“One of them played cricket, he was even a member of a team!” One of the most striking aspects of the reaction to the London bombings of July 7 is the widespread state of baffled incomprehension. The question is not why London was bombed — most people expected that sooner or later London would be struck by the terrorists just as New York, Bali and Madrid had been - but why seemingly-ordinary British men could become suicide bombers. The four suicide bombers of July 7 did not look like the common stereotype of extremist fanatics, they did not look like the villains of Hollywood or children’s fiction, they did not even look like the Taleban or Osama Bin Laden, they looked like normal Asian young men. They went white-water rafting, they even played cricket.
How could anyone who loved cricket commit such an atrocity? You have to smile at the question. So many atrocities over the centuries were committed by people who played cricket. What I find more interesting about this comment, made by an intelligent and sensitive middle-aged Englishwoman, is that it manifests the incomprehension that the bombers could be one of “us”. It is so much easier to believe that criminals are a race apart, people we can easily identify as different, part of the “them”. Surely knowing your enemy is the first step to beating your enemy, but when the enemy comes from within, it is so much more terrifying. And terrorists by definition feed on getting us scared.
Last weekend I had dinner with a group of Arab friends. “Thank God the bombers were Asian,” one of them said. He went on to say that the word “Arab” had barely been mentioned in any of the news reports, the finger of suspicion was pointing firmly at Asians. He was relieved, on a day-to-day basis this made his life easier. In essence he could more easily identify himself as part of the “us” that was being terrorized, rather than the “them” who produced the terrorists. It was rather clumsy thinking. For one thing it assumes that the frightened commuter or the trigger-happy policeman makes the difference between Asian and Arab, when even a Brazilian man was described by witnesses to his tragic shooting as “an Asian man”. For another, it neatly forgets that it is Muslims who are under the glare of the spotlight, not any specific nationality of Muslim.
The July 7 bombers were of Pakistani descent, the July 21 seem to be Somali and Ethiopian, while the Madrid bombers were North African and the 9/11 hijackers were overwhelmingly Saudi. If anything, what the bombings have shown is that the only common denominator is that the terrorists were Muslims. It has only served to confirm the suspicion among many that Islam is somehow responsible for breeding the terrorists.
Of course Islam as a religion is in no way responsible for the carnage that has been carried out in its name, it is peaceful and abhors the taking of innocent life. The Muslim establishment has also been quick to condemn the bombings. The danger lies in the combination of defining the in-group in exclusivist terms and of viewing the out-group as corrupt and evil. This makes it easy to make almost anyone a legitimate target in the eyes of the terrorists. Splitting the world into us and them is a natural knee-jerk reaction to any perceived threat. It is the “you’re either with us or against us” argument. Simplistic, effective, destructive. Simplistic because it is black and white. Effective because it scares people into line. Destructive because it makes the enemy stronger. The moment Muslims start seeing themselves as the victims, as misunderstood and different, as people who do not have a voice and who are beleaguered, is the moment the terrorists win. We fall into the trap of seeing the world in bipolar terms.
The problem is compounded by the fact that Arabs and Muslims are already prone to seeing the world in polarized terms. There is a propensity to think of the world in terms of “good” Muslims and “evil” Westerners, or at least of thinking that Muslim culture is threatened by the virus of Western influence, which in turn promotes entrenchment and defensiveness.
Take a recent YouGov survey of British Muslims; 31 percent thought that “Western society is decadent and immoral and that Muslims should seek to bring it to an end but only by nonviolent means.” These are British Muslims! Why do they see themselves as separate from Western society? When you choose to live in a particular society, when you take its citizenship, give birth to your children in its hospitals, pay taxes to its government and so on, you become part of that society. Assimilation has become an emotive word because there is an assumption that you give up your own cultural identity and take up that of your host culture, whereas it is closer to evolution, your identity evolves — just as your identity would have evolved had you stayed in your country of origin — but core values remain the same. You can be a Muslim and be part of Western society, the two are not mutually exclusive, it is not a case of us and them.
I have a friend who says she would like to ban the word “community”. I can see her point, speaking of “the Muslim Community” is not only the first step to singling Muslim people out as different, but it also makes it easy to think of them in blanket terms. I have become more aware of this in recent weeks because time and time again I have been asked to explain the action of the bombers, as if just by being Muslim I must have the same mindset. The underlying assumption is that we are all part of the same community, the bombers representing one extreme of a continuum and “liberal Muslims” like me representing the other. The truth is that there are as many different kinds of British Muslims as there are British Christians but there is an assumption both among Muslims and among non-Muslims that Muslims have a unique sense of brotherhood, that our religion unites us in a way that other religions do not. I find this nonsensical. From my experience at least, both Arabs and Muslims tend to define themselves in ever decreasing circles. We may pay lip service to an idea of Arab nationalism or of a great Muslim Ummah, but we tend to think of “us” in very limited terms. Besides both Judaism and Christianity have a strong sense of brotherhood, it is a characteristic of most religions, it is not exclusive to Islam.
Since July 7, I have become accustomed to the sound of police sirens night and day. There is still a great sense of shock and the more we find out about the bombers of July 7 and the suspected bombers of July 21, the more bewildered we are by the fact that they could have been anyone’s sons. My heart goes out to the parents of the bombers, by all accounts none of them even suspected that their son could be involved in terrorism. The virus that threatens us is not the dominance of one culture over another, it is the blinkered thinking that the world can easily be delineated into us and them.
