I grew up in a working-class family in a working-class town. During the 1970s and 1980s, Luton was a charmless place of terraced houses and manufacturing industry. It was celebrated for two things: an airport that was a national joke, and the Vauxhall car factory which had been in the town since 1905. Because the plant provided work for the unskilled it was ideal for the town's immigrants. Among those employed on the line at Vauxhall was my father. He had emigrated from Pakistan in the early 1960s, leaving behind his wife, two young children and a modest career in the civil service in Karachi for the potential of a more rewarding life in a country he had never visited and whose language he did not speak.
When he arrived in England, my father was 30, the same age I am now. I was born in Lyllapur, a village just outside Lahore in the Punjabi-speaking north, but we later moved to Karachi, in the Urdu-speaking south. My parents and older brother and sister continued to speak Punjabi as their first language, which I understand but cannot speak. They speak to me in Urdu.
After 11 years of working in Britain, my father had saved enough money to bring the rest of us to join him. I arrived with my brother, sister and mother in May 1974, one month shy of my third birthday. My earliest memory is of my family moving into our first proper home on Selbourne Road in Luton's Bury Park district. My father worked at the factory and my mother made dresses at home on an old Singer sewing machine. Every week a man would come and pick up what she had made and pay us a few pennies for each dress. Dressmaking was a common way for Asian women to earn money because it did not require them to leave the house. My mother made all her own clothes and so did most of the women she knew. As a young boy, I would help her by folding the finished dresses and tying them into bundles, while my older brother and sister went to school.
To my father, Pakistan was always home and England was where work had taken him. His was a utilitarian sense of nationality, founded on economics. His dealings with white people were limited and almost entirely professional: the people he worked with on the production line, the bank manager and later the stockbroker. "The thing about white people," my father used to tell me, "is that no matter how long you work with them, they will never invite you to their homes." Yet he never invited them to our home either.
For my father, coming to Britain offered opportunities that were not available in Pakistan, but it also presented the danger that his children would forget who they were. He was worried that, exposed to western ideas, we would stop thinking of ourselves as Muslim or Pakistani and instead become just Brits with brown faces. He dreamed of us having the best this country could offer-education, the prospect of well paid work-but he wanted us to remain uncontaminated by its worst aspects: parents languishing in old peoples' homes, children who think they are individuals and not their father's sons and daughters. His faith in progress through hard work led him to come to Britain when all his siblings remained in Pakistan. It was a credo that was hammered into us as children. I grew up watching Panorama, The Money Programme and the nightly news. I was probably the only person in my junior school whose father read the Financial Times. It is not surprising that I ended up working as a journalist. But my father died before I got my first job in his beloved world of current affairs.
When I was eight, our family moved from the overwhelmingly Asian Bury Park to the overwhelmingly white Marsh Farm estate. I joined a new school, where I was almost the only Muslim. At that age it never occurred to me that this three mile move would have any implications for my "identity." Most of my memories of school are happy. I remember, one afternoon, aged about 11, walking home with my best friend Scott. I was envious that Scott had grandparents and uncles who came to his house, whereas I only had my immediate family. What would I do, I asked him, if something dreadful happened to my mother or father? Scott replied as if the question hardly merited pondering. "My mum and dad would adopt you and we would be brothers."
To my parents, however, my identity certainly was important. Because we lived apart from most Asians in town, I wasn't sent to mosque on Fridays, nor did I go to Islamic classes after school. But when I was 11 my mother began to teach me Arabic and written Urdu, which use the same alphabet. I would come home and spend an hour or so with her, trying to get to grips with this strange script. By the age of 12, I had completed the Koran. In the evenings my mother would tell me incredible stories about the prophet and describe Mecca, and how millions go there on the pilgrimage. I was captivated and couldn't wait to tell my school friends what I had heard. Somehow, though, they seemed less impressed than I was.
Naturally there were moments of tension in my childhood, like a friend telling me that his dad did not allow "Pakis" into his home. I knew I was different, of course. None of the people whose books I read, or saw on television, looked like me. I had the same dreams as my friends; only mine seemed less likely to come true. I dealt with this by burying myself in books. I would visit Marsh Farm library and read about astronomy, da Vinci, Dr Who.
My other outlet was music. We didn't have a record player at home, but I had a personal radio. On Tuesdays, Gary Davies would start the Top 40 rundown during my English class, and I would sit with my hands on the side of my head, the radio in my pocket and headphone wire weaving up through my shirt and out of my sleeves. "Why do you listen to their music when you have your own?" my father would ask. For me, there was no divide between "us" and "them." At home I would watch the latest Amitabh Bachchan film on video with my family, and at weekends sneak off to catch the new Clint Eastwood at the ABC. I would listen to the songs of Lata and Mohammad Rafi with my mother and Madonna and Michael Jackson with my friends. I was sliding between worlds and still no sign of an identity crisis.
On religious days like the festival of Eid, I would go to mosque. I copied the movements of those around me, not understanding the meaning behind the motions. During Ramadan, when I was 15 and 16, I would try and fast for at least some of that month. But it made lessons, and especially PE, tiring. By the time I started college, I had abandoned even trying to give up food. With each Ramadan, my parents' sense of disappointment grew. But for me, Islam was like the melody of an old song; over time it became ever harder to remember.
I was 16 years old when I met a boy in a turban who was listening to Bruce Springsteen. He gave me a few tapes to listen to and the music I heard influenced me more than anything I had encountered outside the world of my family. This was something new: music that was a way of confronting life rather than running away from it. Over the next few months I, the Muslim boy, and Amolak, the Sikh, would spend hours in the common room discussing Springsteen's music. It took the place of a religion. Amolak and I thought of the songs as maps of how to live and how to be. Born to Run, Darkness on the Edge of Town, Tunnel of Love: these albums amounted to a moral and personal compass. Towards the end of a bootleg tape of the 1985 Born in the USA tour, I heard Springsteen say, "it's easy to let the best of yourself slip away."
Specifically, Bruce Springsteen gave me the promise of America. With it came the civil rights movement, the speeches of Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Emmett Till and Public Enemy. I felt that I was on the same side as those who marched in Selma and Montgomery. I found it easier to be a black American by empathy than to be British. Naturally, I failed Norman Tebbit's cricket test by supporting Pakistan. Yet if Tebbit had asked a supplementary question-not just who would I support, but who would I play for?-the ambivalence of my feelings would have been starker. My answer would have been England. I did not feel an emotional bond, but England was where my ambitions lay.
America, meanwhile, contained no such fine distinctions. It represented a broader sense of identity. To my father, this adoration of Americana was confirmation of his worst fears. The Faustian pact of coming to Britain had played out: the souls of his children had been robbed by the west. Even years later he would express regret he had ever come.
The night before I went to university in Manchester (chosen because Ben Elton had gone there and because it was far from Luton) I sat with my mother in the living room of our house. "Promise me you won't be far away in your heart," she said.
I ended up spending six years in Manchester. There I was accountable neither to my family nor my Luton background and freedom once tasted is hard to relinquish. I grew more distant from my Muslim self; not by design but because nothing that interested me seemed to be what other Muslims were into. When I went to gigs, I was invariably the only non-white person there. Where were the other Asian Oasis fans? To my parents, I was an embarrassment. I was not working, I refused to come home to Luton, and I didn't grow out of my love of western music.
One day, aged 23, I went to Afflecks Palace in Manchester city centre and spent ?80 and three hours having extensions woven into my hair. The impact was almost instant. Girls would offer me their phone numbers, I would be asked if I could supply Ecstasy pills and I'd get searched before going into nightclubs. When my father realised that I was not just wearing a fancy hat, he was mortified. He thought I was trying to be black. On visits home I would be banished upstairs. My sister would bring food to my room. I only had the extensions removed after my father died; it did not seem appropriate to attend his funeral in dreadlocks.
By the time I moved back south and started work I was almost as much of a multicultural tourist as my white friends. I called myself a Muslim because I did not drink and did not eat non-halal meat. But I would take the things I liked about my religion and heritage: the strength of the family unit, a sense of global community, the food. And I would leave the parts I was uncomfortable with: arranged marriages, overbearing deference, bad haircuts. It felt good to be surfing cultures. Someone should have told me that there is no such thing as a free saag aloo.
The cell phone pulsed in my pocket. "Have you heard!?" The twin towers had just been hit. It was Amolak. Fourteen years on from sixth form college, and Amolak is a shaven-headed investment banker (the Springsteen song Independence Day had inspired him to lose the turban). I am a journalist with Channel Four News.
I was on the train to Luton to see my mother. By the time the taxi driver dropped me off at home reports of the Pentagon attack were coming in. Watching with my mother, who cannot understand English, I kept up a running translation of the commentary. She began to cry. "All those people, all they were trying to do was go to work." I explained that a Muslim might have been responsible, maybe bin Laden. "That man is no Muslim," she snapped back.
The following day, reports came in of attacks on Arab Americans in the US and racist incidents in Britain. Not far from my London flat an Afghan taxi driver was beaten so violently that he was paralysed from the neck down. The bank Amolak works for had offices in the World Trade Centre; his friends survived but he was so shaken that he couldn't speak to me for days. Later he told me of feeling threatened while out in Luton; his father, who still wears the beard and turban of his religion, had been taunted.
Meanwhile, I cancelled a flight to New York and a planned driving trip in the US. America had always offered me the prize of anonymity; now it was gone. Despite having spent half my life in a love affair with the country, it wasn't to America that I turned to understand what it means to be a secular Muslim. In my job I operate as a middle-class liberal, largely insulated from the realities of the place I came from. I have enjoyed good opportunities in Britain and luck since I left Luton. It was time to go back to school.
John ramm has been teaching politics at Luton Sixth Form College for 23 years. It feels like a long time since I was his 17-year-old student. He was witty and inspiring then. It felt strange to be turning to him for help again, but he was open to my suggestion that I return to college and talk to a new generation of his students. Twelve years after leaving, I was going back to my old classroom. Even as I walked in to college, I could see things had changed. When I was there, we all wore western clothes. Now, there are far more Asian kids and most wear traditional dress. The boys walk unselfconsciously in flowing kurtas, and the girls wear silky shalwar kameez underneath their Diesel denim jackets.
In a class of 25 there are only half a dozen white faces. The fear for my father's generation was that with assimilation would come dilution. He thought that as subsequent generations of British Muslims were born and raised in this country it would become ever harder to preserve their distinct Islamic identity. The third generation would be trapped in an existential no-man's land, neither connected to the motherland nor wholly accepted in the adopted land. Here, however, it looks like a misplaced fear. These young men and women have grown up by doing the reverse: intensifying their affiliation to countries they have never set foot in, yet able to be far more assertive than I ever was about their right to live in Britain.
John makes a short introduction and throws the class open to me. I show them a short film of mine, which deals with how the networks had covered the breaking news of 11th September. I switch off the tape to an audible exhalation; I am talking to a class acutely attuned to the transforming nature of what took place that day. John leaves me alone with the kids. He had felt that they would open up to me in a way that would be impossible with a white outsider.
I imagined confronting an uncertain group of young men and women-perhaps made angry by the sharpening of insecurities after 11th September. Instead, I find a group of confident, articulate teenagers displaying an odd mix of paranoia and scepticism. To every question I ask them, they have questions for me, and not only about the war. In fact, they want to know who the hell I think I am...
That was the week Luton made the front pages. Reports that two men from the town had died while fighting for the Taleban had brought reporters and television crews in search of suburban martyrs. I did not find any in this class but none of the Muslim students believed that bin Laden was responsible for New York and Washington. "Where's the evidence?" demanded one. Another said, "innocent till proved guilty, that's their law."
Others muttered about Timothy McVeigh. They were scornful of Tony Blair and his quoting of the Koran. They put more credence on circulated e-mails than what they saw on television, or read in newspapers. One girl told the Mossad plot story, in which 5,000 Jews were told not to turn up to work on the day of the attacks.
Some of their scepticism was well directed. They saw the recent portrayal of Luton in the media as an example of how interviews can be distorted. They were suspicious of how I would represent them. Perhaps most telling, was their worry of how recent events might affect their job prospects. "People are going to be suspicious of letting Muslims get into high positions," said Sabia.
"I think you are an amazing person," she added suddenly. I flushed with pride, and began to say that the reason I had come was to give something back; to show the students that you can be working class and Muslim and still get somewhere. Sabia cut me dead. "I think you are amazing," she continued, "because I have never met anyone who tried so hard to blend into white culture." I felt winded.
"If you are a Muslim, why don't you fast?" Hamisa, a tall Kashmiri girl, wanted to know.
"Are you a Muslim because you are a Muslim, or because your parents are?" asked Sultana, a British Bangladeshi Muslim.
My responses came stammeringly. When I was growing up, I found myself saying, things were different. Few of my friends had been especially religious. Just because I listened to Bruce Springsteen and read Philip Roth and watched Woody Allen did not mean I was "denying" anything. I just chose to expose myself to a broader set of influences than some of the people I grew up with. I told my class that they couldn't box people up so neatly. Islam is about tolerance, I added weakly.
"I see what you are saying," Hamisa said slowly. "You're saying that being a Muslim is a very broad category and if we really stretch it out then it's possible to include you too." These were girls who believed in the absolutism of Shari'a law but with very British caveats. Death for adultery was "impractical." They declared that Osama bin Laden was not a proper Muslim and that Afghanistan was not a true Islamic state. "The Taleban practise about three quarters of Islam," Sultana said, "but the missing quarter is really important. It includes things like making sure girls are educated."
The shock passed. I think their views were as much a product of class as religion. They probably hadn't met many middle-class liberal Muslims. "I'm sorry if we offended you," Sultana said sweetly. "I wasn't trying to make out you were a lost case. I was trying to convert you."
Gratitude does not come easy to the young. Sultana and her friends were certainly going to take the best of what Britain had to offer, but they felt no simultaneous need to make compromises. All of them planned to go to university and become professionals: law, finance, journalism. Few seemed to think their colour or religion would make any difference to what they could achieve. Yet when I asked who felt British, among the Muslims in the class not one hand was raised. "I am Pakistani, that is the country of my parents, that's the food I eat and the language I speak," Iftikahar said. But what has Pakistan ever given you? I found myself asking. What about the fact that if you get a job it will be because a British person gave it to you? "Religion comes before nationality," Sabia answered. "I'm British because that is my nationality; but Islam is who I am."
I asked them what they thought was the best thing about Britain. "Clean water," suggested Sabia. "Pavements," said Hamisa. "In Pakistan the roads are crap." This was another version of the utilitarian attitude towards nationhood that my father had. Some said that while they may not feel British, neither did they feel Pakistani. In their attachment to their religion they had carved out a place for themselves which was different from that of both my generation and my parents' but which shared characteristics from both. They had absorbed elements of western culture-the music, the ambition-but from my parents' generation retained a sense that they were different and proud of it. Previously educated in a predominantly white school, Sultana wears a headscarf by choice, though her mother does not. "I started to wear it because I wanted to know who I am." For her, there was no tension between being British and being Muslim because "you can mix it very well." I asked her what she thought was British about her personality. "My liberalness," she replied. "My culture is Islam and my lifestyle is British." She wants to become a lawyer. Her friends Sabia and Hamisa are also planning on getting degrees. They say their parents have told them that there is no way they can get married until they have an education and jobs.
"I am the oldest child," Sultana said. "My dad wants me to have all the things he would want his oldest son to have." It is a long way down the British-Muslim road from what my father would have wanted for my sisters. But in other ways he would have been pleased with these young men and women, perhaps more pleased than he ever was with me.
I left my old class envious, impressed and disappointed. I was jealous that so many of them believed in something and had a faith they had found for themselves. It might be a misguided, intolerant and untested faith; but it explained the world to them and helped them understand their place in it. It is a faith that is part of me, even if I do not possess it.
I was impressed that the students I met were so relaxed about who they were, so well-informed and could argue their corner so forcefully. At 17 years old they seemed more certain of themselves, not only than I was at 17, but more certain than I am now. Perhaps I had let the best of myself slip away.
Yet I was also disappointed that they started from the notion that to integrate is weak. Maybe these students were luxuriating in the certainties of youth. They seemed only distantly aware of how vulnerable they are. What happens when they leave Luton? "I don't know how I am going to survive in university," Sabia confessed. "All those white people. I don't know what I am going to say to them."
My mother was pleased when I told her what had occurred in class; she seemed relieved that the faith and the culture in which she and my father had brought us up still retained a potency for the generation after us. That night I met up with Amolak and other old friends I had been to college with. They were alarmed by my account, but not surprised. We felt so much older than our years, peering across a gulf at teenagers who were just half a generation away. It was only next morning it struck me that there were also other Asians in that Luton club: men with designer jeans and expensive haircuts, beautiful young women with cropped tops and tattoos, all dancing and drinking and laughing and singing. They too were from Luton; they too were young; some, doubtless, were Muslim. Who was the future, I wondered: the students or the clubbers?
