Menace In Europe Part 2

During the two years we spent together, my inability to understand Zia's difficult relations.h.i.+p with Britain was a constant source of friction. From my perspective, Zia's sensitivity to racial slight bordered on paranoia. He could discern subtle racism in the most trivial of gestures, a single raised eyebrow. He was capable of brooding for hours about a shopkeeper who spoke to me before speaking to him- evidence, in his view, of the way the British thought it impossible for him to be romantically attached to a young white woman, the way they saw him as nothing more than a "dirty little Paki." Those words were the identifying epithet of his youth. His desperation to succeed and to prove himself, his ambivalence about dating Western women, his willingness to take seriously his family's insane demands-none of this made sense to me. He was British, I thought, and since there could be no going back, he might as well get on with things.

But he was right, and I was wrong. I was callow and insensitive. I do see that now. My mistake was to a.s.sume that his experience and mine were essentially a.n.a.logous. After all, like most Americans, I too am a recent descendant of immigrants. My grandparents, German and Polish Jews, refugees from the n.a.z.is, arrived in New York in the early 1940s. But being Jewish has always been, to me, completely compatible with being fully American. In the few instances where I have encountered anti-Semitism in America, there has been no sense of inevitability about it: it has been a queer aberration, so out of place as to be ludicrous. I grew up with a deep, intuitive sense of full ent.i.tlement to everything America has to offer. Not only do I not view America as essentially anti-Semitic, I perceive my country as a haven from the world's anti-Semites. Certainly, in being Jewish I am in an important way different from the majority of Americans, but I have never experienced this as a wound. For Zia-and for many other immigrants in Britain-it is just that: a wound that cannot be healed.

"A sense of belonging," he subsequently wrote to me, trying to explain this better, "is crucial on a fundamental human level, because it is linked to the most basic question of how we give meaning to our lives. A sense of belonging, of rootedness, turns us into a link between history and posterity, and in doing so it hands us a purpose. We become part of a greater story. . . . I think that when we start to think about ident.i.ty or a sense of belonging, as a premise, a condition, for creating meaning out of life, rather than merely in terms of political or racial fault lines, we could open up new ways of thinking about ideas that have ossified under the weight of plat.i.tudes. A feeling of belonging to Britain means feeling you're part of the British story."10 At dinner with Zia one evening in London, I mentioned in pa.s.sing that more than once, when I've returned to the United States, the immigration officer has inspected my American pa.s.sport and said, "Welcome home."

"If any official here," Zia replied, "had ever, ever, even once said that to me, I would have died for England on the spot."

"AN HONORARY WHITE MAN"

Zia took an expected First at Oxford, then spent two years at Cambridge. We broke up. He abandoned mathematics. He received a scholars.h.i.+p to Yale, then worked for a few years for a prestigious investment banking firm in New York. The time he spent in America was a revelation: In America, he said, he was "a regular Joe," not only to his professors and colleagues but to women as well. "Maybe they regarded me as an honorary white man-who knows and I don't care. It didn't matter to me because I was always treated well." In Britain, he told me, he had been either fetis.h.i.+zed by rebellious English women or simply uns.e.xed; in America, he felt himself fully a normal man.

"I still feel an enormous amount of affection for America and Americans," he told me. "I felt much more s.e.xual in America. How the outsider is s.e.xualized is as much a political matter as the legal rights conferred on him or denied to him. I felt that I was being acknowledged as a s.e.xual being, in a way that I wasn't so much in Britain. London is very cosmopolitan, and Oxford and Cambridge are very cosmopolitan, but it's most curious that in my three years at Oxford and two years at Cambridge, and all my time in London before I went to the States, I didn't have a single English girlfriend. . . . And the background, to put it in context, is that I did have many girlfriends, but none of them were English. The women I had been seeing and dating, who were interested in me, and in whom I was interested too, were all foreigners in Britain-Italians, French, Indians, Americans, bright foreigners in Oxford and Cambridge. Not English. In America it was no problem at all. Sure, it might have been different if I'd been African-American or even African, but I'm not. I was in an unusual environment, of course, New Haven and then New York City, but American women in these cities-well, I was made to feel welcome."

A suggestive set of statistics might indicate that Zia's experience was not unique. Intermarriage rates among Muslim immigrants in Britain are dramatically lower than in the United States. Fewer than 10 percent of Muslim immigrants marry native Britons. In the United States, the figure is probably closer to two-thirds.11 It is impossible to know whether this distinction tells us more about prevailing att.i.tudes toward religion in the two countries or prevailing att.i.tudes toward race; the two cannot be disaggregated, since the majority of Muslim immigrants in both countries are also nonwhite. It is also impossible to say whether these statistics reflect differences in the att.i.tudes of the immigrants, the att.i.tudes of their hosts, or both. But it is possible to say that hybrid relations.h.i.+ps, and particularly intermarriage, may reasonably be considered the ultimate indicator of the true state of a society's ethnic integration, for intermarriage demands a willingness to see one's culture of origin genetically diluted and ultimately annihilated. Only those fully committed to their adoptive country propose marriage to its natives, and only those who view immigrants as full equals accept. Clearly, in this regard, the United States and Britain are different.

Zia returned to England, where he became a lawyer. Later, he returned to Bangladesh, where he campaigned as a human rights lawyer and anticorruption activist. But there he discovered to his dismay that he was even more an outsider and a curiosity than he was in England. "I was returning to an imaginary homeland." In White Teeth, Samad's confidant s.h.i.+va, another waiter, asks rhetorically, "Who can pull the West out of 'em once it's in?" Zia couldn't, evidently, any more than anyone else can.

THE BITTER EXPERIENCE OF IMMIGRATION.

Hanif Kureis.h.i.+ published his semiautobiographical novel, The Buddha of Suburbia, in 1990. In a memorable scene, Karim, the half-Pakistani protagonist, is told by his friend Helen's father not to see her anymore. "'We don't like it,' Hairy Back said. 'However many n.i.g.g.e.rs there are, we don't like it. We're with Enoch. If you put one of your black 'ands near my daughter I'll smash it with a 'ammer! With a 'ammer!'" 12 The reference is to Enoch Powell's 1968 "Rivers of Blood" speech, in which the Conservative shadow cabinet minister spoke with ill-tempered pa.s.sion against immigration, inciting a wave of racial violence throughout Britain. White Teeth also alludes to this event, though in this reference the speech is portrayed as ancient and irrelevant.

"Conspicuously absent from White Teeth," Zia said to me, "is the anger. Where have all the angry books gone? These new books don't feel like Hanif Kureis.h.i.+." British novels, Zia reflected, no longer "talk about bitter experiences, about experiences of racism, domestic violence, chauvinism, and if they do, it's made saccharine, sanitized. We don't see the very dark aspects of racism. That's something that divides the book from reality-the real experience." And strangely, he noted, these new British novels are written by women, not men.

So what, I asked him, was the real experience? "The real story," he said, setting his tea on the floor and fidgeting abstractly with his hands, "is very complicated, and becoming more and more complicated. Whereas before it might have been generally accepted that Asian men and women were the victims of racism, there's a growing body of opinion that this is not the case-they're now enfranchised, co-opted, we hear. This really isn't so." As we spoke, his voice repeatedly trailed off as he attempted to marshal his thoughts; sometimes he paused for as much as half a minute. It made him sound fragmented and disorganized, but I realized later when I transcribed the tape that in fact he was speaking in lucid, complete sentences.

"The truth is: It wasn't so cheerful. Immigration is a very bitter experience for many people, and it was for us. It was difficult, it was a struggle. My father worked heroic hours, he was very rarely at home. My mother worked very long hours. We were all quite hot-tempered, quite fiery people, and there were fireworks. They were rather more alarming than the book portrayed. The police were called out. And there was a constant feeling of alienation. The book does bring that out, in my character: the alienation from family, the alienation of many, though not all, young Asians from their parents. Zadie does deal with that. The man who became the Chalfen character in the novel, whom you've met. . . . I remember when I was eighteen, sitting in his kitchen, we had a discussion, and in the course of the conversation, he came to a sudden stop and said, 'Where on earth did you come from?' and I was struck by that, struck by it because I felt hurt, not by him but by the comment-there wasn't any malevolence in the comment-but it made me keenly aware that I wasn't regarded as forming a continuum with my family.

"My family was in many respects very typical . . . or if not typical, we had characteristics typical of Banglades.h.i.+ families but in accentuated form. We were atypical in that we were all very bright, all regarded by our peers and teachers as being very talented, which meant that we confronted problems other Asians might not have. Some of our experiences of racism were in contexts where people would say they didn't like our 'brashness.' That was racism-it was pretty obvious. If you're loud-well, people don't like an uppity n.i.g.g.e.r. Before Oxford, I remember one Christmas when there was a Christmas tree in the foyer of my school. These three boys didn't like me. I was loud, but in a socially unattractive way. I was a debating champion, editor of the school magazine, and pupil governor-I was never behind the bike sheds. The three boys set on me. I remember it very well, because one of them was Jewish. I remember marveling at the irony of this Jewish boy pus.h.i.+ng a Muslim into a Christmas tree. I wanted to say to him, 'What are you doing? Your people have been herded into ovens and you're calling me a Paki?'"12 Zia's brother Jimmi evidently made a much greater impression on Zadie than he did on me. I remember him as a vague, angry teenager but don't recall much more about him. White Teeth was written and published shortly before September 11, and the character based on Jimmi, Millat, seems by contemporary standards a benign Islamic radical. Millat does nothing more sinister than burn a book he has never read. But Zadie's plot device was suggestive. Was she correct to draw a connection between incomplete a.s.similation and Islamic radicalism?

Zia thought so. "The grievance of terrorists must operate on a very personal level," he reasoned. "When you read about terrorists, you'll read about arguments rooted in history, and in some slight committed by some Christian king against an Islamic ruler in the distant past. . . . And the explanations are rooted in history, they're fantastic, those explanations, but what seems to be missing is an account of the knot of emotions inside a terrorist, that knot of fire, that personal dimension, that anger, that fear, that personal grievance. I live in the East End of London and I see a lot of angry Asian males. I see them walking in groups of twelve, I've seen them smas.h.i.+ng things, I've watched as they set a car on fire. I see a lot of anger, and the statistics bear it out-the crime rate, I have friends who work in the emergency department of the local hospital. . . . I've wondered whether the anger that I have felt is qualitatively in the same category. Whereas my anger found expression and voice-not outlet-in articulate, nondestructive ways, theirs is turned outward, into other-destructive ways. So I might even sometimes fault myself for something that's really someone else's problem, but they rightly identify it as someone else's problem. The mistake they make is in what they choose to do about it."

If Muslim men turn their anger outward, Muslim women, it might be surmised, turn it inward: young Pakistani and Banglades.h.i.+ women, while rarely seen smas.h.i.+ng cars, have the highest rates of suicide and attempted suicide in Britain.

But what, I asked him, is that anger about, exactly? "The anger is about being alienated from British society, and the great danger now is that as more and more Asians become visibly co-opted, the exclusionary forces have the protection of that fact, they can hide behind it. But things remain difficult-very difficult. There are still gaps in salary, in achievement rates, gaps that econometricians tell us-after factoring out unemployment, educational underperformance, social exclusion, and dozens of other candidate causes-are not attributable to anything but racism and discrimination, not even to the cla.s.s structure. But my anger is not just directed at the establishment, or society, but also at the Asian community, with which I'm in profound disagreement. They have as much, maybe more, to answer for."

"What kind of disagreement?" His voice had become so quiet that I was worried it wouldn't register on the tape recorder. He reached over to switch it off. He told me that he was worried about maligning the Bengalis, that nothing disgusted him more than a man who would denigrate his own people. After thinking quietly a bit more, moving about uncomfortably in his chair, he permitted me to switch it on again, but he remained uneasy. "They aren't equipped to deal with modernity. They come from villages-I come from a village, I'm a villager, I was born in a village, I lived in a village, I spent several formative years in a village-and there's very little in a village that will equip you with the necessary skills. . . . A villager from rural Sylhet is going to have a hard time dealing with taxes, elections, is not going to have a sense of civic duty, he's never had recourse to inst.i.tutions. If you want a dispute resolved you go to the local holy man, or the village elder-there are village elders on council estates13 here in London, but that just demonstrates that they're trying to re-create their village structures here; they're not really integrating. Look, I sit on the board of governors of a school in Brick Lane. More than 80 percent of the children are Sylhetis from Bangladesh, yet there is not one Sylheti parent on that board. Many of these children are taken off to Bangladesh by their parents for months, even years at a time, interrupting their education. I help out in a reading program run by my firm at another school. The kids are wonderful, they still have brightness in their eyes, but they read the storybooks like drones. They can read the symbols, but ask them to explain what they've read and you see that they've barely taken in a word, and this at an age when their comprehension should be much better. How can that be? Well, after school, these kids are taken off to local madra.s.sas by their parents, where they recite pages and pages from the Koran without understanding a single word-Arabic is a foreign language. For these kids, recitation is reading. This is how their parents are educating them. There is so little active engagement on the part of Sylheti parents in the education of their own that school governing bodies in Tower Hamlets struggle to reach a quorum, and people like me, who don't even have children, let alone children at the school, are welcomed onto the boards.

"The kids are growing up with a sense that there's something to be taken from Britain, in between extended visits to the home country, but they don't partic.i.p.ate in this society. They look to the state to provide things for them; they're not rooted in the community; they lead lives with one foot in the airport. . . . They don't want to belong, they don't want to become part of the British story. Someone needs to tell them-because their parents aren't-that our lives are short and the only story we can join is the one going on around us. There's no time to lose. If you don't like it, change it, or get out and join another story-either way, you've got to be part of some story to hold off the meaninglessness."

What is Britishness? And why don't Muslim immigrants want to become part of the British story?

a.s.sIMILATION IS DEATH.

No one really knows what Britishness is. If you ask people in Britain what gives their lives meaning, the answer will often be football. Waiters, bus drivers, kids hanging out on street corners, they will all say the same thing: "Football's our religion." That turn of phrase strikes me as significant, although what it means, I have no idea.

One reason Muslim immigrants don't want to become British is that becoming British means losing their faith, their sense of purpose and ident.i.ty. Being British offers none of those things; if it did once, it certainly does not now. No other ideology now broadly on offer in Britain-certainly not football-can account for human existence or place that existence in a wider, meaningful pattern. British academic life is now dominated by the condescending strain of atheism promulgated by Richard Dawkins, who holds the Chair for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. His remarkably unattractive worldview manages to be not only spiritually empty but also intellectually embarra.s.sing-as evidenced, for example, in his campaign to relabel atheists "brights."

British Christianity has become a vaporous shadow of its former self. Senior figures in the Anglican Church have described the story of the Crucifixion and Resurrection as no more than a metaphor; some have confessed that they do not believe in G.o.d. Cathedrals have been converted into nightclubs, the crucifix is a fas.h.i.+on accessory, and the word religion is a brand name for young women's dancewear. The religious beliefs of politicians are hardly ever mentioned in the course of political debate. Tony Blair's press attache is reported to have told reporters, "We don't do G.o.d."

In the United States, by contrast, levels of churchgoing are high. Christianity, in its literal and evangelical form, is a vital presence in both political rhetoric and popular culture. But even American Christianity is nowhere near as muscular as Islam. Islam's vitality is such that it is now the fastest-growing religion among native Britons. (The runner-up is a form of evangelical Christianity much like that of the American Southern Baptists.) Converts include some of the country's most prominent aristocrats and celebrities. The great-granddaughter of the Liberal prime minister Herbert Asquith has converted to Islam; Prince Charles's interest in Islam, it has been bruited, is more than amba.s.sadorial.14 The Muslim Charles Le Gai Eaton, a former diplomat and author of Islam and the Destiny of Man, reports regularly receiving letters from "people who are put off by the wishy-washy standards of contemporary Christianity. . . . They are looking for a religion which does not compromise too much with the modern world."

Is it possible to become British without abandoning Islam? Of course. But it is not possible to become fully British without abandoning Islam in its more radical forms-in other words, embracing a dilute Islam that is no more compelling than Britain's dilute Christianity. Perhaps this is why so many immigrants view a.s.similation as something literally worse than death.

A DIET FOR THE SPIRITUALLY FLABBY.

I was struck, when I returned to Britain recently after an absence of almost ten years, to find that middle-cla.s.s Britain had become obsessed with health food and dietary purity. It was once rare to see fresh vegetables served in Britain, but now the nation is raising organic produce, shunning red meat, flus.h.i.+ng toxins from its collective system, and taking colonic purges. This last, evidently, is Diana's legacy.

Dr. Gillian McKeith-her doctorate in Holistic Nutrition comes from a mail-order diploma mill in Alabama-painstakingly inspects her clients' excrement on her national television program, You Are What You Eat. This astonis.h.i.+ng display of prime-time copromancy is wildly popular. Her book of the same name was a national number one best-seller. "If dieting has become a sort of religion," writes the editor of a popular British lifestyle magazine, "then Gillian McKeith must be this year's top guru."13 British psychiatric professionals have reported a notable rise in orth.o.r.exia, a previously unknown mental disorder in which sufferers, fixated upon righteous eating, starve to death.

Phiroze Nemuchwala is a British psychotherapist; his specialty is the treatment of psychosomatic illness. We have been friends since we met by chance in a bookstore nearly twenty years ago. Of late, he has noticed that many of his patients on restrictive vegetarian diets- women especially-are suffering from depression, anxiety, and susceptibility to coughs and colds. He is beginning to suspect that they are malnourished. I asked him what, in his view, was at the psychosocial heart of Britain's strange food fixation. "Religion," he said immediately. His patients, having like most Europeans rejected theism, are embarking upon a desperate quest to conquer the unacceptable prospect of disease, aging, and personal extinction. (He offered the suggestion, too, that women who declared themselves repulsed by the very thought of eating red meat frequently presented with intense s.e.xual conflicts and a great deal of unconscious rage.) Phiroze's practice consists mostly of upper-middle-cla.s.s white Britons, the majority of them women. In recent years, his professional approach has changed. "For the first ten years of my practice I worked very much as a Freudian," he said. He did not, in his practice, discuss "deep, fundamental, powerful values like truth, integrity, action, will, clarity, awareness-indisputable values" for him. These concepts are not generally considered by psychotherapists in Britain to be relevant to mental health. "I was not talking about those concepts, and I was quite determined not to. One can do a pretty good four-year, twice-a-week a.n.a.lysis with someone and the word love never comes up. Because if the patient doesn't mention it, it's not really the therapist's place to. And eventually, after some ten years of this, I found this way of working a little bit sterile, and I found that it was missing the deep point. And I suppose my own explorations into psychology, philosophy, and literature were inclining me toward an idea that love, integrity, compa.s.sion, courage-values that are common to all religions, values that date from Socrates, eternal human values-were more important than I'd realized."

The focus of his practice now is on imparting those common religious values that, he believes, give life meaning. These are ideas, Phiroze notes, for which his clients, when they come to see him, don't even have a vocabulary. "Until recently in Europe it was about serving Christ. They didn't really think about that, they were just offered it at the age of three, as soon as they could speak. But the people who come here don't have a whole set of ideas like that. What I try to get across to them is that there has been this current of thought in world thinking for three or four thousand years, and that certain things are agreed to be deeply meaningful and certain things are generally agreed to be not so. I call them true deliverers of the Good Life. I contrast this with false deliverers, things that promise to deliver but don't really-the obvious ones being money, s.e.x, fame. Media and advertising will tell us that if you buy these sungla.s.ses, this handbag, then you will have the good life, and you will be blessed, and you will be in the elect, you will be special. But the truth of it is that the much more religious and philosophical ideas of love, courage, integrity, dignity, respect, compa.s.sion, authenticity, genuineness-these are the things that will deliver the Good Life."

Phiroze does not, however, tell his clients that they should embrace these values because they are, simply speaking, good values. "I never suggest they should do this because it's the right thing to do. I say, 'In my observation and study, and personal experience, these work better, and what I advise you to do, in the empirical, scientific tradition of the West, is experiment.' So I say to them, 'Well, try it out. Try it for this week until next Friday, doing this, and come back and tell me if it yielded a better harvest of good feeling than buying that pair of Ray-Bans did last month.' And without fail, they come back and tell me that yes, being much more honest with their sister, boyfriend, child, parent did yield meaningful, worthwhile results. They feel more deeply anch.o.r.ed in themselves, their self-respect has gone up, and they see very readily that what I call the True Deliverers are better deliverers than earning a bit more money, getting promoted, buying a new car, losing a bit of weight. I don't have a religious type of belief, a faith belief, that these are the things that work. I have found them to be things that work." These are, as he puts it, "a mishmash of religious ideas," though he never mentions G.o.d to his patients, and calls himself an atheist.

"My patients don't think much about the search for meaning. I encourage it. They don't come here saying, 'What's it all about?' Perhaps they come here because of depression or anxiety. Usually when we've cleared all that up, in the third year, I raise the question, 'What do you want your life to stand for, what do you think you're here for?' And almost without exception they get fascinated by that and do another year with me.

"I love that stage of work."

His patients are hungry for something, obviously, as are the patients of Dr. McKeith. Is it really so surprising that presented with a choice between Islam, which offers a coherent and absolute set of answers to these questions, or its alternative, which seems in modern Britain all too often to be a bracing colonic purge, many recent immigrants have found the former more compelling?

CORRUPTION, GHETTOIZATION, AND A PERVASIVE SENSE OF UNFAIRNESS.

There is more to this complicated story, though, than the empty flabbiness of Britain's secularism and the horror it inspires among Muslim immigrants, or at least Zia thinks so. "What we're seeing in the East End of London is a ghettoization," Zia told me, "and n.o.body's doing anything about it-certainly not at the level at which something would have to be done. The local government of Tower Hamlets is riddled with waste, if not outright corruption, and it's very difficult for people to criticize the local government, because the counselors are Banglades.h.i.+, so accusing them of corruption might look like racism."

Tower Hamlets, the area around Brick Lane, is a small, densely populated London borough adjacent to the eastern boundary of the City. It has the largest Banglades.h.i.+ population in the country. There is severe economic deprivation throughout the borough, and if Zia is right, the local government isn't helping. "In order to help the economically and socially excluded who don't speak English as a first language, well-meaning liberals insist that every pamphlet produced by the borough advising its citizens of their rights to health care, education, social services, and so on, every form and leaflet, has to be translated into a dozen languages. This introduces an enormous cost, especially when you think that new local and central government programs are being rolled out at a rate of knots with every pa.s.sing fad of public policy. But aside from the cost, it's either useless or dangerous. When you go to the doctor's surgery,15 the leaflets in Bengali remain piled high-n.o.body takes them. My friends in local government confirm that reams of these translations get pulped. Here's the terrible irony: They don't get used because the literacy rate among Sylhetis is very low-the literacy rate in Bengali, that is. Sylhetis don't even speak Bengali, they speak a dialect or another language, call it what you like. But this business of translation is useless and worse still it is very likely dangerous. The provision of services in Bengali means Banglades.h.i.+s are drawn to Tower Hamlets and remain there. The reception at my doctor's surgery here counts a number of Sylhetis among its staff. As a Sylheti in Tower Hamlets, you can conduct all your exchanges with official Britain, in the doctor's surgery, at the unemployment benefit office, at the social services office, in your mother tongue. Why on earth would you not come here and why on earth would you ever leave? This is a ghetto. We have got to get every generation speaking English as well; we've got to abandon the dogma of multiculturalism."

Tower Hamlets is the setting of Monica Ali's book Brick Lane, another extremely successful recent novel about Bengalis in Britain written by another attractive young woman of exotic ethnic extraction. Despite Zia's complaint that the modern British novel is not angry enough for verisimilitude, Brick Lane portrays the bewilderment and alienation of Bengali immigrants in Britain quite successfully-and proposes, as well, that these emotions morph readily into Islamic radicalism and hatred of America.

Ali recounts the story of Nazneen, an obedient Bengali villager sent to London as a teenager to marry a stranger twice her age. When Phiroze spoke of his wasting vegetarians, I thought of Nazneen, who is astonished to discover that in Britain it is the poor who are fat. Nazneen's daughters, like the children in White Teeth, dismay their father, Chanu, with their enthusiasm for a.s.similation. "And what is their culture?" Chanu asks contemptuously of the British. "Television, pub, throwing darts, kicking a ball." Like Zadie Smith's character Samad, Chanu schemes to take his children back to Bangladesh against their will.

Nazneen's rebellion, late in life, comes in the form of an extramarital affair with a virile young Muslim radical, Karim. His anti-Americanism-and the anti-Americanism of Muslim immigrants generally-is a.s.sumed by the author as a given: At the community meetings Karim convenes, the debate is not about whether British Muslims should oppose the United States, it is about how to oppose the United States. The outcast of the group, who objects to violence on the grounds that it is not sanctioned by Islam, is a black convert- the only one who is not of Bengali origin.

"So there's a lot of anger," Zia concluded. "There's the anger and the fear of the terrorist, the vandal on the street, but there's anger too in the lawyer, the physician, the banker. I've wondered if when you see someone pa.s.sionate against something, against unfairness, whether behind that pa.s.sion there is anger. I know angry Asian men who will only discuss their anger behind closed doors in the company of friends." He had, he told me, thought of writing a novel about these angry men.

A woman he had met the weekend before was sleeping in his bedroom. She was already besotted with him and he was already bored with her. Several more women called him on his cell phone as we spoke. His life did not seem a vale of tears. I interrupted him. "Look, Zia," I said, gesturing around me at his apartment, the leather sofa, the panoramic view of London's skyline, "you're one of the most successful people I know, by any measure. It would seem that Britain has been good to you. Why are you angry?"

He didn't seem surprised by the question. Perhaps he'd heard it before. "It's a curious need," he answered, pausing at length between clauses as if retrieving them from deep storage, "that we all have, which is to be treated fairly. We all must feel that we are being treated fairly. We hear people saying all the time, 'Since when was life supposed to be fair?' And yet we all absolutely rage against injustice. Injustice perpetrated against an individual coupled with injustice perpetrated against the individual because he's part of a wider group, not only is that an unfairness, it's obliterating of his uniqueness. It's so disregarding. Not even a moment's thought about his uniqueness. The des.e.xualizing-it's bound to make you angry."

Zia began to speak now as if facing a jury, no longer using the first person. "Everyone faces adversity. And everyone must position himself in such a way not only to overcome adversity but to find challenges equal to his talents. Now, we all do things, we all find creative ways of negotiating through difficulties. That doesn't mean we don't have them. If you see someone who's done moderately well, what you see is someone who's done moderately well. What you won't see is what obstacles he had to overcome. It almost smacks of greed for that person to argue that he's been treated unfairly-it is unseemly-but I think it's unfair to deny him that argument, because whether that argument is a valid one is entirely to do with matters of fact, which we may or may not be able to ascertain, but it is a factual question, not a moral one. How do I account for my success? I'm an outlier. I'm random. There are many, many more who have much more talent than me, many more, I am sure, who never broke through. And in the whole of life, you will get a few like me, who have had the happy confluence of circ.u.mstances. I've been lucky."

As he finished his sentence, the woman who had been sleeping as we spoke walked into the living room in her pajamas. She stared at Zia with infatuated eyes. He sighed.

THE GREAT SATAN'S SECRET WEAPON.

Zadie's book suggests a particularly important truth: In the war against Islamic radicalism, Europe's chief weapon will be its enormous seductiveness. While Europe has been home to history's most extraordinary forms of religious fanaticism, European civilization has also had a corrosive effect on the religious life, whether Catholic, Protestant, or Jewish. There is no reason to expect the Muslim experience to be different. The temptations of Western civilization, as the characters in British novels repeatedly discover, are corrosive; and even sending one's children back to Bangladesh is no proof against them. That which disgusts the Islamists-alcohol, promiscuity, faithlessness, decadence-will for many be their undoing. These are what Europe has to sell, and they are commodities that have repeatedly proved more appealing than abstract salvific ideologies-at least, in the long run.

The Berlin Wall did not fall simply because the Soviet Union was militarily and economically bankrupt, nor even because the citizens of the East longed to be free. It fell because those citizens said "Screw this" to communism's utopian message. They wanted video recorders, not the dictators.h.i.+p of the proletariat. They wanted Michael Jackson alb.u.ms. They wanted motorcycles. They wanted Penthouse magazine, combination washer-dryers, twenty-four-hour convenience stores, rave music, and a lot of Ecstasy to go with it. Communism provided none of that. 14 The West, by comparison, demands no adherence to grim, selfsacrificing ideologies, even as it offers infinite possibilities for pleasure in the temporal realm. Of course it is that very same seductiveness- accompanied by the complete absence of a redemptive message, the disdain for redemptive messages-that introduces into the West its anomie and hopelessness, but surely it is far better to have newly faithless immigrants moping around the cafes, fretting about the toxins in their diet and complaining that none of it makes any sense, than to have them planning to blow up buildings. Unfortunately, it is that very anomie and hopelessness that prevents the West from defending itself aggressively even when the buildings actually are blown up.

The eminent Middle East historian Bernard Lewis has remarked that when the mullahs call America the Great Satan, the Satan in question is not our incarnation of evil, but theirs-"the adversary, the deceiver, above all the inciter and tempter who seeks to entice mankind away from the true faith."15 In the Orientalist mythology described by Edward Said, the East is a seductive female and the West is a conquering male. But it can equally well be viewed as precisely the inverse.16 The West tempts the faithful and the West devours religion, not so much by subduing it militarily as by offering something so much more immediately attractive: personal autonomy, s.e.xual freedom, nice things to buy. Europe has snuffed out Christianity, and sooner or later it will probably do the same to Islam. With luck, it will do so before Islam manages to wreak too much more damage. But given how much easier it is to destroy than to build, there is no guarantee that it will do so in time.

TOO MUCH b.l.o.o.d.y HISTORY.

Let me make one thing clear: No one but a fool would argue that the United States is free of racial and religious tension, that immigration is an uncontroversial issue in America, or that there are no Islamic radicals in the United States. It is a difference of degree-but differences of degree can be so great as to amount to a difference of kind. The fundamental ethnic divide in the United States is not between established Americans and recent immigrants but between whites and blacks. The historic origins of this divide are obvious: Black Americans came to the United States not as willing immigrants but as slaves. Relations between blacks and whites in the United States remain less than perfectly harmonious, but it is laughable to imagine that a significant number of black Americans would consider martyring themselves to destroy Western civilization.

The historic origins of the divide between native Britons and Muslim immigrants are often held to be equally significant: the immigrants were once the colonized, and the native Britons, the colonizers. In White Teeth, describing his obsession with Poppy Burt-Jones, Samad reveals the greatest source of his shame: Poppy Burt-Jones is English.

"That is the worst of it," said Samad, his voice breaking. "English. White. English."

s.h.i.+va shook his head. "I been out with a lot of white birds, Samad. A lot. Sometimes it's worked, sometimes it ain't. Two lovely American girls. Fell head-over-heels for a Parisian stunner. Even spent a year with a Romanian. But never an English girl. Never works. Never."

"Why?" asked Samad, attacking his thumbnail with his teeth and awaiting some fearful answer, an edict from on high. "Why not, s.h.i.+va Bhagwati?"

"Too much history," was s.h.i.+va's enigmatic answer, as he dished up the Chicken Bhuna. "Too much b.l.o.o.d.y history."

That b.l.o.o.d.y history, it is often said, is why Britain is unable to integrate its immigrants as the United States does. But it is not the fact of colonization per se. Non-Muslim immigrants from the Indian Subcontinent in Britain-Hindus, Parsis, Sikhs, Jains-are wealthier and better educated than other ethnic groups in Britain, including whites and Jews. 17 Nor is this a function of national origin. Although most Hindus in Britain come from India, Hindus from Bangladesh-a minority so small that they scarcely register on the census-are by every socioeconomic measure as successful as those from India. The 1.2 million Hindus in Britain are never found rioting in the streets of industrial towns as their Muslim counterparts do. Nor do they bomb London's subways. Yet the obstacles to political and economic success in Britain that apply to Muslims should in principle apply to Hindus, should they not? All have dark skin, and thus presumably encounter the same degree of inst.i.tutional racism. All come from countries that were colonized. All come from vastly different, non-Western economic traditions. When I pointed this out to Zia, he replied that I was asking the wrong question. "The proper question is whether, all other things being equal, outcomes for this cohort of Hindus are as good as those of their white counterparts. The fact that they have done well tends to mask what studies show, which is that as a group they would have done even better but for discrimination. (Also, it's important to bear in mind that discrimination has mutated in Britain; if people can discern the difference between a Vindaloo and a Madras curry, it should come as no surprise if most people can tell a Muslim name from a Hindu one.)"

Perhaps. But the crucial difference is not discrimination, nor even any beliefs or habits of mind particular to Islam. It is that, as Zia remarked, the Muslims come from villages. Through a series of historical contingencies, Muslim immigrants for the most part arrived in Britain poor and uneducated, whereas other immigrants from the Indian Subcontinent did not.

Consider this: For nearly 800 years India was ruled by Muslims, and it is for precisely this reason that British colonizers smashed their privileged political, social, and cultural position. This policy was above all driven by a practical power logic-and justified as a liberation of Hindus from the rule of an oppressive minority-but ancient religious antipathy clearly made the task a pleasure. While Islam and Hinduism were of inherently equal theological anathema to British Protestantism, Islam was viewed by colonists and colonized alike as the old, familiar enemy of Christendom-the Crusades here shaping the recent past, and by this means the present. Hinduism, by contrast, was viewed as a quaint, faintly contemptible, and unthreatening paganism.

Having crushed the Sepoy Mutiny in 1857, Britain abolished the East India Company, placing India under the direct control of the Crown. British administrators, incorrectly attributing the mutiny to the Muslims alone, confiscated Muslim properties and restricted Muslim employment in the army, revenue department, and judiciary. Advertis.e.m.e.nts inviting applications for government jobs noted specifically that Muslims would not be appointed. The Inam Commission, appointed to study Mogul legal structures for landholding and revenue farming, concluded by seizing some 20,000 Muslim estates, ruining countless ancient Muslim families. The British built schools in India designed specifically to cultivate Western habits of thought, making no provisions for religious education. A new Hindu elite, the Bhadralok, emerged from these schools, swiftly filling the vacancies in government offices formerly held by Muslims. Muslims, having been given excellent reason to fear the destruction of their culture, refused to be educated in these inst.i.tutions, further withering their political role in the colonial system. It is not really a surprise that Hindus were more willing than Muslims to accept the adulteration and Anglicization of their religion as the price of power. Historically, Hinduism has always profited from its polytheistic syncretism and ability to a.s.similate foreign influences; it is common, for example, to find Christ images or the Virgin Mary among the pantheon of deities in a Hindu household.

Following decolonization, and in many cases much before decolonization, Hindus-as well as Jains, Sikhs, and Parsis who profited similarly under the British Empire-came to Britain as highly qualified teachers, doctors, businessmen, and army officers, often with several degrees apiece. They spoke excellent English and had generations of experience with administrative and commercial inst.i.tutions modeled on British ones. They were in consequence at a tremendous a.s.similative advantage.

Indian Hindus were, moreover, active traders in East Africa, where they dominated the banking and financial services. Muslims, owing to Islamic prohibitions on usury, have never evidenced much of a flair for these industries. Upon achieving independence, African states nationalized banks and private businesses, strictly regulating their economies, and in the early 1970s, Idi Amin confiscated the property of Indian businessmen and expelled them from Uganda. The urbane, commercially experienced Hindu immigrants who came to Britain as a consequence have become, unsurprisingly, remarkably prosperous.

Muslims, however, for the most part arrived in Britain as unskilled rural laborers. The part.i.tion of India in 1947 caused the displacement of large rural populations from Pakistan, including Bangladesh, particularly in the Punjab and Mirpur. The simultaneous construction of the Mangla Dam in Pakistan displaced another 100,000 people. While some relocated to other parts of Pakistan, many immigrated to Britain. In this, they were encouraged by the British government, which hoped to preserve British textile mills in the north and midlands through the import of low-cost Commonwealth labor. Britain deliberately encouraged unskilled, uneducated, politically unsophisticated Muslim immigrants to fill its factory jobs. So did most other European countries: Germany, for example, imported a ma.s.sive labor force of unskilled Turks to do the jobs Germans no longer cared to do. They came from the least-developed areas of rural Turkey. Moving to Istanbul would have been a great shock; Germany might as well have been the moon. This was true as well of the North Africans who immigrated to France, Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands. Throughout Europe, the vast majority of Muslim immigrants were already the poorest citizens of their native societies-this, precisely, is why they migrated. As Zia remarked, traditional village life is poor preparation for economic advancement and civic integration in a modern, secular city.

In Britain, the focus of the modernizing economy soon s.h.i.+fted from labor-intensive industries to those requiring specialized skills and education. Unskilled immigrants consequently found themselves not only unemployed but in natural compet.i.tion with Britain's white undercla.s.s, who predictably failed to embrace them. It is obvious why this group of immigrants has fared poorly in Britain, as have their offspring.

Here is a critical point: Education and social cla.s.s upon arrival in Britain, above all, appear to account for the radically different markers of a.s.similative success evidenced in these communities, far more so than religious belief. The evidence? Muslims whose parents were educated, English-speaking professionals upon arriving in Britain seem to fare quite well-just as well as Hindus, in fact. There just don't happen to be very many of them.

Ha.s.san Alam, who also studied with me at Oxford, is the son of Muslim physicians from a comparatively prosperous northern province of Bangladesh.16 He finds Zia's descriptions of immigrant life unrecognizably angst-ridden. He wondered in a letter to me, Why do you think he paid so much heed to the prejudices and idiosyncrasies of his parents? Not going out with your girlfriend in public is a Banglades.h.i.+ rite of pa.s.sage. It's like p.u.b.erty (except it's still happening in your 30s). No reason for him to get so hung up on it. We all go through it. He should have just lied to his parents and listened to Morrissey in his bedroom like the rest of us.

Ha.s.san is quick to emphasize his admiration for Britain, for its tolerance and pluralism. His Bengali relatives can visit Britain, wear clothes that distinguish them as Muslims in a predominantly Christian country, find and eat halal food, and wors.h.i.+p at a mosque without hara.s.sment. In Saudi Arabia, he notes, no Christian would enjoy a similar freedom. Britain's ethnic diversity, he says, is "fantastic."

Ha.s.san didn't much care for White Teeth; he found it unconvincing and overwritten. He wondered why all these comely first-generation immigrant novelists felt compelled to write about Islamic radicalism, forced marriages, and social alienation. Why, he asked, did these novels insist on depicting abusive, hypocritical male characters, men who were inevitably secret fornicators despite their ostensible piety? Why so many long-suffering, oppressed women who by the end of the novel enjoy a feminist awakening? "Why can't they do us the courtesy," he asked, "of portraying us as unique, complex people?" These, I thought, were an interesting echo of Zia's words, but their premises and implications were remarkably different.

Most immigrants, he insisted, were not destined for unwanted arranged marriages or wracked with anger about their alienation or plotting to blow up buildings. Immigrants were capable of thinking about other things, normal things, the things Bridget Jones thinks about. He was toying with the idea of quitting his job as a management consultant and writing a book about the real Bengali immigrant experience.

This alone seems to be the universal constant of the Bengali immigrant experience: the desire to write a novel about it.

HOW TO RAISE A GOOD LITTLE EUROPEAN.

On my last visit to London, I found myself chatting with Phiroze in his consulting room, an opulent study with drawn brocade curtains and a coal fire. Sculptures on the mantel of his fireplace represent different aspects of the emotional world. There is one for depression, one for the gentle mother, one for the hurt child. Socrates depicts wisdom. Until recently, I had thought it striking that none of the sculptures had Asian faces. On this visit, though, I noticed the addition of a placid Buddha's head.

Psychotherapists of Asian descent are extremely rare in Britain, as are Asian patients. Almost none of Phiroze's patients have been other Asians. Even middle-cla.s.s Asians are unlikely to consider practicing or entering psychotherapy, a discipline intimately linked to the core of Western intellectual culture, to its art and literature and high drama, to representation and abstraction, to the enlightenment ideals of selffulfillment and the pursuit of personal happiness. Immigrants of his background, Phiroze surmised, had little patience for these concepts and were uncomfortable discussing feelings and the self, particularly s.e.xual feelings. The admission of rage and resentment toward one's parents would be unthinkable in many Asian families, and spending money to talk about oneself would be an unacceptable self-indulgence.

Phiroze lives and practices in a ma.s.sive, somber stone manor on London's Blackheath, an upper-middle-cla.s.s neighborhood of carefully tended rosebushes, manicured lawns, and white professionals. He has lectured, conducted seminars, and performed a.n.a.lytic work throughout Europe, and his private practice is full. He is not angry about his relations.h.i.+p to Britain, though he concedes that notwithstanding his achievements, he is regularly "identified in the street as some kind of wog or Paki." Strictly speaking he is neither; he is a Parsi. His parents were born to Bombay's upper-middle-cla.s.s Parsi community and came to London in the 1950s after completing their university education in India. His grandfather was a prison warder in India who was killed in a riot, dying a hero.