Less than twenty-four hours after the bombs, the buses and tubes of the East End are full. The whining chorus of car alarms, sirens and helicopters is gone. People are sipping coffee in street cafés; a market trader is haggling over toilet rolls. The Emergency Zone tape has been binned, and Aldgate East station is open for business. Londonders have reacted to the biggest massacre in our city since Adolf Hitler’s bombers with a proud, defiant shrug.
At half past nine on Thursday morning, I left my flat next to Aldgate East to head to work on the tube. There was a small crowd – a few City boys with black briefcases, a hijab-wearing student, a pensioner – talking to a police officer, who was mysteriously putting ‘Keep Out’ tape next to my road. “Where did the explosion happen?” a woman asks. “Everywhere,” the policeman says quietly. She looks puzzled. “There have been several… incidents,” he says. “Please step back.”
Nobody panicked. Even the battered people trickling from the tube – thick with dust and soot and caked blood – had a strange look of bemused tranquillity. Across the road, there was a gaggle of people crowded around an open-topped car; the radio was on full-blast. “The explosions were at ten to nine,” a woman says, apparently to herself, over the blare of Radio 5. “9/11 was at ten to nine.” Her voice is flat. “It’s happened, hasn’t it?” Everybody is realising that they were only a few minor decisions – a later train, an earlier bus – away from dying. But nobody is crying. Nobody is screaming...
7/7 was supposed to be a day for the causes of peace. It was supposed to be a day for campaigners to fight for Africa and against global warming, and for everyone to celebrate the ultimate symbol of peaceful competition, the Olympic Games. Al Quaida decided to turn it into a day for death. But the streets refused to be terrorized. In the City, people told to leave their workplaces lingered in pubs, exchanging office gossip or watching the cricket. Walking between the mini-Ground Zeroes bleeding across London, there was endless talk of how people will get home. It seemed so right: when terror comes to London, it becomes another excuse to argue about the train timetables.
How incredibly, inspiringly, hilariously, tear-jerkingly, typically English, this shit is slaying me. God save the UK -
And then this intense clarity and truth:
I headed for the East London Mosque – a few minutes’ walk away from the bomb in Aldgate – to watch afternoon prayers. In the stark white prayer hall, there are three hundred Muslim men, some wearing traditional white robes, others in leather jackets and jeans. Chairman Mohammed Bari reaches the podium and says, “Only yesterday, we celebrated getting the Olympics for our city and our country. But a terrible thing happened in our country this morning… Whoever has done this is a friend of no-one and certainly not a friend of Muslims. The whole world will be watching us now. We must give a message of peace.”
As everybody mills outside the mosque, there are groups forming to go and give blood at the Royal London Hospital up the road. Many people make a point of smiling at me, an obvious non-Muslim in their midst. There is an awareness here – although not yet in the rest of the country – that the Bin Ladenists who planned these massacres despise democratic, non-violent Muslims who choose to live in the West as much as they despise the rest of us. Anybody who tells you these bombers are fighting for the rights of Muslims in Iraq, occupied Palestine or Chechnya should look at the places they chose to bomb. Aldgate? The poorest and most Muslim part of the country. Edgware Road? The centre of Muslim and Arab life in London and, arguably, Europe.
This is not a fight between Muslims and the rest of us. It is a civil war within Islam, between democratic Muslims and Wahhabi fundamentalists who want to enslave or kill them. Yassin Dijali, 31, says, “It could have been our children on those trains too. This is where we belong. These people are insane.”
This reminds me very much of an intense/intensely related bit from David from the Hurry Up Harry blog, in a letter to his friend that is worth reading in its entirety - but this bit is so relevant to the Hari piece that I want to get it a bit more circulation - this is context -
The radical Islamists are not fighting a realisable campaign, in the same sense that the Irish nationalists were. They do not want a Caliphate in the sense that the IRA wanted a united and independent Ireland. They are fighting a battle against the corrupting forces of modernity for the souls of all muslims. Their principal enemies are principally "apostate" muslims, not you or I.Why do you think a bomb went off in Edgware Road?
Do you think that it was an accident that the home to London's liberal, westernised Arab muslims was targeted?Or, indeed Aldgate East, home to the British Bangladeshi community.
Many western liberals have simply projected their own concerns about US policy onto the radical Islamists. That is not fair to them: they do NOT share your concerns, but have ones of their own which you would do well to respect. They are not fools or mindless religious fanatics: they are philosophers. You should listen, in particular, to what radical Islamists say, and not what you think they ought to be saying.
Islamist movements have been strong, and growing stronger, in the middle east since the 1950s. Banna established the Muslim Brotherhood which was brutally oppressed by Nasser. The survivors fled to Saudi, where in 1961, they established the Islamic University, in Medina. There they developed the Islamist analysis. That generation taught young, unemployed, hopeless Saudi men who went off to fight in Afghanistan, Bosnia and Chechenia. Those men returned and turned their sites from the "near enemy" - the Saudi royal family who were tainted by unislamic values - to the "far enemy": the west, capitalism, and in particular the United States. They recruited political soldiers in the gulf states and operated franchise operations which extended to Algeria and Spain.
The crunch has been a long time coming.
Is the West to blame? Yes, but not in the way you might think...
I don't purport to have any great ideas about how to/how not to combat fascist Islam, but looking at the history of these groups and taking their ideology seriously sounds like a good place to start. It's not going to be a lot of fun, nor will it be easy - but I'm taking some inspiration from this awesomely crotchety old British guy that Hari talks to at the end of his article:
On Friday morning, sitting outside a café on Whitechapel High Street, one of the lingering Jewish residents of the old East End, an 86 year-old called Henry Abelman, is drinking tea, as he does every day. He was here the last time fascists attacked London; he says with a laugh that he expects to be here the next time they toss some bombs at us too. “Not so long ago, we had bombs like this every day for six years coming from an army backed by twenty million people. That didn’t destroy us or divide us, so what do you think a few spoiled brats with home-made bombs are going to do?”
ALSO: Poetry from (the anti-Iraq war) Hari's former friend, the notorious Christopher Hitchens - Their sordid love of death is as nothing compared to our love of London, which we will defend as always, and which will survive this with ease.