Environment, definitions, and assumptions

Criminal Pasts and Blocked Social Mobility

Wiktorowicz (2005) argues that the ‗risky‘ nature of al-Muhajiroun activism, adequately demonstrated by the 2008 arrests and terror raids of two of the interviewed activists, is not irrational but is the result of personal ‗grievances or dissatisfaction‘ or wider conditions (p.

206). These conditions ‗prompt a cognitive opening in which the affected individual [becomes] open to alternative belief systems and ways of looking at the world‘

(Wiktorowicz, 2005, p. 206). The lives of Stoke-on-Trent‘s al-Muhajiorun activists do not contradict this finding, with blocked social mobility, criminal pasts, and experiences of racism being a feature of their accounts of growing up. Indeed, for those with other negative experiences of the justice system, the risks of arrest associated with their activism are not a significant departure from the risks they ran beforehand.

Abu Q, Haseen and Yasir were all involved in crime prior to their becoming activists.

Outside of the formal interview Haseen admitted that at 16 and 17 he was ‗leading a bad life, smoking weed, chilling out‘. Abu Q did not want to talk about the bad things he had done as a child, bar telling me to ‗imagine how a normal youth goes on‘ (Interview 1).

Yasir, however, was much more forthcoming, telling me about his life before becoming a Muslim:

When I got to about 16, 17, I started selling drugs. I was selling crack cocaine, and was selling, er, heroin as well, and I was selling that for about two, maybe two years…My house got raided a couple of times, my family house where my mum lived and my stepdad, and they weren‘t happy at all. But I didn‘t care what they

thought, cause like I said, I had no loyalties to no-one. I didn‘t er, you know, er, there was no limits for me there was no boundaries.

(Interview 1)

Indeed, Yasir‘s drug dealing followed the activities of his father who ‗was basically in and out of jail, so he did a bit of jail here, there and everywhere, you know what I mean, for, you know, because of drugs‘ (Interview 2).

He then went on to describe how others, all Asian Muslim by birth, in his drug-dealing gang began to reject this way of living after a friend came out of prison a practising Muslim, and Yasir did the same. After converting to Islam, Yasir was looked after by some Hizb ut-Tahrir activists:

They were just, you know, befriended me, looked after me, I needed a house to move into so they got me a house, you know. Because they see me as a new Muslim that needed help to get on my feet, because basically when I first become Muslim obviously I told you my family had a bit of an issue with it initially… But then what they did is they helped me out so they got me a house, they got me some furniture for inside of the house. They got a lot of things, they helped me out in a lot of ways.

(Yasir, Interview 2)

Abu Q had more to say about racism and in particular an incident which seems originally to have been designed to wind up the teachers, in the manner of other working-class boys (Willis, 1977) and increased Abu Q‘s resistance to authority:

I was fasting that day. That is the only day I fast. Like I wasn‘t practicing but I, I really wanted to fast this day. I woke up in the morning to fast and I said I‘m never, not going to break my fast. No. I said to my teacher no I said to her I‘m fasting I

don‘t want to... We were making cakes or something. She said you have to make it.

I said I don‘t want to you know what I mean bro? I don‘t want to. Because I‘m fasting. She said go to your own country and fast. Go there and do the fasting. I got angry. I got angry. I was an angry kid them days. I started throwing stuff. I got very, very angry. Then the head teacher came and like the senior head came in and they all… I said she said go to my own country. And why didn‘t they say nothing to her because she was an authority. They didn‘t believe me. And that stuck to me hard. I said aye up, why they believing her over me? Aren‘t I a human being too? But they didn‘t believe me. They called me a liar. I said I ain‘t a liar. I‘m even fasting: how can I lie? You aren‘t allowed to lie when I‘m fasting. This was this statement hurt me a lot. But I found out this wasn‘t her country. This wasn‘t the white people‘s country. This wasn‘t the brown people. This wasn‘t nobody‘s country. This land ain‘t created by nobody. It‘s created by God.

(Interview 1)

Unlike the other al-Muhajiroun activists, Asif and Nasir had done well in their education and should have been more socially mobile than others of their background.

Nasir‘s curriculum vitae should have made him attractive to employers: as well as the community activity described above he was also his school‘s cricket captain. When he went to university he continued to be involved in sports. However, his original choice of university and degree was changed when his father had a heart attack, and Nasir felt he should attend a more local university. Instead of the vocational science course he had hoped to do, he did a more traditional science degree but this did not lead to a job in science – he had interviews with big companies in the south of England but no offers – and at the time of interview Nasir was working in a call centre.

Asif also had the potential for social mobility. As a teenager he had a ‗rebel phase‘ in which he had travelled around north-west England, working and staying in hotels. He then returned to do A-levels and a Law degree at a local university. However, like Abu Q he wanted to challenge the authority of those teaching him:

I disagreed with the assignment on a fundamental point and I was told, well no, you can't… you're not really supposed to disagree with it at that point. You know, you're supposed to disagree from this point beyond. And there's a couple of issues, you know, a couple of times when I went to them and I said, "Look, I can… I can provide a very academic argument, and I'm talking scholarly arguments, so we're not just talking, like… I'm not just talking opinion. I'm talking a scholarly argument, but it's… it's viewpoints of different people. And they said, "No, no, no, we can only accept people whose books we've written as part… as part of the necessary reading." And I said, "Well, I don't believe that's education. I believe that's training. And you want me to have a certain viewpoint about that and that's wrong.‖

(Interview 1)

This led to him receiving a lower grade for his degree than otherwise. Asif‘s sense of social justice also led him to challenge elsewhere. While working for the race equality body he challenged a council officer after a community cohesion event where there was no halal food provided. Asif also complained about a visit from his MP, canvassing for the election, in which the MP began by saying what he would do for his Muslim constituents although Asif did not consider himself to be a Muslim. However, his most serious challenge to authority led to him spending time in prison. In 2005, Asif witnessed an incident in which a white police officer was alleged to have hit a young Asian man with a baton, and conversely the police alleged they were racially abused. In a subsequent trial he

was called as a defence witness for the young Asian man, but was then prosecuted for intimidating the jury:

…as they walked past they heard me say the words ‗not guilty‘ and cause they‘d heard me say the words ‗what‘s the verdict? Not guilty‘ they felt intimidated, and hence I was guilty of intimidating the jury.

(Interview 1)

At the time of interview Asif had only recently been released from prison, and although he described himself as a youth worker, he was not working.

Wiktorowicz (2005) found that ‗most [al-Muhajiroun] activists are university students or recent college graduates with aspirations of upward mobility… [believing] that they face a discriminatory system that prevents them from realizing their potential‘ (p. 91). While this rang true, and the story told by Nasir contains little for which he can personally be blamed, the majority of these activists were challenging authority or the authorities prior to their Islamist activism. The interplay between individual demands – for the right to not take part in a home economics class, to halal food – or the street behaviour of Abu Q and Yasir and the authorities‘ response to this sets them up on a path to confrontation.

Indeed, it is useful to compare the al-Muhajiroun activists‘ descriptions of suffering with that of Munir, the social entrepreneur. As one of ‗only two Bengali lads, Bangladeshi lads‘

he was in ‗a mixed group of black, Asian, white‘ (Interview 1) but had problems with the white and Pakistani groups. He was also stabbed in the arm in one incident at the school due to mistaken identity, but did not tell me if the perpetrator was white or Asian: he did not racialise this incident. While he was working in NorthSide, a very white suburban estate, as a community warden he was racially abused on more than one occasion:

In NorthSide I got glass bottled there three times… I remember working with a guy who was a community warden, he was an Asian guy who had somebody pull a knife at him. Um, that was down because he was Asian and walking through the NorthSide area.

(Interview 2)

Later, on Munir‘s first day in his youth work job he was also an early victim of the Islamophobia arising from the terrorist attacks of 2001:

Actually, the first I heard about 9/11 without realising I heard about it, was when I got off the bus: I was walking through Hanley and somebody come out of a flat.

And, um, this thing was along the lines ‗I bet it was your dad who did it‘, and I didn‘t think anything of it I was thought he was just a pisshead walking over to the pub.

(Interview 2)

These experiences, however, had not led Munir to anger and extremist politics. As I will discuss in the next chapter, many of Munir‘s opinions about societal Islamophobia, the war on terror, and the state‘s relationship to Muslims were similar to those expressed by the al-Muhajiroun activists. However, his success as a social entrepreneur meant that he felt his voice was heard:

I mean I suppose [my work] also challenges some of the government initiatives. I was quite heavily involved in challenging their extremism pathfinder, um which sort of.... it took a long time but it was something that was quite close to my heart.

Um you know, I just felt the government was demonising Muslim communities, you know, you're setting up a project just to challenge um, what to call it,

extremism in the Muslim community… and to be honest, I think the LSP and city council kind of understand where we were coming from.

(Interview 1)

Compared to Munir, then, those who became al-Muhajiroun activists gave me stories of their lives that emphasised the setbacks they had suffered. Munir, the mainstream activist, mentioned that ‗there‘s a lot of racist views out there‘ (Interview 2) as merely a matter of fact, and then talked of his dealings with BNP councillors and his day-to-day work challenging the racism of young people in particular. The extremist activists, however, dwelled more on stories of injustice, and those in which people of authority – teachers, lecturers, and police officers – were cast as the perpetrator.

This difference raises questions about what these young people are supposed to integrate into, and for what purpose. Many first generation migrants remained integrated into cohesive groups based on ties to place, language and culture of their homeland, and allowed community leaders to be their representatives to British power structures.

Communal establishments such as the mosque were places that sustained this integration.

As hoped for by politicians of all sides, the children of such migrants integrated into British society and the British way of life through schooling, work, and on the street, but this has led to a rejection of those communal establishments and structures. As one of Stoke‘s Muslim councillors put it: ‗The young, they seem to be a community of their own and really they do live their own parallel life with the community‘ (Michael, 2007, p. 178).

What these young people integrate into is not always the ‗upstanding‘ and empowered community that will enable them to fully participate in society. In the American context, Portes, Fernández-Kelly, and Haller (2005) note that ‗it makes a great deal of difference whether they [assimilate] by joining the mainstream middle class or the marginalized, and largely racialized, population at the bottom‘. In Stoke-on-Trent, with the second smallest

proportion of middle-class people of any local authority in England and Wales,³ the integration that would assist social mobility – perhaps bridging social capital to people with professional jobs – is not possible. The young Pakistani Muslims of Stoke-on-Trent are more likely to integrate into white working-class society, thus Abu Q‘s challenging of the teacher mirrors the behaviour of white working class boys. Haseen‘s parents sent him away to boarding school as he was beginning to integrate too much into the lifestyle of a certain segment of local youths.

Thus the integration of young Pakistani Muslim men is not accompanied by empowerment or social mobility. ‗While growing up in a British system that preaches tolerance and multiculturalism, they experience both racial and religious discrimination‘ (Wiktorowicz, 2005, p. 206). This, in Jock Young‘s words, is ‗citizenship thwarted‘ (Young, 2003b), where the descendents of migrants come to believe they have full and equal citizenship as they were born here but find that, when push comes to shove, that they do not.

Talking of places like Bradford and Burnley, Young argues that any possibility of ‗genuine cultural diversity‘, qua new ethnicities, is stymied by ‗segregated housing policies, single faith schools, backward looking community leaders and, above all, the glib allocation of people to fixed ethnic categories‘ (Young, 2003b, pp. 459-460). Stoke has so few Asian Muslims that the epithet of ‗ethnic ghetto‘ would be impossible to justify. However, the recruitment of Asian youth workers for Asian youth, and the approach of the local MP to Asif, certainly is based in fixed categories.

For Nasir and Asif, the very real chance of social mobility never came to pass: their university degrees have left them in either unskilled jobs or unemployed. Prior to their Islamist activism, Abu Q, Asif, and Haseen all challenged the authority of teachers, parents, lecturers, and police officers and lost. Perhaps it is a step too far to see this as

3 Analysis of neighbourhood statistics, using social grades AB as a percentage of total population.

political citizenship thwarted. However, these young people are given, in our liberal democracy, the idea that challenges to authority, including debate and protest, are integral to a healthy polity. If their challenges are dealt with more harshly than those of their white counterparts – as was also true in the case of the 2001 disturbances where longer than expected prison sentences were used to ‗teach these communities a lesson in law and order‘ (Bagguley & Hussain, 2008, p. 127) – then this is surely citizenship thwarted, a theme I will return to in chapter 8.