One of the strange ironies of the Southasian immigration experience to Great Britain was how the near-universal levels of racism in the host community dissipated at the same time levels of religious identity politics and radicalisation became endemic. White racism started to fall back but at the same time secular politicisation receded in the immigrant Muslim community. We are now living in times when the kind of visceral racism we Southasians experienced in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s is at an all time low, but Muslim immigrant communities have organised themselves into political structures which are emanations of reactionary political groups from “back home”, such as the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat-e-Islam.
Ansar Ahmed Ullah, who is involved with the International Forum for Secular Bangladesh, has charted these alternating sinusoidal waves in racial identity and religious politics in an article on the short history of activism among Bengalis in the East End of London “from the localised welfare politics to the dangerous shores of Islamism”. I hope the young people from Tower Hamlets who now see themselves as “Muslim activists” would read this to see how the real battles against racism in East London and beyond were fought, not so long ago, by men and women with secular politics first and foremost.
The history of the Bengali community and political activism in London’s East End can be seen as passing through different phases. It started with localised welfare politics. Then it was characterized by Bangladesh’s national independence movement. This was followed by the political mobilisation of the second generation of Bengali community activists in anti-racist politics. But significant involvement in mainstream politics led eventually to the fringes of the global politics of Islamism.
The earliest Bengali political activism in London’s East End can be traced to the first Bengali settlers, the seafarers. The Bengali presence in the UK goes back long before the Indian subcontinent gained its independence from the British in 1947, however it was early in the 20th century that the first large group of South Asian – including Bengali – seamen, known as “lascars”, were recruited in British India to work for the East India Company, and came to the UK.
Some of these seamen had begun to settle in London’s East End from the 1850s onwards. Evidence of the early settlement of Bengali seafarers in London can be seen in the formation of organisations such as the Society for the Protection of Asian Sailors in 1857.
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Let me just plug one more thing then I’ll stop being a creepy hanger-arounder on your blog today.
Ansar’s article is also published in the latest Jewish Socialist magazine (he gave it as a talk at a Jewish Socialist Group event at Toynbee Hall). The same issue also has a very interesting article by Georgie Wemyess on 300 years of Asian migration to the East End, which is an extract from her new book on the same topic, “The Invisible Empire: White Discourse, Tolerance and Belonging”.
ooh thanks for the tip Rachel, I will try and get hold of that book.
Faisal, what happened is that the Jamat-e-Islami imposed itself structurally on the Pakistani / Bangladeshi community before they had the chance to fully grow into themselves as British Pakistanis / Bangladeshis. They kept on doing this, because they felt it was their duty to navigate Muslims in the ‘hostile’ society using the ideological structuring and institutionalising that they did in order to become the ‘Muslim voice’ in Britain. They started this in the 1970′s. It manifested most spectacularly in 1989 in the Rushdie affair. And it has continued since then.
This mangled the natural trajectory of integration for British Pakistanis and Bangladeshis (although until recently, much less for Bangladeshis than Pakistanis), and they attempts to opress them still. Sectarians amongst Hindus and Sikhs exist, but have been relatively less successful in doing this, one of the reasons being that they have not had the same ideological plutonium to keep the fight against ‘the other’ going to the same degree that the Islamists have been able to. Islamist have a lot of fuel and resentment in their tank.
Extremely useful and enlightening comment, Sanjay.
Sanjay, and you only have to look at early Islamic groups founded in the UK. Islamic Foundation – founded by Khurshid Ahmad, an early pioneer of the Jamaat-e-Islami in Pakistan. Then there’s the Muslim Educational Trust, also Jamaati. Post Rushdie-fatwa came the Islamic Society of Britain and the Muslim Council of Britain, all with executive boards bristling with Jamaat and Muslim Brotherhood members from the outset.
Yes Faisal, you are right. It is directly traceable to this institutionalisation of Jamaat-e-Islami / Mawdudi ideologists within the diaspora.
They provided a ready made toolkit of thinking for how to negotiate life in Britain, and it was founded on ideas that originated in political Islam in Pakistan and the sub-continent, and transposed them on to the lives of Muslims in Bradford, Birmingham and London. And it had to relevance to their dilemmas, their choices, their reality as British boys and girls and men and women, it only had the insistent appeal to the faith and the loyalty to the ideological construct that they assserted.
Add to this the concerns of the elders who wanted to control the new British born generations, and the appeal of ‘Ummah’ Identity Politics, and their dogma became manifest. They were able to simply appeal to the rhetoric of ‘pluralism’ and ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘tolerance’ to have a disguise under the ill-thought out but well intentioned reflex of ‘diversity’ (even though those concepts are anathema to them)