[ExI] bishop warns of no-go areas

[Tom Nowell]

Speaking as an Englishman living in a mostly-white
area, I can honestly tell you a lot of people will
have no direct experience of heavily Islamic areas. I
grew in North Yorkshire (one of England's whitest
counties), and have lived in poor areas of Liverpool
and now live in Cheltenham, a fairly well-off town.
The white middle-class people I work with,live with,
and socialise with, are only likely to come into
social contact with professional, well-educated
Muslims.
 The areas the Bishop is talking about are inner-city
areas where immigrants have come together and where
there has been "white flight" to the suburbs. Several
big cities have developed large areas with big
immigrant populations. These areas have developed the
voluntarily segregated communities mentioned in the
article. Because they live in their voluntary
segregation, and people like me are happy in our
little suburbs, no-one really has much idea of how the
other half lives.
 Many of these segregated areas are in poor areas.
Shortage of social housing and jobs has led to ethnic
tension - white far-right politicians claiming "the
asians are stealing our houses", asian people who
can't get a job complaining "white employers only give
jobs to white people", and the scarcity of resources
has caused racially-motivated violence. 
 As to how much these are "no-go" areas? Well, it
wouldn't be the first time - in the early 80s, race
riots in afro-caribbean areas meant there were parts
of London,Leeds and Liverpool it was dangerous for a
white person to walk into. On the other hand, the
North Yorkshire villages my father and sisters live in
are notoriously unfriendly to outsiders, and everyone
would stare at any non-white faces they hadn't met
before.
 In conclusion - it's very hard to get a grip on how
much of a problem this is, and how to address this.
The very insularity of my society makes it hard to
assess.
 (as an aside, Islam in Britain is not a monolithic
entity. Most muslims are descended from Islamic
immigrants. Because of the way immigration works, the
old,established Islamic communities are of people
descended from the area around Mirzapur in Pakistani
Kashmir, and the town of Sylhet in Bangladesh. More
recent communities are made from people fleeing
Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq. Each has their own
ethnic differences, each has its own variations on
islam, and each only has minimal contact with the
others. The mosques preaching Sharia law are unlikely
to be the same mosques where white,anglo-saxon
converts to Islam worship).

Tom


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