At the time of the Hajj in Makkah, the worldwide Muslim community, the Ummah is made strikingly
visible.
Wherever it may be, in Africa, in Asia, in America or Europe, the name of God marks the
entry of a new soul into the Ummah.
This little girl, like a third of all Muslims, will live in a non-Muslim country.
She may face many difficulties, suspicion, hostility, ignorance, even physical danger.
Above all, she may struggle with the greatest issue facing Muslims in the minority today,
her identity.
Can she belong both to her host nation and to the Islamic Ummah at the same time?
So, here period, excuse me.
The Grand Trunk Road is the oldest road in India, running across the width of the subcontinent.
Muslims have been living among the Hindus here for nearly a thousand years.
Yet today we hear claims that the only true Indian is a Hindu.
The village of Gabana has long been home to people of both faiths.
Many questions of identity should have been settled long ago.
It is easy to be fooled by appearances.
The singers of this Hindu devotional song are Muslim, not Hindu.
But they love to sing and in a poor village like Gabana, it seems natural to contribute
whatever you can to communal life.
But though Gabana is poor, much religious building work is being done in the community.
The old Hindu temple is being renovated.
And in the part of the village, that's the focus of religious activity.
Almost next door to the temple, a brand new mosque is beginning to take shape.
In this village at least, nobody seems to think that belonging to a different religion
makes a person a stranger, let alone an enemy.
Though Muslims have lived in this area for centuries, it is only recently that they have
begun building their own place of worship.
Also, most of the churches and shrines there belong to Muslim tak твор
After the
Muslims' lives are so closely interwoven that the need for tolerance is no less than
a matter of daily survival for both Muslims and Hindus.
Five times a day, in a symbol of the religious harmony of the village, Ida the singer turns
his talents from Hindu devotional songs to the Muslim call to prayer.
The Muslims of Gabana appear to have confidence in their identity, no difficulty with being
members both of the Ummah and of Indian society.
They are divided from their countrymen only by details of belief.
They eat much the same food, wear much the same clothes, sing much the same songs.
How can an outsider tell which of these villages are followers of Islam and which of the Hindu
God Lord Ram?
And yet, not 30 miles away Hindu militancy is putting Gabana's peaceful coexistence
at risk.
This is a modern Hindu religious procession, but it's not the sight of strange gods that
threatens us.
There is also a political message.
Muslims feel intimidated by the deadly passions so easily whipped up by Hindu chauvinists.
Remember, Mahatma Gandhi himself was assassinated by a Hindu extremist for trying to protect
Muslims.
This is Ayodhya.
The mosque was built in the reign of the Mughal Emperor Babur on the site Hindus claim as
the birthplace of Lord Ram.
In 1992, Hindu extremists broke into the compound and destroyed the building in the course of
a single day.
The police looked on.
Disturbances broke out over much of the country, exposing tensions simmering just below India's
secular surface.
It seems a world away from Gabana village just down the road.
Such strife is, I fear, nothing new.
Communal violence is endemic to the subcontinent, particularly in the towns.
In village India, conflicts of loyalty are an unwanted import.
His distinctions are brought in from outside.
They are not indigenous to the situation.
But in the cities, in the rural, in the urban areas, among the educated classes, among the
economic classes, the middle class, the lower middle class, this is a very deliberate effort
to create a distinct identity based on religion.
That creates the problems.
Such problems came to a tragic head in 1947 at the time of partition of the subcontinent
into Pakistan and India.
Military journeys in this part of the world have a disturbing resonance for anyone who
lived through those times.
Ten million people, Muslim and Hindu, left their homes, with terrible atrocities committed
on all sides, as many as a million died.
I was four years old and it nearly happened to me.
My father had decided that, along with so many other Muslims, we should move to Pakistan
and booked us onto a train.
But in buying food for the journey, we missed our connection and had to travel a day later.
We arrived safely in Pakistan, but the train that we should have taken was stopped just
short of the border.
Not a single passenger survived.
Such memories color the reaction of India's Muslims to the conflicts in Ayodhya and Kashmir.
Ayodhya today, they say, where next?
In India, as in many places all over the world, age-old Muslim communities are being threatened
by changes, not of their own making.
In spite of a thousand years of shared history, some Hindus are now refusing to accept the
Muslim's Indian identity.
Many of those hundred million or more people are asking themselves, who are we and where
else is there for us to go?
Today, the sword of the Holy Land is hanging over us.
It is a task necessary to maintain peace.
If many Muslims feel alienated even in India with its common culture and shared heritage,
what of other communities immersed in cultures of a very different kind?
For hundreds of years Muslims have been travelling, establishing themselves in new lands and among
new peoples.
I am sailing to the Isle of Lewis off the north west coast of Scotland to meet a community
of Muslims from Pakistan who have made a home for themselves among people with very different
ways.
One might expect Islam and the island culture to be far apart but in fact the Muslim Hebrideans
turn out to have much in common with their community.
Islamic is a fundamentalist religion and Presbyterianism is practised on the islands here I would say
as a very fundamentalist religion as well so they are both probably on opposite ends
of the stick but very fundamentalist and they seem to respect each other's activities and
I have never seen them sort of open on Sundays and this type of thing.
Oh they don't open on Sundays.
They have a harvest for us.
Not opening on Sundays is a good way of showing respect for your Christian neighbours.
It will be interesting to see whether respect is received as well as given.
The main town of the island of Lewis is Stornoway.
Abib Ullah and his daughter Rubina have come to meet me.
They certainly look well integrated into island society and to my ear they sound very Scots
too.
I
first wanted to know how much they felt part of one of the most clannish and traditional
communities in Western Europe.
The reason why we are integrated here is because it's a small community here.
There are not so many Asians or Pakistanis here and people accept us more and the other
thing is we try our best to mix with our local community.
By running the biggest store on the island, the Pakistanis have made themselves indispensable
to the community.
We think of ourselves as just one of the islanders now.
We are living for so long here.
With a small community there is not so much noticeable.
The family came to Stornoway some 30 years ago when they were filmed for a documentary.
The idea of Gaelic speaking Pakistanis charmed the television audience.
When I came here first I found it very very strange and for a while I was unsettled.
I thought I would leave here, I didn't like it to start with but then I started working
and selling stuff out in the country with my suitcase and all that and I reasonably
got on alright.
So I was beginning to like and then after about 3 years I bought a shop in Stornoway
and from there I progressed.
These Stornoway people are deeply committed Christians, as strict Scottish Presbyterians
their values are not so very far from the values of Islam.
Perhaps this is the key to the Muslim sense of ease.
This is Stornoway on a Sunday.
We don't believe in opening on Sunday, not whatsoever.
We don't do anything at all which will offend the local community.
We think it will be wrong to do so.
This must be one of the few places in the British Isles where propriety insists that
everything be closed on the Sabbath, the Lord's Day.
And by everything they mean absolutely everything.
To ensure that no offence is given to Stornoway's Presbyterians, the Sunday football game is
held well out of sight in the Lee of the Dunes.
I confess to finding religious tolerance here a little one-sided.
It is the Muslims who seem to make all the adjustments.
They wouldn't think of closing their shop on Eid or building a mosque for their little
community.
But the Pakistanis of the Hebrides themselves don't seem to find it difficult to combine
both a Scottish and a Muslim identity.
I wanted to know if they felt their Muslim culture to be under threat.
We are not worried.
Sooner or later any community who integrate into a host community will lose their identity
eventually.
And as you know, changes are always painful.
We would feel very, very painful when change would come like this, even though I won't
be here at that time.
But I'm sure my children or their children or their children, when they integrate they
will feel, you know, probably they will be very disappointed.
I am a Muslim but I'm also Scottish.
I was born here, I was bred here.
And when I first went to university I felt, as most people from the island do, very homesick.
I first joined the Oceanic Society, which is a Gaelic society, and started taking Gaelic
lessons.
I think that was more to get back to my Highland roots, which I think are as much a part of
me as my Muslim roots are.
Have the two, I can't ever separate the two.
When I went to Glasgow then I felt a bit ignorant about my own religion.
I mean, I've been taught the basics by my family, but when I went there I realised how
much I didn't know.
And so recently in the past couple of years I've made a concerted effort to learn more
about Islam.
I just wanted to know more from that standpoint, and when I did start to learn more it just
gave me a sense of peace.
I don't think the Muslim identity will ever fade.
I think it's too strong.
I mean, there's already a resurgence in the whole of the world.
I don't think it'll ever fade.
Perhaps the most important pointer to a community's sense of identity comes at the end of life.
When Muslims no longer want to return to their original homeland for burial, then one can
say that integration is on the way to being complete.
So this is the Muslim graveyard?
This is the plot we bought in 1959 for all Muslims.
Shall we say a prayer before?
Yes.
Who's buried here?
This is my uncle's grave, Mr Niaz Muhammad.
And do most people in the community wish to be buried here?
Well, we are going to be buried here because we have decided, we told our family that our
remains mustn't be sent back to Pakistan.
These are our Punjabis.
They weren't from the community?
No, they weren't from the community.
But all of them are friends here.
The layout of Stornoway Cemetery reflects the lives of the island's Pakistani community.
The Muslim section is within, but quite separate from the Christian burial ground.
Stornoway has been largely spared the storm of social revolution which mainland Britain
has had to weather since the Second World War.
That helps account for the sense of security and identity among the island's Muslims.
Things are very different in England.
Bury, near Manchester, is much more typical of today.
Here, amid the welter of change, a Muslim identity may be the only fixed and certain
feature of an immigrant's world.
Fazal Wadood, a Pathan from Pakistan, runs a worker's cafe here, exercising the Muslim
duty of hospitality.
In fact, Fazal's name is very appropriate.
Wadood means he who gives love, one of the attributes of God.
But Fazal doesn't expect his customers to know that.
They call me David, because it's easy to say like, easy for English people to say David.
Really it's Wadood, but call yourself David.
For the disabled people, you will see that I'm mentally disabled, they are all coming
in here, all welcoming here, and they are quite happy in here.
I treat them nice, some of them by social workers, they come to see me, how is my client?
Is he all right?
Yeah.
They are happy in here.
I regard Britain as my home, and I am a citizen of Britain, and I love to stay in this country
till the day I die.
I never had any problem in racial attack or anything like that in 32 years, no problems.
I'm nothing against them.
They are all right.
They are all right with me, I'm all right with them.
Fazal declares himself quite at home in Britain, but is he perhaps being over optimistic?
His wife and his daughters, they go upstairs, you know, like doing chips, but they never,
ever come in here.
You just see them at bat, you might see them, you know, one in a key or something, and then
if they do, his daughters put a veil over them, so they can't see them.
I think it's vain, that, putting a walking man with a veil on.
I mean, I can't understand it, I mean, I look at this way, they're here, they should go
our way, do you know what I mean, like if we were over there, we'd have to go their
way, wouldn't we?
That young woman clearly does not know that when her people ruled our country, they not
only lived as in Britain, but wanted to make Muslims live their way too.
It seems to me that not a great deal has changed since then.
He only closes it twice a year, and that's our Christmas, not his.
It just goes brain and everybody else carries on working.
Older Muslims like Fazal Wadood are grateful to be here and try to fit in at all costs.
The next generation, like Fazal's son who runs the amusement arcade above his father's
cafe, are less prepared to shut their eyes to the difficulties and prejudices they face.
Noor grew up in Britain.
He has no other country, so when he finds that he is not accepted as British, his only
recourse is to a Muslim, not a Pakistani identity.
They don't like the Muslims somehow, you know, that's my point of view.
I don't feel accepted because ever since we come to this country, we've had a lot of English
people, you know, like calling us, Pikes and you know, things like this, and you know,
the English lads.
They don't like mixed with them, you know, so that's why they don't like us, and plus
our religion as well, we're Muslims, so that puts them off, you know.
We were let into this country, you know, to work.
Really our father came because we were, you know, we wanted a different style of life,
still to be Muslims, but when we come to this country, like, I mean, years have gone by
now and you know, with us being grown up, so we're beginning to sort of like mix with
the English, like my brother for instance, going out with the English girls.
To assimilate or to integrate the great conundrum facing all minority communities.
While most Pakistanis wish to be integrated into British society as Muslims, many find
that they will only be accepted if they assimilate to a completely English way of life.
For some, that is too much of a threat to everything they believe in.
For them, the only option is to return home.
Two thirds of Britain's Muslims have come from South Asia.
Salikana in the northwest frontier province of Pakistan has long links with Britain.
These are Patan tribal people with a warrior tradition.
Their little town grew by serving the nearby army barracks during the days of British India.
The graveyard at Salikana is like a gazette of the world.
People have come back home to be buried from as far afield as Britain and Brunei.
For Patans, tribal identity and honor override most other considerations.
I am very happy to be here, but I am not satisfied with the way I am living here.
I am very happy to be here.
I am very happy to be here.
I am very happy to be here.
I am very happy to be here.
My brother, this one, is getting too old.
He is younger than me, but he looks worn out.
I am glad to see him.
He looks older and he has no beard before.
He has become more religious.
He wasn't before.
He has quite changed.
This is Rahimul Wadood, Fazal's brother.
The brothers have made their choices.
Fazal's sons have no choice.
They must find a way to be British.
But in between, the middle generation has one foot in each country and each culture.
Here is Fazal's son-in-law, Haroon.
The land over there, the graveyard over there, it's like a magnet.
What will happen one day is when we are deceased, right, it will sort of pull us to that land, right, and that's where we will be buried.
When it's rain, it's pouring down.
When it's not rain for six months or nine months and you stay dry,
when you start raining, you rain proper.
It's a beautiful smell that comes out.
You know, when the sun actually hits the rain, it absorbs nice moisture and everything.
It's a really nice smell.
A fine aroma of fresh leaves and just natural soil.
I miss that, to tell you the truth.
The Wadood family are not just typical Pakistani Muslims.
They come from a tribal area, and their traditions and culture maintain a strong and constant pull on their loyalties, as of course does Islam.
When in England, Islam instructs them to abide by British law, as is the case in any country which allows freedom of worship.
Though they may apply the Sharia, Islamic religious law, in private, it is easy to underestimate the compromises Haroon has to make.
It was once said by a member of parliament, in fact, that we were actually, people over here were actually building nations within nations, should I say.
I totally disagree with that, because, take for example myself, I've come from Pakistan, I've come here to live, right?
I will serve this country till the day actually I die, right?
But as you can see, the influence and the impact that it's had on me, it has changed me quite a lot.
If I was, for example, in Pakistan, right, then I would probably be praying five times a day.
I would be a completely different person to what I am here.
Unlike Haroon, the next generation of British Muslims has no other homeland.
Neither Pakistani nor English, Islam gives them their only identity.
They find it unjust that Muslims are not allowed their own state-supported schools, nor, all too often, to take time off work for their festivals.
Since Britain is now their country too, they want Islam recognized as another British religion.
When people understand what Islam is really about, and it's not this evil ideology from the alien east come to overtake the western world,
as soon as people understand that, and understand its beauty and understand the peace that comes from practicing Islam,
there will be no longer this idea of opposition, no longer this idea of threat.
I don't think I'm any different to other British people who have grown up here, who live here, who are British,
and in that way I don't think anybody's done me a favor by allowing me to be here.
I think I have a lot to give to Britain, and I think Britain has a lot to take from me,
and in that way it's nothing to do with obligations and favors.
As Muslims, I feel we have a right to demand for our rights, but there's ways and means of actually going about how we actually demand for those rights.
We don't go around threatening people or having mass demonstrations,
but there's ways and means of getting people representing us in parliament, and getting our views across there so that we can have what we want,
and that way the parliament will cater for our needs, because we are part and parcel of society.
We won't ever try to enforce anything, because that's not Islam.
Islam is submission to the will of God, and unless you submit to the will of God, you're not a Muslim.
So to enforce that ideology on somebody else is not to make them Muslims, it's not to encourage them to practice Islam.
That would be a lie, and that would not be acceptable within Islam.
But in Islam there's no basis for nationalism, and I would describe myself as a Muslim rather than a British Muslim or a Pakistani Muslim.
Because nationalism can be taken as a form of God.
People say, my country, right or wrong, or Jingoism, and that came across in the Gulf War.
So I would not describe myself as a British or as a Pakistani, I would describe myself as a Muslim person.
True Islam indeed allows for no separate national identities, but perhaps now, for the only time in their lives,
these pilgrims to Makkah will not be divided by class, race or nationality.
But when they return home, most of them will face a world in which national allegiance plays an ever greater part.
In India, some question whether Muslims can ever be loyal to the state.
In England, there are those who judge Muslims by their support for the national cricket team.
Yet others will return to countries where, until recently, they were not permitted to express their Muslim identity at all.
I've come to Dagestan in the Caucasus, southwest of Russia.
Pilgrims returning from the Hajj have taken over the airport for a spontaneous Sufi ritual in praise of God.
In communist times, these people might have faced losing their jobs, their liberty, even their lives.
1stpt
I'm not going to let you go.
I'm not going to let you go.
Music
For 70 years, the ban on Islam was enforced, even in this remote region.
Stalin's rule was brutally heavy-handed.
As a Caucasian himself, he knew that these mountain villages have had a long history of resistance to Russian rule.
Their spirit had to be broken.
He said, can you imagine not to be sad if my father is in Wallen, if my relatives are dead,
and if I came to a different place, to people with different language, different nations,
and if I had to survive here, certainly he said that he would become sad.
And how did he survive then? How did he pick up his life?
Allah help.
The interior of Dagestan was too mountainous and too inaccessible for the communists ever to maintain total control over the people.
Islam survived, indeed flourished, in secret seclusion.
The village of Gubden now has 30 mosques.
Even during the Brezhnev years, many of the houses were given Arabic inscriptions.
With the coming of the Gorbachev era, Dagestan's Muslim leadership at last felt able to reassert their religious values and to protest at their treatment.
The whole country, including Dagestan, was ruined by the whole generation.
A thousand miles east, in Central Asia, reasserting an Islamic identity has been an even less peaceful process.
At the end of 1992, the newly independent Republic of Tajikistan exploded into civil war between the Democratic Islamic Alliance and former communist president Nabiyev, seen here.
Trouble had begun that summer.
I am from Kulob, the city. I am a driver. When I was working in the mosque, I used to pray there. At night, they came to the mosque and threw me out.
I was in the fourth year of university. They took me to the mosque and threw me out.
I don't know what happened after that. I am here today.
Far from being fundamentalists on the march, the Tajik religious authorities were quite clear that first they were aiming for a democratic state and only eventually an Islamic constitution.
I think that the Islamic government has been working for 30-50 years.
The Islamic government has been working for 30-50 years.
Our goal is not to have an Islamic government in the future. I am not saying that we don't want to impose laws on the country.
I think that the Islamic government has been working for 30-50 years.
My own impression is that the people of Central Asia do not want yet another political upheaval, but to be allowed to restore their suppressed traditions, reassert their forbidden culture and resurrect their almost but not quite forgotten faith.
So great is the need to renew religious expression that the notices condemning tomb worship as un-Islamic are mostly ignored.
We are at the shrine of Bahauddin Naqshband, one of the greatest saints of Central Asian Islam, whose teachings helped sustain the people of the former Soviet Union during their long night.
Now the Muslims of Central Asia are slowly, tentatively and rather movingly rediscovering their cultural and spiritual inheritance.
It is a pious duty to prepare food for pilgrims to the shrine.
A young boy recites from the Quran. I was astonished. How had the Muslim identity been preserved through 70 years of communist atheism?
I asked where the boy had learned the Quran. His grandfather, I was told, had taught him in secret. And here he sits, the proud grandfather.
Clear evidence of the old man's loyalty to the Soviet state is pinned to his lapel. Yet the Quran was his way of resisting communist control of his mind.
This is the memory I will always keep of Central Asia.
Joining the cosmopolitan congregation in London's principal mosque and looking back at my travels across the Muslim world, I am struck by both the unity and the diversity of Islam. One God, one book, one prophet unite very different peoples.
What I am trying to say is that Islam in all of these communities should develop an indigenous tradition. It sounds a little awkward to the Muslims as a whole that there will be several Islam.
There will be British Islam, American Islam. It sounds rather dangerous. But actually, ultimately, this is what's going to happen. That is, if these societies have to develop roots where they are in their societies of residence, they will have to indigenize a religious tradition that would enable them to live as British Muslims or as German Muslims or as American Muslims.
At the same time, have a satisfying Islamic life.
It's the Islamic life that makes the Ummah a reality. The majority need have no fear, for outside the Islamic world, it is religion, not politics that unites us.
If they can accept that fact and be a little tolerant and understanding of our particular needs, I believe Muslims will come to play their full part in the life of the nation.
I heard the brothers and sisters for positive inspiration. Let me my second.
Thank you, brothers and sisters.