A radical mistake

In the early 1990s, after the shock of the 1989 fatwa against Salman Rushdie, I began to do some research among those who condemned him, and learned that a strange thing was happening among young British Muslim men and women. I first wrote about this strange thing in my novel The Black Album, which concerns a young man who comes to London from the provinces to study and finds himself caught between the sex-and-ecstasy-stimulated hedonism of the late 1980s and the nascent fundamentalist movement. At the end of the novel the Asian kids — as they were called then — burn The Satanic Verses and attack a bookshop.

I followed this up with a story published in the New Yorker, ‘My Son The Fanatic’. Set in Halifax, this story became a film made by the BBC and was released in 1997. Once more it was centered around the strange thing I had noticed: that these young Muslims wanted less sex, more obedience, worldwide revolutionary change and their own state based on religious principles.

I can’t say that it seemed crazy that young people were turning to utopianism and revolution. After all, many of my generation had been Maoists, Marxists, communists, militant feminists, supporters of black power and Trots of various kinds. Some of these former ‘revolutionaries’ now owned several properties and were retiring with good pensions after a lifetime of service to journalism, academia or the arts.

However, the return to a new submission, this time to Allah, along with belief, sincerity and puritanical sacrifice, was shocking because I was aware that immigrants like my father had not come to Britain to foment political change. After the horrors of Partition and starvation in India, they wanted safety, security and education for their children. The mother country might be the seat of Satan with an absurd idea of itself as racially superior, but it was more tolerant than most other places, retaining, so the older generation believed, a patrician Orwellian decency and a spreading liberalism which would benefit the new migrants and their children.