Ed Husain on Nazir-Ali's "no-go" nonsense

He starts off by describing the recent conviction of three Asian men for racially attacking a white man on an east London council estate, having called him and his friends "white honkies", leaving him with brain damage. This is abhorrent and the men were rightfully jailed, but this is straightforward racist violence by delinquents, and does not lend weight to what Nazir-Ali alleged, namely that the no-go areas have something to do with Islamist ideology. He further claims:

A weekly curry in Brick Lane is not enough to understand the the underworld that extremists manipulate to ensure that their version of a rigid, soulless political ideology - Islamism - reigns supreme in so-called "Muslim areas". Islam is an Abrahamic religion, not a political ideology.

What is his evidence that any part of London, or anywhere else, is controlled by this ideology? The general consensus seems to be that if they, and their Muslim or otherwise Asian inhabitants, are "controlled" by anyone, it is the social networks and conventions which were imported from "back home". Islamists are a minority, even if they are most prominent in the Islamic organisations; they do not control most of the mosques. Having had friends living on one of these estates, I was able to visit them (admittedly, I have a beard, but I'm white) and have visited various parts of east London and got in and out unmolested.

As for Canary Wharf bankers who live in Tower Hamlets (very much the minority, I suspect) and why they do not send their children to local schools, the fact is that an awful lot of very rich people do not send their children to state schools, especially in inner-city areas. The schools may not be "no-go" schools and if they have a low achievement record, the reason may well be linguistic; if enough middle-class white parents sent their children to the local schools, they would not be isolated among the Asians for very long. His comment about Green Street (that one "may as well be somewhere in India" is simply not true - there are a lot of Asians (of many religions) there, but it is not all Asian by any means. (I have been there many times.)

Husain's desire to throw mud at and reveal secrets about his fellow Muslims leads him to make some odd claims about the rest of society. The issue of "white flight", in which white people move out of a neighbourhood when blacks start moving in, is a well-known American phenomenon but is not nearly as well-known in the UK. In the UK, most neighbourhoods with a heavy black presence also have large numbers of other ethnicities, including whites (if not on the estates, in the districts). Golders Green is not known as a place of Jewish isolationism; it is not where the strictly Orthodox Jews live - that's Stamford Hill, and like Golders Green, it's a well-connected neighbourhood with plenty of non-Jews about.

He alleges that Asians cry racism "at every perceived injustice" while marrying from the Subcontinent in preference to their own community, and refer to white people by the "derogatory" term of goreh. Gora (gori in feminine) is simply Urdu for white; it is not derogatory at all, and Asians sometimes use the term Paki among themselves, objecting to it only when it comes after f***ing or before bastard. As for marrying from back home, if the spouse is educated, even if not English-speaking, and able to play an active role in society here, there is nothing wrong with that. I should add that those influenced by Islamist ideology are more likely to be educated, and may well be less likely to marry an illiterate peasant (or peasant's daughter) from back "home" who speaks only Punjabi or the local dialect of it. It often happens that elders obstruct efforts by the young, who are more likely than the elders to be influenced by Islamism, to marry locally and from backgrounds other than their own.

He ends by talking about the "debate about multiculturalism" opened by Trevor Phillips and the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, and now added to by Nazir-Ali. However, Phillips's assertion was also a plainly a sensationalist one - that this country is "sleepwalking into segregation", when in fact it is only as segregated as it has been for years, which down here in London means not at all except on a few council estates in Tower Hamlets. In many parts of London Asians and whites live happily side-by-side; it is only in areas of poverty, on both sides, that they tend to live separately.

I do not see a debate about multiculturalism: I see an orchestrated attack on it, based on exaggerations and untruths. I do not defend going to extremes in accepting unacceptable behaviour from minorities on the grounds of it being their culture; the law should certainly not refuse to help anyone in obvious distress simply because it stems from something their enemies claim is part of their culture, as it has been known to do in Germany for instance, but that does not mean that a certain tolerance of difference, particularly in such matters as dress, when dealing with long-established communities who are not guests or immigrants but descendents of people who migrated from formerly colonised countries.

Ed Husain's article uses a lot of conciliatory language, but throws in a few ugly generalisations about Asian and Muslim attitudes and behaviour along the way, leavening them with some misplaced observations about other groups as well. Husain does not bother to challenge Nazir-Ali on his plainly false central claim regarding no-go areas based on Islamist ideology, and it is significant that he has not bothered to back his claim up in the full week since his original article appeared in last Sunday's Telegraph.