@tolmie's hairdoo Just wondering, does this mean you'd kick my brown wife out of the country? She was born here, works here, pays tax here, as did both of her parents before her dad died. Her mum came here from Malaysia as a teenager when her family decided to move for a better life. She still pays tax here, works at a school for predominantly white English special needs kids, loves what this country has done for her life, and watches EastEnders religiously. Her dad fled anti-South Asian religious and ethnic persecution in early 1970s Uganda and came to London as a refugee, built himself up from nothing, went to university, got his degree, and worked in Thatcher, Major, Blair, and Brown's governments as a civil servant, he loved Brian May and listened to Queen until the day he died at age 64. Their daughter - who has mostly turned her back on her Ismaili Muslim upbringing for Western secularism - moved from London to Manchester in the late 2010s for university and eventually married a white boy. Me. She has tattoos and drinks cocktails. If you were blind and had a conversation with her then you'd probably think she was white.
I mean fuck, if you just looked at her you'd think she was of Hindu origin. Very Indian features from her dad's side, a combination of Malaysian and Indian features from her mum's side.
My point is, every brown face in this country has a story like this and you personally do not have the ability to separate all of their stories. Instead what you've done is group all of their stories together in order to flatten the nuance, cast them as a hivemind, and justify your urge to have them all kicked out of the country. We brought them here in their millions to rebuild this country and its economy after World War II, all across the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. We can't then be surprised and angry that they put down roots and started having children and started building houses of worship. The story of 20th century Britain has brown people in several chapters.
I'm very close to Islam by marriage now so I see a lot of the inside - the good, the bad, and the ugly. I see the social conservatism on a daily basis and it makes me uncomfortable, but that's partly because I'm not keen on organised religion in general and how prejudiced and conservative it can make somebody behave, even in small ways. Some women from the mosque have approached my mother-in-law in the past and have asked her if she knows her daughter's dating a gora. There's gossip, one-upmanship, a lot of guilt-tripping, women are discouraged from attending the burials of their loved ones after funerals. But then, after some time, the whole thing clicked for me. In terms of how its values and attitudes, Islam is where Christianity was about 50-60 years ago. The second generation children born in the 1980s and 1990s are having the same awakenings that my parents had after being born in the 60s: that there is an alternative to the religion they were brought up under.
On that, my wife's parents seemed to have similar values to my grandparents. My grandparents were religious, stern, stoic people who followed traditional rules, fit into traditional gender roles, and watched on in disbelief as their children turned their backs on Christianity, stopped going to church, and started living more liberal lives. You see something happen every now and again when a local council turns a church into a mosque: outrage that something like that could happen. This outrage comes from people who spend Sunday mornings in bed. If people started going to church they'd stop turning them into mosques, but we stopped going to church generations ago. The same thing will happen to mosques over the next 20-30 years as the older, stricter, more god-fearing generation dies off and the more liberal, non-religious kids find other things to do. Mosques will be turned into secular community centres, market halls, libraries, work hubs, and other things like that. Repurposed like churches.
Kids of Muslim immigrants who came to this country 50 years ago are turning their backs on Islam. There's a big panic occurring among older generations of Muslims in the UK, that their children don't seem to have faith, don't go to mosque as much, and are living more Western and secular lives as they realise what personal freedom actually is. Let that process continue, imo. If we can replace religion with community then we'll be laughing, it just takes time. That's what extremist Salafis like Bin Laden and ISIS can't stand, that Muslims who come to the West are seeing that they can live lives without religion, they can drink and gamble and get tattoos, and collaborate with white people. You're saying this country is lost. I disagree. I think bringing more religious people into a secular way of life is a way of showing that this country is actually winning. There will always be those who cling on, who believe in religious supremacy, but they will fade away as alternatives to their religion are gradually, slowly presented to them.
Take the three generations of my wife's family. My wife's gran was brought to England from Malaysia in the 1980s. She couldn't speak a word of English because her husband forbade it, she never worked for herself, she never drove, she never had her own bank account, she never did anything except keep her house tidy, go to mosque every day, and give birth to six children. My wife's mum, my mother-in-law, came to this country not knowing English, expecting to never work, expecting to just produce kids for her husband. She was ready to live her mum's life. My late father-in-law said to her, "No, you're going to get fluent in English, get a job, learn how to drive, make your own money, and live your own life". Since the early 1990s she's fluent in English, drives, works, goes to mosque less than her mum did, and has lived without her husband on her own for four years now following his all-too-premature death. He retired in 2015 after recovering from cancer and a stroke so my mother-in-law was the breadwinner for the last seven years of her husband's life anyway. And now my wife - born in England, works in advertising, earns a shit-tonne more than her husband does, drives, owns a house, has tattoos and drinks, married a white boy and only goes to mosque once or twice a year out of obligation. That process is reflected across many Muslim families in this country. Let it carry on.
