Nazir-Ali’s unsatisfying explanation

Yesterday afternoon, I dropped a line to the Bishop of Rochester's public email box (bishop.rochester at rochester.anglican.org) questioning the claims he made in last Sunday's Telegraph. I included my home address and mobile number. This is what I wrote:

Dear Rt Revd Dr Nazir-Ali,
I am writing in regard to your recent interview in the Sunday Telegraph, in which you repeated your claim regarding "no-go areas" in England. I twice attempted to submit a comment to the online version of the article which appeared out of that interview, but the Telegraph's web team would admit only supportive comments.

I have a fundamental objection to your claim, namely that you have not once provided a single example of a no-go area where acceptability is defined by adherence to an Islamist ideology, which is the claim you made. The Telegraph's interviewer does not seem to have asked you for one, and you apparently did not volunteer one. This concept is fundamentally different from the no-go areas which do exist, defined by race, or even by postcode or area or gang. The incident in east London, in which a white man was attacked because he entered an "Asian" council estate, is not an example of what you allege.
For such a no-go area to exist, it would require the presence of some sort of armed enforcement team. It would require large enough numbers of the local Muslims to adhere to such an ideology, and none of the well-known Islamist ideologies have significant numbers of followers. I have never heard of any such thing happening in the UK, and if it did, we would surely know of it. I have lived, briefly, in what might be described as a Muslim ghetto, in Gloucester, which is dominated by the Tablighi Jama'at group, and I never felt harassed because of my colour or because I sometimes disagreed with the group's methodology, or because I lived with a Muslim friend who was also known to disagree with it. This is the largest group with any extremist tendency in the UK; the others, even the Muslim Brotherhood, are much smaller and could not dominate any area without force of arms.
Please furnish the public with actual evidence of a no-go area of the type you describe. Like Ed Husain, who has also made a name for himself attacking the Muslim community, you have presented yourself as a brave, persecuted truth-teller (when, in fact, a mass-circulation newspaper has been telling the same "truth" about Muslims for years), characterising the response to your claims as threatening and ignoring people's questioning of the veracity of your claims. Unless you can back up your claims with a serious example, it can only be concluded that your claim was false, and intended to foment hostility to Muslims.
Yours sincerely,
Matthew J Smith (Yusuf)

Today, I got an email from Tony Smith, Nazir-Ali's personal chaplain, thanking me for my email but telling me that everything he has to say on the matter is on the diocese's website. I found, buried in their archives, this PDF (why can't they put up proper webpages rather than these stupid PDFs, when PDFs are meant for printing off rather than for bits of web pages?):

It has been asked what I meant by 'no-go' areas. I would wish to make it clear that I was not referring, as some have implied, to the situation which arose in some neighbourhoods in Northern Ireland some years ago which the authorities felt constrained from entering. I was referring to the situations which were first reported by Lord Ouseley and Ted Cantle, but subsequently by many others down to and including the Commission on Integration and Cohesion of last year and Sir Trevor Philips even more recently. This is the phenomenon that is referred to as 'parallel lives', 'separated' or 'self contained' areas or communities, 'lack of cohesion' and in many other ways. There has been an extensive literature, academic, official and popular about how we can become a more cohesive society and the government has encouraged such a debate.
Such separated areas exist for a complex of reasons, but in large part relate back to the general ideas of multiculturalism.

Does anyone really believe this nonsense? My impression is that the presence of minority-dominated areas date back to the general need of immigrant communities to stick together, so that those who speak the same foreign language can continue to speak it together until enough people speak the country's main language, so that people can buy the food they like eating from people who know what they want, to facilitate worship if they have a different religion to the majority, and to defend each other against indigenous racist thugs. It is not only British Asians who form ghettoes; Brits who emigrate to Spain do the same, some of them becoming known as "por favores" because the phrase for "please" is all the Spanish they know.

He then makes a point about "Christian workers" who face intimidation in some areas, as a result of which "the full range of Christian ministry and presence is not possible". This, however, is not what his original interview said; even so, if the Christian church's "ministry" is not possible in some areas, it is because the locals do not want it, hence the empty or sometimes converted churches. What type of ministry the Church wants to carry out there is not explained, but they do not proselytise outright anywhere, as far as I can tell. In London, a Christian man was given an ASBO for proselytising with a loud-hailer at Oxford Circus; groups which propose mosques, minarets or even Muslim cemetries routinely face serious opposition.

The issue of converts out of Islam being subject to intimidation was already on the table when Nazir-Ali gave his first interview in the Telegraph last month. His wording clearly suggested the presence of areas dominated by Islamic extremists which were no-go areas for anyone else; the reference to John Reid in Leyton is given as evidence, clearly indicating what sort of no-go area is being referred to, and he did not mention Christian "workers" at all. I suspect he is referring to various northern towns, and I suspect that any attempt by Muslims to carry out a "mission" in white working-class neighbourhoods in many of these towns would prompt a response barely less hostile than whatever intimidation the Christian "workers" had received (and if we were talking gang beatings, riots and murder, we would surely know of it), which is why Muslims do their da'wah in town centres, much as every other religious group does, and leave the council estates alone. It is apparent that his original article mislead by omission, giving the impression of an area where it is not safe to walk the streets, when in reality what happened was that it has been advised that Christians are better-off not proselytising or otherwise "working" there. Whatever one thinks of such a situation in a multi-religious society in a Christian-flavoured state, it's not quite the same thing as what Nazir-Ali's words implied.