This piece will of necessity be something of a ‘pre-review’ of Danny Lockwood’s book, for I have not yet bought a copy. Nonetheless, it struck me as worthy of comment, for a publication with such a title does speak a certain uncomfortable truth about what has happened to sections of this West Riding town. It also appears quite surprising that a journalist of some 34 years has chosen to write something that many members of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) most certainly wouldn’t approve of. Perhaps Lockwood is not a member?
Given the recent history of the town and numerous attacks upon members of its non-Muslim population by Muslims, this was a book that needed to be written. After all, it is as the Daily Mail noted, one of a handful of places in Britain where Islamists have considered setting up shariah-governed statelets. In all likelihood, it is the case that such a reality pertains in the predominantly Deobandi enclave today.
If you have already read the book, I would welcome your comments upon its content. The local paper for which Lockwood works promotes his book as follows:
This no holds barred account of what has happened to a town and its people begins on Saturday June 24th 1989, when the Muslim community rioted – and, he asserts, life in Dewsbury changed forever.
“The usual suspects will portray this as an attack on an ethnic minority,” says the author.
“They always do. But such as this is a finger pointing exercise, it is aimed at the massed ranks of political and public sector bodies who have failed all communities in this town. Crime, religious separatism and social decay have thrived because no one in authority has the guts to tackle issues that hide behind the ‘race’ card.”
Deobandi Islam came to Dewsbury in the 1950s with an influx of immigrants from Pakistan and India who came to work in the town’s woollen mills. They settled predominantly in Savile Town and Ravensthorpe [1]. This is a tale familiar to many of Britain’s northern towns and cities, and, as elsewhere, these exotic seeds later bloomed into so many fleurs du mal.
Dewsbury’s own deathly blooms included 7/7 bomber Mohammad Sidique Khan, who worshipped at the town’s Markazi mosque [2]; Waris Ali, a Ravensthorpe resident convicted at the age of 18 for planning to bomb BNP members [3], and Adnan Hussain, who threatened a woman by saying “he knew people who would “slit her throat”” simply because she refused to sell him cigarettes [4]. All products of the oft-termed “austere” interpretation of Islam favoured by the Deobandis and their religio-political offshoot: Tablighi Jamaat. Deobandi Islam is not on the fringes of Muslim life in the UK. Far from it. According to a Times report published in 2007, some 600 of Britain’s 1,350 mosques were run by followers of this branch of the faith [5].
Dewsbury's Markazi Mosque
Once they had founded their colonies, Dewsbury’s Muslim newcomers kept to themselves. Turning inwards, they cleaved to their ancestral Islamic beliefs and practices rather than assimilating to the host culture and population. Why assimilate to the latter, when they clearly believed that their own beliefs and ways were, in their perceptions, so self-evidently ‘superior’? Endogamy and chain migration maintained their biological cohesion; the mosque and the madrassah enforced their ideological unity; assaults and intimidation cowed the non-Muslim population and maintained their enclaves’ nascent territorial integrity. The enclaves expanded as the local English population sought to vacate properties in their immediate vicinity, thereby facilitating Muslim expansion. In this way did they build demographic, cultural and spiritual outposts of Gujarat and Pakistan. One instance amongst many. Heaton was once a pleasant place (so I’ve been told).
Tablighi Jamaat, which runs Dewsbury’s Markazi mosque, is the force behind plans to construct the London ‘mega-mosque’ and has been attributed as the radicalising influence which led Kaheel Ahmed (a doctor of Indian origin) to die in his attempted car bombing of Glasgow Airport in August 2007. Tablighi Jamaat’s European headquarters is found in Dewsbury, and its core beliefs go a long way to explaining the motivations underpinning the repeated attacks upon Dewsbury’s non-Muslim population. A Times article published in September 2007 stated:
“Tablighi Jamaat was founded in 1926, in India, by a Deobandi scholar, Muhammad Ilyas, who wanted to raise Islamic awareness among rural Muslims in south Asia. He promised them that by obeying Islamic laws and following the example of the Prophet Muhammad in their personal lives they would one day “dominate over non-believers” and become “masters of everything on this earth”.”
“Ishaq Patel, Tablighi Jamaat’s first amir (leader) in Britain, is said to have been on pilgrimage in Mecca when Ilyas’s successor gave him a long-term mission to win “the whole of Britain to Islam”.” [6]
Members of Dewsbury’s Muslim colony thus take in such views with their mothers’ milk, and they are reinforced day after day, week after week, year after year in the local mosques and the Markazi adjunct known as the Institute of Islamic Education. Tightly bound by these ideological ties which cultivate an attitude of supremacy and hatred towards the non-Muslims who live around them, is it any wonder that we see them attack the innocent? Those who would have you believe that these Deobandis are victims of racist discrimination, poverty and relative deprivation are either deliberately lying or deeply ignorant and self-deceiving. The violence at the heart of Dewsbury is cultivated and legitimated by Deobandi Islam, and it cannot be stopped by ploughing money and resources into these so-called ‘communities’ (i.e. colonies). Take away Islam and you remove the source of the violence.
Dewsbury is of course the constituency of disgraced Labour ex-Minister Shahid Malik (who has called for a Muslim PM in the UK (see video below)) and home to his Conservative parliamentary rival in the 2005 General Election ‘Baroness’ [sic] Sayeeda “I would fail the cricket test” Warsi. Hopefully, the voters will punish Malik at next year’s General Election. For want of a better means of expressing dissatisfaction it would be satisfying if the BNP vote were to rise, and martyr Malik will lose his seat.
The BNP have polled well in Dewsbury where they have stood in a succession of elections, taking a new high of 5,066 votes - 13.1% of those cast - in 2005 [7]. How any non-Muslim voters could cast their ballot for Malik again, I do not know. Such voters would do well to voice their dissatisfaction with the unwillingness of the local authorities and West Yorkshire Police to recognise, let alone confront the town’s Islamist problem, by delivering, for want of a better choice, a strong vote to the BNP in 2010. The Deobandi bullies will not be beaten unless someone stands up for their victims: the non-Muslim people of Dewsbury.
