We rock the boat

We rock the boat

Today's Muslims aren't prepared to ignore injustice
Dilpazier Aslam, Wednesday July 13, 2005, Guardian

If I'm asked about 7/7, I - a Yorkshire lad, born and bred - will respond
first by giving an out-clause to being labelled a terrorist lover. I
think what happened in London was a sad day and not the way to express
your political anger.

Then there's the "but". If, as police announced yesterday, four men (at
least three from Yorkshire) blew themselves up in the name of Islam, then
please let us do ourselves a favour and not act shocked.

Shocked would be to imply that we were unaware of the imminent danger,
when in fact Sir John Stevens, the then Metropolitan police commissioner,
warned us last year that an attack was inevitable.

Shocked would be to suggest we didn't appreciate that when Falluja was
flattened, the people under it were dead but not forgotten - long after
we had moved on to reading more interesting headlines about the Olympics.
It is not the done thing to make such comparisons, but Muslims on the
street do. Some 2,749 people were killed in the 9/11 attacks. To discover
the cost of "liberating" Iraqis you need to multiply that figure by eight,
and still you will fall short of the estimated minimum of 22,787 civilian
Iraqi casualties to date. But it's not cool to say this, now that
London's skyline has also has plumed grey.

Shocked would also be to suggest that the bombings happened through no
responsibility of our own. OK, the streets of London were filled with
anti-war marchers, so why punish the average Londoner? But the argument
that this was an essentially US-led war does not pass muster. In the
Muslim world, the pond that divides Britain and America is a shallow one.
And the same cry - why punish us? - is often heard from Iraqi mothers as
the "collateral damage" increases daily.

Shocked would be to say that we don't understand how, in the green hills
of Yorkshire, a group of men given all the liberties they could have
wished for could do this.

The Muslim community is no monolithic whole. Yet there are some common
features. Second- and third-generation Muslims are without the
don't-rock-the-boat attitude that restricted our forefathers. We're much
sassier with our opinions, not caring if the boat rocks or not.

Which is why the young get angry with that breed of Muslim "community
leader" who remains silent while anger is seething on the streets.

Earlier this year I attended a mosque in Leeds for Friday prayers. It was
in the month of Ramadan, when Islamic fervour is at its most impassioned,
yet in the sermon, to a crowd of hundreds - many of whom were from Iraq -
Falluja was not referred to once; not even in the cupped-hands prayers
after the sermon was over.

I prayed my Eid prayer in a mosque in Sheffield and, though most there
were sickened and angry about events in Iraq, the imam chose not to
mention Falluja either. We "youngsters" - some now in our 40s - had seen
it before. This was deliberate silence, in case the boat rocked.

Perhaps now is the time to be honest with each other and to stop labelling
the enemy with simplistic terms such as "young", "underprivileged",
"undereducated" and perhaps even "fringe". The don't-rock-the-boat
attitude of elders doesn't mean the agitation wanes; it means it builds
till it can be contained no more.

Dilpazier Aslam is a Guardian trainee journalist

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