The World's Most Dangerous Place (47 page)

‘Everything is so ugly there now, and nothing works. We were once the cleanest country in Africa, but now even the shower water is salty.’

She made an interesting, if sweeping, observation about the difference between her ‘old’ generation and the younger one.

‘The old Somalis are mostly good people, but you can’t trust the new ones. They are too traumatized. They have seen so much killing and blood . . . I couldn’t sleep when I went back to Mogadishu, but those people don’t notice the gunfire any more.’

It was clear that she was not the only one who thought the
Somalis left behind had been almost literally dehumanized by exposure to so much violence.

‘When Mohamed became mayor, my Somali neighbours here said, “Ask him to come back! Those people will hunt him like an animal!”’

Later in the evening she began to describe how Mogadishu had been when she was young. She remembered listening to James Brown records, watching the latest Fellini films at the cinema, and reading magazines with names like
Photo-Romanca
.

‘We were a developing country then. We could have been like South Africa. But everything went backwards because of the war.’

Shamis produced a photograph of her and Tarzan taken in 1980 which made her children hoot with laughter. They both wore the platform shoes and flares of the high disco period. Shamis was wearing a miniskirt and long, pretty earrings beneath an immense Afro hairdo, in striking contrast to the abaya and scarf that now enveloped her.

‘I never wore a scarf before 1989,’ she said. ‘Hardly anyone in Mogadishu did.’

I asked what she thought had prompted that sartorial revolution and she shrugged, as though she had never given it much thought.

‘We were still Muslims inside when we wore miniskirts, but it wasn’t a big thing,’ she said. ‘It was the war that turned us religious. Maybe the war was our punishment for being bad Muslims.’

The family all hated qat. Nur senior, indeed, had organized a local campaign against it, following a savage murder in a Kentish Town marfish one Saturday night in 2003. A 33-year-old supermarket shelf stacker, Hassan Abdullahi, had been watching
Match of the Day
with some friends when another Somali, Abdi Aziz
Warsame, thirty-one, attacked and killed him with an eight-inch kitchen knife.

‘There were a dozen other people in the marfish,’ Abdullah added, ‘but they were all too stoned to do anything.’

Warsame claimed, bizarrely, that he had killed Abdullahi in self-defence. At his trial, though, he also admitted to feelings of paranoia, which no Somali doubted had been caused by anything other than too much qat.
¹¹

The Nur children had grown up in a rough neighbourhood. The nearby Queen’s Crescent was once so notorious for gang violence that it was nicknamed ‘the Murder Mile’. The district’s drug dealers delineated their territories by tying a pair of sneakers together and slinging them over one of the telegraph wires that crisscrossed the streets. There were several local Somali gangs with names like the Money Squad, the African Nation Crew and the Centrics. They fought the black and Asian gangs for supremacy, and also rival Somali gangs from Tottenham, sometimes with fatal results.

‘The Somalis got the upper hand in Queen’s Crescent cos they’re more men’al,’ said Abdullah. ‘They don’t give me any trouble. I knew a lot of them at school. They were the ones who were always smoking weed, skipping classes.’

‘You would be under more pressure if you mixed with Somalis more,’ said his mother.

‘It’s worse in Toron’o,’ Abdullah shrugged. ‘There are some guns here but not like over there. A friend of mine got shot there.’

It was simply good parenting, and the ethos of achievement and self-improvement that the grown-ups had instilled in the family, that had kept Abdullah on the right path and away from the gangs. Islam played a role, although not an overbearing one. When I
asked Abdullah when he’d last been to mosque he said on Friday – which drew a sarcastic ‘Yeah, right’ from Ayaan, followed by a disapproving cluck from their mother, and then an angry look from Abdullah at his sister for betraying him. It was clear enough that he was more interested in nightclubbing than attending Friday prayers. He said that he had attended a traditional Sufi mosque in Tottenham, once, but he found their mysticism too much to take and he hadn’t been back.

‘It was all music and drums and stuff,’ he said. ‘I got quite scared.’

By strange coincidence, the teenaged Abdullah had been passing through King’s Cross tube station on 7 July 2005 when Germaine Lindsay detonated his bomb that killed twenty-six people.

‘I had my iPod plugs in but I still heard the bang. Then I saw smoke and I started running.’

There seemed little danger of him being radicalized.

His sister Ayaan’s religious stance was more enigmatic. On the one hand she had no time for extremism, either in Britain or in Somalia.

‘Some Somalis do go back to fight for al-Shabaab, but their star is waning. People talk about them all the time on Universal TV. It’s madness what they are doing. Proper explicit!’

On the other hand, it emerged that she had only recently begun to wear an abaya like her mother. She also kept her head tightly covered throughout our interview. Her conservatism was not quite as it appeared, however.

‘I put an abaya on during Ramadan last year and I’ve been wearing one ever since,’ she said. ‘I like wearing it. It’s comfortable and easy to wear.’

One of the advantages of a scarf, she admitted, was that it
allowed her to go out when her hair was in a mess. The nose-stud she wore also suggested that her abaya was at least partly to do with fashion. She said she would never wear a full veil, as did her genuinely conservative sister-in-law, whom she disparaged as ‘a ninja’. And yet she understood that the headscarf was a ‘badge of Islam’, and had thought through the implications of wearing one of those. In this she was very like Nimco Ahmed in Minneapolis, who at some quite deep level also wanted people to know she was a Muslim. Both women understood that the traditional outward appearance of their religion had been stolen by the extremists, and were quietly intent on reclaiming it for themselves. Shamis, backtracking on what she had said earlier about the headscarf, recalled how some young Somali women in Mogadishu in the 1980s had covered their heads as an act of rebellion against Siad Barre and his aggressively secular scientific socialism.

‘Wearing a scarf is like being an ambassador for Islam,’ Ayaan added. ‘You can’t choose your destiny, but maybe you can choose your identity.’

Taken together, the Nur family presented an impressive riposte to those who claimed that multiculturalism in Britain wasn’t working. They were not the Islamist ghetto-dwellers of popular imagination but almost model citizens of the world: ambitious, forward- and outward-looking young people who would undoubtedly end up as net contributors to the society that had taken them in as refugees.

‘I don’t even have any Somali friends,’ said Abdullah. ‘My mates are Bosnian, Bengali, Turkish, English.’

If multiculturalism meant knowing how to adapt to a new host environment – an essential part of nomadism, after all – then these Somalis were naturals.

Even so, it was no easy task, working out how to be a good Muslim in the suspicious West. The children had been brought up to feel gratitude towards a state that had given them housing and benefit and education, but now, according to Abdullah, the London Somali community was ‘confused . . . people
are
very grateful, but they are feeling a bit persecuted these days. They can’t understand why the system is starting to turn against them.’

This was not paranoia. Shamis explained how in 2008, her eldest son, Mohamed, a youth worker for the Kentish Town Somali Welfare Association – a body that his father had in fact set up through the local community organization – had been so badly harassed by MI5 that he complained to his MP about it, and eventually went to the newspapers with his story. Shamis was able to produce the relevant cutting from the
Independent
. ‘Exclusive,’ I read. ‘How MI5 blackmails British Muslims.’
¹²

Mohamed, now twenty-nine, had been eight years old when he came to Britain, and had always been more religiously inclined than his siblings. In 2003, aged twenty, he went to Egypt for a while to study Islam and Arabic.

‘He never smoked or did anything wrong when he was young,’ Shamis said. ‘He wore a beard and he always went to mosque.’

One morning at 6 a.m. in August 2008, Mohamed opened the door of his Camden flat to a postman carrying a red Royal Mail bag. He turned out to be an MI5 agent in disguise, who accused him, first, of being an Islamic extremist. When Mohamed denied this, the agent revealed the true purpose of his approach, which was to coerce him into working for British intelligence.

‘The agent said, “Mohamed, if you do not work for us we will tell any foreign country you try to travel to that you are a suspected terrorist.”’

MI5 were obviously desperate to infiltrate the Kentish Town community organization, for they approached five other Somali workers there in much the same heavy-breathing way. None of the six complied.

Shamis still felt genuinely hurt by what had happened to Mohamed, as well as baffled that anyone could think that any of
her
children could become a terrorist.

‘This country has been like a mother to us,’ she said. ‘I love this country, I don’t have another. And my kids don’t know any other home. Why would they burn their own house?’

It was a fair question. According to Shamis, MI5 had even briefly taken away Mohamed Jnr’s mobile phone and iPod. It was a stupid as well as a shabby way to treat an immigrant Muslim family as blameless as the Nurs, and if it was as typical as Abdullah claimed, it was no wonder if London’s Somalis felt ‘a bit confused’.

The previous November, David Cameron had described Somalia as ‘a failed state that directly threatens British interests’, citing the radicalization of young Somali Britons, attacks on British tourists, and the impunity with which the pirates apparently continued to operate.
¹³
Among the victims he had in mind were the retired yachting couple from Tunbridge Wells, Paul and Rachel Chandler, who were released alive in November 2010 after hundreds of thousands of pounds of ransom money had been paid, 388 days after their yacht, the
Lynn Rival
, was boarded off the Seychelles.

Perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of the Chandlers’ long ordeal was that the public campaign to rescue them was led not by the British government, or even by the British, but principally by London Somalis appalled at the way the couple had been treated by their countrymen. According to the SO15 officer Paul
Birch, mainstream Britain tended to look on Somalis as part of the ‘feral underclass’ that the justice secretary, Kenneth Clarke, identified as being responsible for the 2011 summer riots, a characterization that Birch thought profoundly unfair. He had recently attended a Somali famine relief rally in Regent’s Park, where he had seen for himself how astonishingly public-spirited the Somali community could be: ‘Not feral at all,’ as he put it.

The Chandler campaign’s rallying point was an earnest music video called
Sii Daaya Lamaanaha
– ‘Release the Couple’ – a performance of which was recorded by Universal TV and became a modest hit on YouTube.
¹⁴
With exquisite irony, the performance and its recording were organized by Tarzan Nur’s Kentish Town Somali Welfare Association, a part of the very body that MI5 once considered such a threat to British security that they had tried to infiltrate it.

‘We started that campaign!’ said Ayaan Nur. ‘The video galvanized Somali public opinion. There was a lot of shame here about the way that old couple were treated. They weren’t rich, and they hadn’t done anyone any harm.’

Somali donations to the Save the Chandlers fighting fund reportedly reached £150,000, some of which may have been used to pay the pirates’ ransom. This was in marked contrast to the British government which, in line with long-established ransom policy, contributed nothing.

The Chandlers’ release was negotiated on the ground by Dahir Kadiye, 56, a former minicab driver from Leyton in east London, who was born in the noted pirate town of Adado and belonged to the same Hawiye Saleban sub-clan as the pirates. His involvement was said to have begun when his 17-year-old son, Yussuf, saw television footage of the Chandlers in captivity and urged his father
to do something about it. Kadiye then spent nine months shuttling back and forth to Adado urging the Saleban elders to pressurize the pirates to negotiate a deal.

The whole story seemed an example of the diaspora operating at its very best, and turned the usual media narrative about Muslim immigrants dramatically on its head. When the Chandlers were released, even the
Sun
– a newspaper that had long positioned itself as a bulwark against what it called Britain’s immigrant ‘tidal wave’ – took Kadiye to its heart, describing him as ‘a brave ex-London cabbie’ who had heroically saved the Chandlers from the ‘bloodthirsty pirates’.
¹⁵
Britain’s collective imagination was so gripped by this stirring triumph of good over evil that Kadiye was taken on to the books of Max Clifford, the famous celebrity publicist. Hollywood was also rumoured to be interested.

And yet Kadiye seemed unlikely filmstar material, as I found out when I went to meet him in his Leyton council flat. He was, in the first place, not nearly as anglicized as the ‘London cabbie’ description suggested, but a Somali of the old school, who spoke English poorly for someone who had lived here for twenty years. He entertained me with tea and cakes in the formal style of his homeland while his wife, unequivocally veiled, hovered dutifully in the background. At one point he broke off our conversation to scold her for not serving me properly. He reminded me of an old Somali saying I had read of:
Caado la gooyaa car alle ayey leedahay
(‘the abandonment of tradition calls forth the wrath of Allah’).
¹⁶
I was unsurprised to discover that he had never heard of Adam Matan’s Anti-Tribalism Movement.