Focus: Undercover on planet Beeston

“Look what we can do if we stick together,” Sabeer had told me as we drove through an area completely dominated by Muslim shops, houses and schools.              www.bnp.org.uk

Sunday Times reporter Ali Hussain spent six weeks in Beeston, where three of the 7/7 bombers came from.
He found an enclosed community, rife with conspiracy theories

The rich smell of Indian spices wafted along the road. Voices babbled in Urdu and Sylheti, a Bangladeshi dialect that my own family speak. Thick-bearded men in robes strolled the streets and youngsters wore their jeans rolled above the ankle after leaving the mosque, as Muslim custom requires.
I felt both at home and in a foreign land. This could almost be an Asian city, I thought, rather than Beeston, the suburb of Leeds where two of the July 7 bombers had lived.
I had come to gauge the mood of the community after the 7/7 attacks, which struck London a year ago this week. The world I knew as a British Muslim sprang from cosmopolitan roots, and I wanted to discover what the people of this more insular community really felt about the bombers and western culture.
I found myself both drawn to the warm embrace of the Muslim community that dominates Beeston, and shocked by the views it espoused in private.

Take, for example, Anhar Ghani, a community worker at the Hamara centre on Tempest Road that was frequented by Mohammad Sidique Khan, the leader of the bombers. Ghani became my first “friend” during six weeks of living in Beeston as an undercover Sunday Times reporter pretending to be a student, and at first he displayed a generosity of spirit hard to fault.
 Like me, he is in his twenties and of Bangladeshi origin, and we warmed to each other immediately. We chatted in English and Bengali about his family — he is married with one child — and how to get a job and draw up a CV. Though Ghani normally dealt only with teenagers, he went out of his way to help. In his trendy jeans and trainers, he seemed like just another hopeful in modern multicultural Britain — and I, a stranger in town, found him comforting.

But his kindness to me was coupled with a darker outlook on the wider world. I was shocked when one day at the Hamara centre he began explaining how the London bombers could be seen as martyrs.
“The western mind and the Muslim mind are two different psychologies,” he said. “The Muslim mind will see that this life means nothing unless I sacrifice myself for Allah.”
Inside I flinched, but outwardly I nodded with a look of sympathy. I did not want him to close up as much of the community had done after last summer’s attacks.  I wanted him to speak honestly.
“My life means nothing, you know,” he continued. “I would give up this evil, two-seconds of a life.” Earthly experience, I think he meant, was but a moment compared with paradise to come.
Later he went on to eulogise Abdullah Faisal, a firebrand Islamic cleric who was imprisoned in 2003 for inciting the murder of Jews. Faisal, said to have been a strong influence on the 7/7 bombers, has advocated the spreading of Islam “by the Kalashnikov” and declared that one aim of jihad is to “lessen the population of unbelievers”.
To Ghani, the cleric was “one of the good ones” and he advised me where I might obtain recordings of his sermons.

As I looked at Ghani, a young man with much to live for, my shock turned to anger. How could he, so similar in many ways to myself, view the world through such different, bellicose eyes? How could he have become trapped in vicious dogma?
Though I would hardly be described as devout, I see myself as Muslim — and have been increasingly mindful of it since 9/11. Yet I feel nothing like Ghani’s disillusion and anger at the West. Where had our roads parted? What makes places such as Beeston breeding grounds of hate?
My parents brought me to Britain when I was two and settled not in a city, but in an Oxfordshire village. My father opened the only Indian restaurant there and I grew up in a rather English environment, though my parents were strict Muslims.
IT WAS only when I was about 10 that we moved to Tower Hamlets in east London — a culture clash that was almost as great as being a Bangladeshi transplanted to an English village.

In Oxfordshire I had been the only Asian in my school; in Tower Hamlets my school had barely any white faces. For the first time I learnt, from my new peers, to swear in Sylheti.
Thanks to my earlier experience, however, I was always open to the world outside this community; close by, too, were more prosperous areas of London with many different cultures vying for attention.
I rarely worried about my identity or how other people perceived me as a Muslim — until the 9/11 attacks. Suddenly there was a war on terror and Muslims were under scrutiny as never before.
The effect, to my surprise, was to make me feel more Muslim, not less. I am sure the impact on young people growing up in Beeston, an area more deprived and isolated than Tower Hamlets, was even greater.
Beeston is a suburb of Victorian terraces that have been slowly unravelling since the decline of the textile and coal industries. Unemployment is about 8%, twice the level in Leeds overall, and 42% of residents are classed as “economically inactive”.

Over the years Asian Muslims of Pakistani, Kashmiri and Bangladeshi origin have congregated in the area and now run many of the businesses and shops. They open and close with Muslim prayers throughout the day.
In the six weeks I spent there, the only person of non-Asian origin I spoke to was the caretaker at a bed and breakfast place — and that was owned by Asians. I began to feel curiously detached from the Britain I had known, like a contestant in some weird reality show.
Social structures in Beeston revolve around certain community centres, shops and the mosques. Three principle mosques cater for different groups: the Hardy Street mosque is run by Kashmiri Muslims; the Stratford Street mosque is dominated by Pakistani Tablighi Jamaat Muslims, a missionary group; and the Bengali mosque on Tunstall Road is dominated by Bangladeshis.
The days were punctuated with mosque gatherings where people exchanged news and information. I found the sense of brotherhood very comforting: as we knelt and prayed, feet facing straight towards Mecca, our shoulders touched to squeeze out Satan who would fill in the gaps if they did not.
Unused to such literal rubbing of shoulders with new friends I felt a strange unity, even a growing intimacy. It was not hard to see how young men, ignorant of Britain’s opportunities beyond Beeston, could find purpose in Islam.

Some worshippers attend more than one mosque, of course, and at least one of the London bombers, Khan, is known to have frequented all three. Ghani did not discourage me from attending the Stratford Street mosque, but he did warn me that the Tablighis can be a little “forceful” in their preaching.
This group has its centre 10 miles away at the Markaz mosque in Dewsbury, where thousands of worshippers arrive every evening from all over Yorkshire. It’s an extraordinary sight: I had experienced nothing like it before in Britain.
You approach the Markaz mosque through an area packed with Asian shops. Men in robes throng the streets. Women are nowhere to be seen. Inside the building is one huge hall, plus two smaller halls where the sermons are translated into other languages.
Invited by Sabeer, a senior member of the Stratford Street mosque, I attended Marqaz several times. On one occasion after listening to a biyan, or sermon, Sabeer took me to the canteen. We sat cross-legged on the floor on sheets of white paper and were served by men with large buckets of lamb curry and rice. We ate with our hands, one great communal gathering sharing food.
Was I dreaming? Had I time-travelled? I had to keep reminding myself that this was Yorkshire, land of broad vowels, warm beer and Geoff Boycott; but it felt like Pakistan, a country I know and the country that two of the bombers visited, apparently for training, before their attacks.

It was Eid ul-Adha, the festival celebrating the time God asked Abraham to sacrifice his son. Muslim custom is to dress in new clothes and visit friends and family at Eid, and I had bought myself a new pair of shoes and a top.
At the Bengali mosque in Beeston that morning the congregation was overflowing.
I felt odd being away from home during Eid, but people tend to be generous at this time and one man, whom I knew as Jabbar, invited me to his house after prayers.
Jabbar, clean shaven and in his thirties, ran a DIY shop on the Dewsbury Road. On the face of it Jabbar, who lived nearby with his young family, was one of those responsible, hard-working people who weave communities together. He insisted I stay for tea, and then rice and curry.

As I brought up 9/11, I was taken aback when he began to talk about a “western conspiracy against Muslims”. I had been in London on the day of the 2001 attacks and like everyone else had watched in amazement and horror as the twin towers fell. I had never doubted that Osama Bin Laden had inspired the atrocity and that Islamic terrorists had perpetrated it.
Jabbar doubted it. He told me the 9/11 attacks were a conspiracy and that he had a DVD which proved it. So were the London bombings, he said.
I found myself in a ferment of mixed emotions. Here was a man who had shown great courtesy and kindness, yet believed the West was so corrupt it had staged terrorist attacks against itself. How could he be so deluded? Jabbar, however, was far from alone. One of the sternest advocates of conspiracy theory was Imran Bham, a shopkeeper running Idoo PC, a computer equipment shop.
“You don’t get anywhere with the dirty kuffar (infidels),” he told me, claiming there was a widespread conspiracy against Muslims and that the 7/7 bombings were part of it. “These brothers never did it,” he said. “And understand this.  In order for America and Britain to go to Iraq they have to have reasons and sometimes, I’m afraid, if you haven’t got a reason, you make up that reason.”

He showed me pictures of the bomb blasts from the BBC on his computer, claiming ID documents must have been placed at the scene by officials because the blasts would have destroyed them.
He offered me £5 to go and buy a piece of beef, telling me to place the meat in the oven alongside my credit card, passport and other ID and then turn the temperature up. After half an hour at medium temperature, he said, the documents would melt but the beef would only be sweating. I could then draw my own conclusions.
Once again, I felt as if I had entered a strange bubble, a world where the reality I had known before had been suspended. Bham then asked me if I would ever blow myself up for Islam. I replied that the Koran says you should not harm innocent people. 
“What Koran was that?” he countered. “Don’t fool yourself by saying jihad is a struggle within, to get on with life, to motivate myself to get up for prayers and that sort of thing,” he said. “That’s not jihad. Who told you that?”

AFTER six weeks I left Beeston quietly, slipping away to Leeds and back to London by train. As I travelled out of the Victorian streets towards Leeds city centre, I felt the claustrophobia lifting. It was relief to rejoin a wider, more diverse world.
I felt, too, guilt at having moved among the people of Beeston under a false guise. They had welcomed me; but they had also revealed an important facet of Muslim life in Britain today. While I was there an imam of the Bengali mosque, Hamid Ali, had praised the bombers, saying their actions would make non-Muslims “prick up their ears” and listen. I had learnt such sentiments are, one way or another, widespread in Beeston. Ghani, Bham, Jabbar and many others believe in some form of conspiracy against Muslims.
Even the seemingly sensible Sabeer insisted the western “enemy” was out to get him. “It’s the way of the enemy really, the kuffar,” he said. “I’ve always known it as divide and rule.”
He’s utterly wrong in seeing a conspiracy, in my view — but he’s right that there is division. The Muslims of Beeston and other such areas are retreating, not engaging.

“Look what we can do if we stick together,” Sabeer had told me as we drove through an area completely dominated by Muslim shops, houses and schools. But look at the price isolation also exacts. Sabeer’s view was, I believe, a defensive reaction to a perceived threat. But it is also a stance coupled with an idea of a global Islamic “brotherhood” taking precedence over other communities. Unless the cycle of Muslim suspicion and separation can be broken, the dangers will remain. Ghani and his friends will continue to feel that, as he claimed, the western mind and the Muslim mind are irreconcilable. But for me this is a false dichotomy. Beeston brought home that I cannot separate what is Islamic about me from what is “western”. I do not see myself through the prism of us versus them, good versus evil, Muslim versus kuffar. I’d far rather embrace the things we share.

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