Those who witnessed it can never have the image erased: two rogue commercial air-carriers crashing one after the other into New York’s Twin Towers, the city’s skyline made to crumble before a world witnessing appalling loss of innocent life. My generation would come to describe it in similar ways to those who experienced the Kennedy assassination, detailing exactly where they were when a TV screen depicted the devastation in real-time. I was in my mother’s back room in Blackburn, the two of us frozen in the shock and sympathy that struck millions around the world in that very moment.
Media commentators casually expressed how nothing could ever be the same again. Everyone would anticipate what exactly that could mean. Over the coming years, amid questionable wars and an atrocity visited in England’s own capital with the 7/7 attack, the entire Muslim community would come to feel targeted. Commentators and politicians would insinuate British Muslims should ‘get their house in order’ and intra-community distancing also ensued as some Hindu groups formally separated themselves from the British Asian umbrella. The aftershocks of the Twin Tower attacks would crumble both my British and British Asian identities.
Amongst British Asians, a ‘we are not them’ message quickly took root. Indeed, the first victim of a fatal ‘revenge attack’ in the USA was an innocent Sikh man. I understood the message to some extent, after all British Muslims were adopting it too – except here it was meant to reference only the extremists, not all Muslims.
Proximity could now be association, and so the resulting shuffle ensured British Muslims visibly shifted away from their extremist minority, whilst Hindus, Sikhs and the wider state shifted from the whole community. This left British Muslims experiencing an isolation that was as sudden as it was profound.
My confusion only grew as I watched slapdash attempts to mould this public version of British Muslim-ness in real-time and under unforgiving studio lights. Debates that should have taken place privately were instead thrust before the nation every Sunday morning on Nicky Campbell’s Big Questions. Like other emerging sectors, the mantle for ‘representation’ was seized upon by individuals and chancers with questionable qualifications, often doing more harm than good.
I eventually found comfort while studying in Manchester. To make sense of the new world I took to performing poetry and writing plays, becoming exposed to the city’s creative communities. British Asian artists, British Black artists, the city’s LGBTQ and feminist communities, each successively wrapped arms of solidarity around me while contextualising this as just the most recent wave in a wider anti-discrimination struggle. In so doing I was given a foundational political education to rebuild my Britishness upon.
A quarter of a century has passed since that horrific day, and many individuals have spent this period fashioning a more authentic sense of what it means to be British Muslim. Whether in the arts, business, politics or journalism, these individual but simultaneous efforts have developed a confident influence that was unimaginable back then. This was remarkably achieved by fighting on two fronts: against the extremism within, as well as the prejudice and anti-Muslim hatred without.
Day to day, my job now includes bringing communities together via the British South Asian Bridger’s Project. Committed to cohesion, the project demonstrates the effectiveness of cross-community allyship during times of crisis. A network I wish British Muslims would have had access to all those years ago to navigate internal challenges, as well as external discrimination.
Twenty-five years on and the struggle against anti-Muslim hatred sadly remains ongoing. Recent findings from the British Muslim Trust and British Future suggest it may even be higher than ever before. While British Muslims are disproportionately affected, it comes against a general backdrop of rising hate against all minorities. Yet there also exists a new opportunity. We are now more able to step out of that isolation, utilising the tools forged during our own crisis to become a voice committed to challenging the discrimination felt by all in Britain, regardless of faith, ethnicity and sexuality. In so doing, we can finally shed expectations of putting our own ‘house in order’ – and instead take the lead in building one truly capable of accommodating everybody equally in Britain today.
Avaes Mohammad is the Programme Manager for the South Asian Bridgers Project at British Future.
Image by Mike Labrum on Unsplash
