual posse. Osman was with me, as was a friend called Nas. Nas's original name was Christian Nathaniel—he was from a Greek Orthodox background. He was into the same music as us, and the fact that his skin was of a Mediterranean complexion was enough for the skinheads to consider him a Paki. If their prejudice wasn't so threatening, their worldview would have been pathetically comic. Under the influence of the times, Nas had converted to Islam and had changed his first name from Christian to Nasir.

Once again we were spotted by Mickey and his crew; there were about half a dozen of them. They were carrying baseball bats, and no doubt were strapping knives. They caught us by total surprise, so we split in different directions. Eventually, once we'd properly tooled up at my house, we reemerged looking for the rest of the posse, and headed back to our rendezvous point on the street corner opposite my house. Osman, Nas, and I were the only ones who made it back; the others must have gone their separate ways.

Then, and I don't know if this was luck or learning, we saw Mickey and his entire crew heading our way. We were completely outnumbered. There were some posts on the side of the road, and they began banging their baseball bats against them, like some sort of war cry. But by now we were battle-hardened. This time, despite being grossly outnumbered, we stood our ground. This was right outside our home; we could see our front door. If we didn't have a right to walk here, then where on God's earth could we walk? I had my knife strapped to my back as usual. Osman had a green backpack on his.

The stand-off continued, and despite their outnumbering us, Mickey began to look nervous. We were only three, yet we were refusing to stand down and this made him doubt himself. Next, to our surprise, Mickey stepped forward and asked to talk. For a moment, Osman and I exchanged confused glances. Mickey had never before uttered a single word to us. It took us a moment to get used to seeing Mickey as anything other than a knife-wielding demon that only knew the word “Paki!” Once we composed ourselves, Osman indicated to Mickey that he should go over the road, while he too crossed over and waited for Mickey to join him. The war cry dimmed, and a worried-looking Mickey walked over to join my brother. What followed was a tense few minutes. My brother and Mickey were deep in conversation. Nas and I were switching between watching them and watching Mickey's mates; Mickey's mates were staring the two of us down. Everyone was poised, hands wrapped around baseball bats or fingers ready to unhook knives, in case it all kicked off.

After about ten minutes, we noticed that the talking had stopped. Mickey and my brother were making their way back across the road. They crossed over, halfway between the two groups and shook hands. This was nuts. I watched in disbelief as Mickey returned to his friends and told them to stand down.

“That's enough, lads,” he told them. “No more trouble here.”

“Eh?” I asked Osman. “What did you say to him?”

Osman looked at me with a level of confidence in his eyes and told me what had happened: “I told him we're Muslims and we don't fear death. We're like those Palestinian terrorists he sees on the television blowing up planes. We're suicide bombers. We've been taught how to make bombs, and I've got one in my backpack. If you even try to make a move, I'll set mine off. Trust me, I don't give a shit. If we have to take ourselves out to take you out, then that's what we will do.”

“Damn, man! What did Mickey say?” I asked.

“He believed me when I told him he was messing with the wrong guys.”

Osman's bluff played on Mickey's racism, no question about it. Mickey may or may not have watched the news, but he knew his Combat 18 literature. This depicted Muslims as terrorists, and suggested that we were all murderers given half the chance. So when Osman said he had a bomb in his backpack, and that we had links to suicide bombers, it confirmed every prejudice that Mickey had come to believe about us.

“If we feared death,” Osman had told Mickey, “we'd be running away from you. Why would we be standing here when we're completely outnumbered? It's because we have the power to call backup and fight you to the death.”

Calling for backup was the sort of language Mickey understood. It's what he'd done previously, and so he figured that this must have been something that we were capable of as well. If he'd even bothered to question the racist propaganda he'd swallowed, Mickey might have seen through this. But this was someone who considered the Greek Orthodox Nas a Paki. In his warped worldview, such statements made sense.

The discussion between Osman and Mickey was the end of our trouble with Mickey's racists. Mickey had decided that we were too dangerous, too connected to take on, and had made his peace with us instead. While Mickey was explaining his climb-down to his crew, there was still one question that played on my mind. Just as I had done that time at the police station, I decided I needed to ask something, to understand.

“Hey, can I ask you a question?” I asked.

“All right,” Mickey replied. I saw a different look in his eyes for the first time. The venom had vanished. Now there was wariness, a sliver of fear in his gaze.

“I want to know why you started all this in the first place,” I said. “Back in the park that day when you hounded Chill. You seemed to know his name. What happened?”

Mickey paused, for once a little unsure of himself. But his reply was pathetic. “We're tired of all you lot taking our women. We saw your mate Chill pulling all these white girls, and we'd had enough.”

It was, frankly, ridiculous. The driving force behind that original attack was as simple as old-fashioned jealousy, with a racist bent. Mickey had seen the way that hip-hop had interested the girls, how they all wanted to get in on the scene.

Osman's successful bluff affected me more profoundly than any other event up to that point. I realized for the first time the futility of relying on men. For all the security that knowing people like Rowan had brought, there was only so far this could go. Rowan was a rock, and I owed him much, but there was no way he could always be around. And while packing knives offered limited protection, it just escalated matters without addressing the root problem.

That problem, put simply, was respect. When I asked Mickey why they had started on us, he looked at me and talked to me in a different way. He was no longer looking down on me. He was, in fact, scared. And that came from the assertive new identity Osman had adopted.
Islamism.
It had done what years of knife fights could not. It had won the psychological war and defeated our enemy. For the first time, I caught a glimpse of its power, and how it was capable of transforming my standing at a stroke. Osman, who by this point had become a committed Islamist, had been banging on about this for a year, but I'd never really taken him seriously. I was still a B-boy: that was my culture and my rule book for climbing the obstacle course that was my life.