An attack on our prejudices

I SAT cross-legged on the floor of the mosque and, like the men and boys in the other four long rows, stared at the date, the litchi, the tangerines and the vegetable samosa before me. We were waiting for the digital watch of the imam to register 4.06pm, the official time for sunset in Bradford. Those who were most hungry passed the final minutes peeling the fruit in readiness for the moment when the Ramadan fast would be declared over for the day.

As we waited the conversation became fragmented. It had been a long time since the fast began; since 6.30am no food and not so much as a drop of water had passed the lips of devout Muslims in this holy month. It was as if the speakers were searching for just enough words to fill the available time, and not a second more.

"The date is the traditional food to break the fast," said Khadim Hussain, a Bradford bus driver until his retirement, and now the senior vice-president of the Victor Street mosque. The man opposite was rearranging his fruit in a neat row. The man to my right laughed: "Each day of Ramadan more food is given; by the final day there is too much to eat..."

"The fast is not too bad in the winter, when the days are short," said the fruit rearranger, a date now poised between his eager fingers, "but in the summer it can be 17 or 18 hours and that..." He said no more. The word had been given. A silence descended suddenly as the eating began.

There had been two kinds of voices in the room, I thought as I ate: the traditional sing-song Pakistani tone so beloved of English comedians and the blunt, flat tones of Bradford that, heard on the phone, betray no sign whatever of the racial origin of the speaker. They are the voices of two generations.

They are to be heard not just in Bradford but all across the country. The young British-born Muslims who have been acting as spokesmen and spokeswomen for the families of the five men detained in Yemen on charges of terrorism speak with accents and vocabularies learnt alongside their white schoolfellows. The wife of one of them even describes the detainees as "our boys" in an ironic echo of the demotic of The Sun when faced with unpalatable foreigners.

All of which seems to make it more difficult, rather than less, for the British cultural establishment to understand - in a society where faith has retreated into metaphor - the earnestness with which British Muslims look upon their religion.

A similar failure of imagination surrounds our view of their opposition to the bombing of Iraq. Despite Tony Blair's insistence that Saddam, and not his people, are the enemy, Muslims insist on seeing in it an attack on Islam. When their parents said similar things it could be dismissed as misunderstanding. However, the new generation clearly understands the distinction Mr Blair makes - but dares to disagree.

Nowhere are the prejudice and ignorance about Islam more evident than in the British press, where the generalised hatred for and contempt of things Muslim are undisguised. Underlying much of the reporting of the Yemen crisis is the assumption that extreme and fanatical behaviour can be seen as normative. Islam is seen as monolithic and static rather than diverse and dynamic, as the enemy not the partner. All Muslims are assumed to be the same - inferior, aggressive and manipulative. There is no attempt to approach with openness and respect the ordinary Muslims such as those in the mosque in Victor Street.

Ironically, such cliched perceptions are what Professor Akbar Ahmed, of Selwyn College, Cambridge, warned his Islamic co-religionists against this week in his historic address on "Islamophobia and anti-Semitism: the need for understanding", which was delivered in a leading British synagogue. Anti-Semitism was, for Muslims, an own goal that completely ignored the "almost boundless toleration" that was one of the extraordinary achievements of Muslim civilisation in previous ages and which had maintained a long relationship of mutual nurture with Jewish scholarship. Muslims had to stop seeing everything in terms of a Jewish conspiracy, he said.

Equally, he might have said, his co-religionists should not blame the godless West for absolutely everything; like racism, Islamophobia can easily be seen where it does not exist.

But self-righteous British opinion-formers should not make the same mistake in reverse. For all the smug statements about the maintenance of liberal values, discrimination against Muslims is defended rather than challenged. Anti-Muslim discourse is seen as natural and not problematic.

Most Muslims are like those I met in the mosque in Bradford. In their religious life they want nothing more than to be left to pray, to practise their rigorous self-denial with integrity and then, in the festival of Eid next week, to celebrate with feasting and merriment. Their concerns are not Islamic theocracy but the stuff of ordinary life - jobs, schools for their children, family breakdown, crime and drugs on their inner- city streets, and their additional burden of racial discrimination.

Professor Ahmed quotes the Jewish novelist Isaac Bashevis Singer as saying of the average Jew: "All he wants to do is earn a living and raise his children and children's children to follow in the ways of the Torah." British Muslims want only to do the same in the light of their holy book.

At his lecture there were policemen on the door "for fear of attack by extremists", one synagogue official said, pointedly omitting to say whether the fanatics might come from the Jewish or the Muslim side. But the police could do nothing about the threat from native British prejudice, which is more subtle and infinitely more worrying in the long term.