Lets take a look NORTH, at England's Muslims many of whom are Pakistani
"While car bombs were being prepared in London and Glasgow, I was visiting the land of the niqab, communities that are in England but not of England, where I was usually the only white person on the street, where the veil and the beard are the norm, and where sharia law holds greater authority than English common law. I was in East London, Bradford, Dewsbury, all bastions of the niqab.
The niqab is the veil which covers the entire face of a woman, except for a slit for the eyes. It has become the symbol of revolt in Pakistan, a tinderbox of Islamic fundamentalism and political instability, where hundreds of young women in black niqabs in the capital, Islamabad, have been challenging the authority of the military Government all year. What they really want is an Islamic state in Pakistan.
I've just been sharing streets and markets with scores of women hidden behind black niqabs, quite a powerful social statement, but these women were in Tower Hamlets in London, Manningham in Bradford, Savile Town in Dewsbury, and in shopping centres in Luton and Leeds.
Manningham and Savile Town and East London are places where the centre of community life is the mosque, where most of the children in the primary schools come from Muslim families. These are self-contained, self-assured functioning communities, not ghettos, not deprived and not excluded. They are self-excluding. These communities are growing in size, number and confidence. The majority of families originated in Pakistan and are alive to the tensions there.
In Whitechapel, within sight of the City of London, the financial centre of Europe, women in niqabs are common at the market. They retrieve their children from the Osmani Primary School then disappear into the rows of council houses nearby. London's large Muslim population is concentrated in several areas, such as Tower Hamlets, but the centre of gravity of Muslim life in Britain is much further north, in gritty Yorkshire.
In Bradford, I visited Manningham, the inner-city suburb where the first Asian race riots in Britain took place in June, 1995. It started outside the Lawcroft House police centre, which sits like a fortress next to Manningham, after a rumour went round that police had manhandled a Muslim family. A crowd gathered, bottles were thrown, police responded, a melee became a riot, cars were attacked, businesses firebombed. The violence spread to other cities in northern England with large South Asian communities. They were called the "Asian" riots. We now know better. They were Britain's first Muslim riots.
