Bradford Comes of Age
By Dr Akbar Ahmed
American University
Washington, DC
For several decades, the image of the Muslim community of Bradford, and the region around it, has been depicted in the media as that of angry-looking, white-bearded Pakistani men dressed in shalwar-kameez demanding the death of Salman Rushdie. Today, however, it is that of educated, intelligent smart women – also with a Pakistani background.
Bradford in the popular British imagination has long meant Islamic fanaticism and fundamentalism, urban crime, drugs and poverty. It has also more recently been associated with such phenomena as “grooming”, terrorism and the shariah-dominated “no-go zones” – defined by Islamophobes as places where non-Muslims ‘fear to tread’. Feeding in to these perceptions was the news last year that three Bradford sisters and their nine children had traveled to Syria to join ISIS together.
Terrorism experts tend to look at dense communities like Bradford as hubs of terrorism producing an endless stream of recruits. It is for this reason that the government is constantly placed in the awkward position of implementing extreme measures only to come up with embarrassing results, such as the case of the young schoolboy who was arrested and taken for interrogation when he wrote in a school assignment that he lived in a “terrorist” house when he meant “terraced.” Bradford has thus been labeled a breeding ground for terrorist activity, which has made the city a particular target of the British government’s “Prevent” security strategy, a program that is increasingly being seen as coercive and unfair by the Muslim community. British Muslims use terms like “thought police” and “big brother” when discussing Prevent.
When I first visited Bradford early in 1973, the Muslim community was “invisible.” I was attending a World Bank course at the University of Bradford along with a group of mid-level civil servants and development officers from across the world. We were housed in the landmark and very comfortable Midland Hotel that bore testimony to the former grandeur of Bradford as an industrial center. During the three-month course we neither came across the Muslim community nor discussed it. I knew it was there, but it was out of sight. The Muslim laborers who came to work in Bradford’s factories had yet to make a mark.
Bradford is a hard, gritty community. You are either part of a clan, and therefore obliged to carry its symbols of identity, or you are simply an outsider. It is a constant battle of identifying who you are and where you stand. Here poets sing not of the beauty of the beloved and the fragrance of the rose in the moonlight but of lineage and clan and the home they left behind in Azad Kashmir or the Punjab (see the work of Zaffar Kunial, Faber New Poets 11). Artists of the younger generation express the angst of identity and disruption of immigration through drama, poetry recitations and articles.
The majority of Bradford’s Muslims are Mirpuris – those from Mirpur in Azad Kashmir – who form about 70% of the Pakistani population of the UK which in turn forms the vast majority of the Muslim population of the country. The demographic dominance of the Mirpuris places them at a political advantage and therefore it was not surprising that the first Muslim member of the House of Lords, Lord Nazir Ahmed, was from Mirpur. Mirpur has produced Members of Parliament, mayors and councilors because of its numerical strength in Bradford and the tendency of the community to vote for its own candidates. The broader Pakistani community however – even those communities that come from the Punjab – tend to see Mirpuris as clannish and backward. The Pakistani-British manager of the smart Khaadi (hand woven) clothes shop in Bradford came from Manchester, which was not that far away, but he still sniggered at the people of Bradford as “ paindu”, a derogatory term for backward country bumpkins.
It was the publication of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses which brought the Muslim community in Bradford precipitously on to the world stage. This phase could be called “angry and noisy.” Elders demanded that the death sentence against the author be carried out and made support of Khomeini’s fatwa a litmus test of Muslimness. In the popular perception, Bradford was now seen as the voice and face of Islam. I found myself at the opposite end of Bradford in every sense in the debate about Rushdie. While obviously not pleased with Rushdie’s conscious attempts to play on the religious sensibilities of Muslims, I nonetheless publicly rejected any demand for the implementation of the death sentence. Such demands were isolating the community and alienating its youth. Based in Cambridge, I was able to create an alternative voice.
When I visited Bradford with my team in 2014 to conduct a study of the Muslims of Europe, we found evidence that this second phase of Bradford society was still in evidence. Unemployment was high among the angry young men and their only ambition seemed to be to drive a taxi. Although my position on Islam in the modern world was no secret, traditional Pakistani hospitality was also evident: The Bradford Council of Mosques, the high command of the community and mostly from Mirpur, invited me for a lecture and then for dinner. The Lord Mayor, also a Mirpuri, even drove us around for the better part of a day.
Yet when I returned to Bradford in 2016 with my research team, two years later, to speak at the Bradford Literary Festival and present my new documentary film, Journey into Europe, a different side of the Muslim community was apparent that was at odds with its negative image in the media.
The festival escalated Bradford onto the cultural landscape of the UK. This Bradford was far from “noisy and angry”, having entered a third phase which appeared as unlikely as unexpected – it could be described as “glamorous and inclusive”. What is so exciting about this transformation is that it is spearheaded almost entirely by dynamic, educated, hardworking and confident Pakistani women. They are not only the pride of the community and the pride of Britain. Their festival was cutting edge and outshone even those traditionally held in other centers in the world – the fact that it was conceived and run by two Muslim women should have alerted the world to dramatic changes taking place in European Muslim society. Shops like Khaadi, a Pakistani women’s clothing store, were prominently located in The Broadway, the glittering new mall in Bradford, alongside the major brand shops and standard American eateries like Burger King, KFC and Subway. Khaadi had some stunning dresses imported from Pakistan and was always full of young, modest but smartly-dressed females with a Pakistani background.
The festival, co-directed by two remarkable young women, Irna Qureshi and Syima Aslam, which ran from May 20-29 for the second straight year, was the coming-of-age of Bradford. There was an impressive collection of 200 high-profile speeches, panels, film showings, and performances. Some 70 local schools also joined the festival activities. There were even talks, panels, and performances which featured LGBT themes. It was distinctly multicultural with a particular focus on Muslim-themed events such as the evenings devoted to the giants of South Asian Muslim literature like the legendary Ghalib, as well as English literary figures like the Bronte sisters, who were from Bradford. It is important to keep in mind that the main support for the Festival has come from organizations like the Arts Council of the UK, which underlines its inclusive nature.
I was particularly proud to show our film, Journey into Europe, in an impressive cinema complex in the National Media Museum in the Cubby Broccoli Cinema named after the producer of the James Bond films. I also appeared on a panel discussing the rise of the far right earlier that day.
Guests had come from all over the world, such as the prominent social activist and politician Dr Yasmin Raashid from Pakistan. With a fine touch of hospitality, typical of the two hosts, guests were invited to a complimentary meal every night after the day’s festivities at “My Lahore”. It bustled with energy and ideas as people from different backgrounds exchanged views and email addresses while they enjoyed the excellent Lahori tikkas and kebabs. It was a nostalgic time for me sitting in “My Lahore” surrounded by young Pakistanis in their traditional dress, animatedly discussing art and poetry with non-Pakistanis. I also thought of the time I first came here as Irna housed my team in the Midland Hotel, which had stood the test of time.
In discussing the Muslim women from the region changing the image of the Pakistani community, we cannot neglect to mention another star of the area, Baroness Sayeeda Warsi – a patron of the festival. About the same age as Irna and Syima, Sayeeda lives in nearby Leeds. She shot to fame when she was made a member of the House of Lords. Possessing a lively sense of humor, she recounted how she found herself, at 36, part of an institution in which the average age of the members was 69. Sayeeda and her husband Iftikhar Azam generously took us out for a magnificent Pakistani breakfast at Zoya, a Pakistani restaurant typical of this new smart Bradford. It was impeccably clean with superb Pakistani food, and our hostess ordered the especially recommended halwa, puri, siri-paye and nihari with paratha and sweetmeats. The restaurant was full of comfortable, middle class-looking men and women of Pakistani background, many in traditional dress. Without a trace of irony, an Englishman hired by the owner to play the piano rendered a passable version of “ As Time Goes By”. After the meal, I could not resist requesting the pianist to play it again. I could almost hear the nasal intonations of old Bogie muttering, “Of all the gin joints in the world…”
We are now seeing the emergence in the Bradford region of a distinct group of females, proud of their Pakistani heritage and equally proud of being British. These are not the daughters of the elite of Pakistan – the feudal lords and rich politicians. Each and every one of them we met – Irna, Syima, and Sayeeda – were the children of men who had worked in the local factories. Success has not come easily.
Each of them had to first fight the highly patriarchal family structure, go through the traditional marriage, often to their cousins, inevitably split from their husbands, and finally, triumphantly, find their own individual voices. If their fathers and grandfathers had been heroic in their selfless and silent service, long hours and minimum pay to ensure that their children had a basic standard of living and could survive into the future, these women were equally heroic in surmounting their traditional, often claustrophobic social environment and moving out to new expressions of their identity while maintaining their integrity.
Inadvertently, these women were providing the community with an alternative leadership to the one provided by traditional Bradford. Their leadership was symbolized in the way they spoke and appeared, and contrasted sharply with the traditional leadership of Bradford – they wore smart traditional shalwar-kameez or modest but elegant Western clothes whilst the traditional leadership stuck to turbans, long beards and white shalwar-kameez stitched in the fashion of the 1950s. None of these women wore the hijab.
The literature festival and the role of these women indicates the coming-of-age of a new and important Muslim identity with great implications for Islam in the West. These are not isolated women or one-off examples; Naz Shah the local Member of Parliament and Tasmina Sheikh of Glasgow (also an MP), along with high-profile figures like Zeba Salman and Amina Yaqin at SOAS, the University of London, suggest a change in the role and status of women in the Muslim community.
When Haji Musa migrated to Bradford from rural Punjab in 1950, he could not have imagined that one day his granddaughter Irna would become a national celebrity representing the new, dynamic, and attractive face of Bradford, the area that had stripped him of his old identity and had kept him unsung and invisible. Similarly, Sayeeda’s father who heroically brought up five girls and worked in a factory, can now sit back and take pride in the fact that his daughter was the first Muslim in history to chair the Conservative Party and equally that she had the courage to resign from government on a matter of principle. These men from rural Punjab, and others like them, are heroic figures who worked hard silently and with dignity to make a better life for their children. Their stories deserve to be documented for what they tell us about both Pakistan, the land that they left behind; and Britain, the country that gave them new lives and a bright future for their children. The same applies to the Pakistani immigrant bus-drivers whose sons went on to become Cabinet Minister and Mayor of London, Sajid Javid and Sadiq Khan respectively, but that is another subject and another story.
The commentators on Islam and those from government monitoring the Muslim community need to understand that while the “noisy and angry” side of Bradford is still apparent, there is another face that is emerging from this very community that is “glamorous and inclusive”. It is the latter that gives credit not only to the Muslim immigrant community but ultimately to British society, which has allowed these young immigrants to find a new path to rediscover and reaffirm their own identity. But if the media and the Islamophobes do not recognise these changes and continue to focus on “noisy and angry” Muslims, the danger is that the authorities will ignore those whom they should be encouraging as role models for all Britons – not just Muslim immigrants. An opportunity will be lost: these Pakistani women from the north of England may have valuable lessons to teach Western societies in their battle against the scourge of terrorism and hatred of the “Other” which continues to poison relations between different faiths and cultures.
( Professor Akbar Ahmed is the Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies at the American University, Washington DC)
