Imagine, if you will, a small Punjabi town in which Christian missionaries build a massive US-funded church with an accompanying monastery — and declare it to be the centre of all their activities in South Asia. Each day, earnest young Christians clad in monkish habits walk in and out of the church compound as they go to, or return from, their missionary work. Sometimes tens of thousands turn up for weekend events. High fences and CCTV cameras surround the compound and Pakistani Muslims are not allowed in. And then imagine that, while most of the missionaries are peaceful, a couple of the young men associated with the church mount a deadly bomb attack in Pakistan.

From the point of view of British journalist Danny Lockwood, something rather like that has happened in his hometown of Dewsbury in northern England, home to the European headquarters of Tablighi Jamaat.

This book describes the current state of Dewsbury with a mix of despair, anger and a fair amount of wry amusement. A more politically incorrect book could scarcely be imagined. Some of the language is loose. Lockwood, for example, describes the veil as a “militant” costume; suggests that parts of Dewsbury resemble a “caliphate” and asserts that the existence of Sharia courts shows that Britain has two conflicting legal systems. In fact, the UK’s Sharia courts, like their Jewish equivalents, cannot trump the regular courts. Their decisions can only be legally enforceable in cases in which both parties have agreed to its arbitration.

Journalist Danny Lockwood’s account of changing demographics in his hometown Dewsbury is polemic but speaks of a larger trend of Islamist revivalism in migrant communities

For all its hyperbole, this book makes an important point. The remarkable fact that a greater number of British Muslims are fighting for the militant Islamic State (IS) group than for the British army requires some explanation. Some of Britain’s jihadists were also born and bred in Dewsbury. Men — or rather boys — such as Talha Asmal, who was just 17 when he blew himself up last year in an IS attack on an Iraqi oil refinery.

One of Lockwood’s stories illustrates why so many of Dewsbury’s indigenous population feel angry. The local sport is rugby league (Lockwood was himself a very good player), and one of the grounds was located in a district of the town almost entirely populated by British Pakistanis. The players — all white — found that, each week, bucket loads of broken glass were strewn across the turf so that when they dived to the ground (an integral part of rugby) they cut their flesh — sometimes with wounds so deep they required stitches. Then, after the games, they would find their cars, which they had parked in streets with almost entirely British Muslim residents, had been vandalised. Out of sheer obstinacy they kept on playing for some years, but eventually gave up. Local officials, wondering what to do with the now disused pitch, then decided to hand it over to the only local community organisation they could find — the Tablighi mosque, which was given a 999-year lease for the sum of £1.

Infuriated by many such points of tension, Lockwood has few inhibitions in lashing out at those whom he considers responsible: the police (for being so afraid of accusations of racism that they don’t stand up to crimes committed by Dewsbury’s Muslims), the liberal left (always giving in to political pressure from Dewsbury’s Muslim community), Muslim community leaders (pretending to be full of goodwill to their neighbours while feeling no such thing), national-level journalists (turning up for a day and getting the story wrong) and national politicians (whose bland statements wilfully ignore the reality faced by most people on the ground).

It’s a raw read. Lockwood repeatedly insists he is not racist and there are layers of complexity in this book. Many of Lockwood’s most powerful passages are despairing descriptions of the breakdown of some of Dewsbury’s white working-class families. He has sharp words for those sons and daughters of Dewsbury whose dysfunctional families have turned them into benefit scroungers and drug addicts.

“I found the new resident a quite pleasant woman for the first couple of months and always said hallo, or waved, while secretly wondering how someone who was little more than a girl (and a single mother) could afford nearly £200,000 for a house quite patently far larger than she needed. I popped a Christmas card through their letterbox, as I did with other neighbours. Then one day everything changed. This attractive, smiling young mum was replaced by someone entirely clad head to toe in a black burqa and niqab. I stopped saying hallo and waving for one simple reason — and it wasn’t based in the slightest on any form of prejudice. I just hadn’t a clue who was walking in and out of the house — her, or a female friend, or a relative. Think about it — recognition is simply impossible. Was she smiling at me from behind that back mask or mouthing a profanity? And more importantly, why, all of a sudden was it necessary? Was it pressure from the occasional Muslim men who visited the house?” — Excerpt from the book

This is a local book written by a local journalist; it is perhaps, therefore, not surprising that it ignores some global trends that are at play. Lockwood uses pictures of Muslim women in Lahore to point out that they are dressed in far less conservative attire than their counterparts in Dewsbury. But he does not reflect on why this might be, and the extent to which the difference is explained by factors that have little to do with Dewsbury and the way it has been run. It is well established that exiled and expatriate communities tend to become more extreme adherents of the identity they have left behind than those still living in the mother country. But in the case of contemporary Islam there is something else going on. The changing attitudes to religiosity in Dewsbury are part of a global Islamist revival that has little to do with matters such as the inactivity of the town’s police or the incompetence of local government officials.

The racial tensions in Dewsbury have many dimensions: a local rugby league hero was nearly killed, not by British Pakistanis but by a group of Iraq Kurdish refugees, who had been resettled in the area in part because, by accepting them, the cash-strapped local authorities were able to get access to some extra central government funding. Most strikingly of all, the book is suffused with references to the drugs trade. People make money by selling drugs, they fight turf wars over them, and they die taking them. At times it seems as if drugs are the main thing happening in Dewsbury.

But for all the dirty truths exposed by Lockwood’s book it remains polemic; seeing things almost exclusively from one point of view. There is next to no acknowledgement of an alternative version from the other side of the racial divide, in which many British Muslims have their own stories to tell about feeling vulnerable to racism, discrimination and their inability to advance in a society where they remain at the bottom of almost every socio-economic indicator. It would be interesting to read an equally outspoken book written by one of Dewsbury’s Muslim community.

Lockwood writes repeatedly that the depth of divisions between the two main communities in Dewsbury results from the local authorities being so afraid of accusations of racism that they fail to stand up to wrongdoing by British Muslims. There’s too much carrot, he argues, and not enough stick. It is also important to appreciate that Dewsbury is located in the relatively poor north, not prosperous south-east, of England. Migration movements, as demographically significant as the one in Dewsbury, have generally been limited to a few relatively poor northern towns. Had various historical accidents worked out differently, and British Pakistani communities become established amongst leafy villages near London occupied by British establishment families, then the policy might have taken a very different course towards migrants. Elements of the British establishment in the UK are openly contemptuous of the north, even going so far as to openly describe it as ‘desolate’. Part of the Dewsbury story is that the indigenous population there feels abandoned by the central government.

There are signs of change. Faced by increasingly vocal demands to address issues related to migration and, in particular, home-grown violent jihadism, the British state has in recent years shifted its focus from multiculturalism to law enforcement. That, coupled with the passage of time and concomitant changes in attitudes down the generations, gives some hope that, in line with previous experiences of migration to the UK, the fears will subside and the divisions soften. .

The reviewer is a British journalist who presents Newshour on the BBC World Service. His book Pakistan: Eye of the Storm was published by Yale University Press.

The Islamic Republic of Dewsbury: Requiem
(POLITICS)
By Danny Lockwood
The Press News Ltd, United Kingdom
ISBN: 978-0957096448
326pp.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, May 29th, 2016