Two Bradford community leaders told how their city had learnt lessons from the Madrid train bombings of 2004, when they addressed a Greencoat Forum in the London centre of Initiatives of Change, 16 September 2008. The Madrid bombings led Bradford to strengthen its links between the city’s Muslim and non-Muslim communities.
Bradford has one of the highest proportions of Muslims in any UK city. It has experienced street riots but it is also a pioneer in strengthening interfaith relations.
Over 80 mosques serve 80,000 Muslims, said Ishtiaq Ahmed, from the Executive of the Bradford Council of Mosques and a leading spokesperson for the Bradford Muslim community. ‘The first mosque was established in a terraced house back in 1958,’ he said. Now there were mosques ‘in old houses, warehouses and abandoned factories, disused schools and churches’.
He was joined by Dr Philip Lewis, a specialist on Christian-Muslim relations as the advisor to the Bishop of Bradford on interfaith issues, and a visiting lecturer at Bradford University’s Department of Peace Studies.
Following the Madrid terrorist attack, Bradford had developed a civic network capable of responding to such an atrocity, Lewis said. The statesman-like intervention of the Mayor of Madrid, to prevent a backlash against local Moroccans, made Bradford’s community leaders question their own community structures. ‘We asked ourselves, did we have a similar level of political leadership?’ Madrid made them realise the need for ‘robust, cross-cutting, associational links—trade unionists, educationalists, faith leaders that could build a civic resilience to absorb that kind of shock.’
‘We identified five sectors,’ Lewis said—the business and education communities, the voluntary sector, local media and the different faith communities. ‘We brought each sector together to ask them: “If there was an atrocity in Britain, how would that play out in our city? How would we ensure tensions are ameliorated?”’
The discussions involved young Muslim professionals and proved particularly timely: they took place just one year before the 7/7 bombings in London. Bradford was in a position to immediately allay local fears.
The majority of Bradford’s Muslims came from Pakistan, India and Bangladesh—around 65,000 from Pakistan alone, Ahmed said. He had arrived from Pakistan in 1967, aged 10. After five decades, their roots are strong: ‘There are now Muslim families that are into their fourth and fifth generations,’ he said—people born and educated in Bradford who now had children and grandchildren. ‘We’re no longer talking about immigrants. These people have Yorkshire accents and are part of the fabric of Bradford life.’
The geography of Bradford, however, remains one of ‘white flight’ and stubborn segregation. ‘It means inner-city schools can be predominantly or even 100 per cent Muslim.’ This led to a lack of opportunities for social interaction. Bradford’s textiles factories and foundries had once been important places for people of different faiths to work and socialise together. With their demise, there was now a challenge for different faith leaders to create new safe spaces to encounter each other. ‘How do we encourage, enable and empower communities to be able to live beside each other and to be true neighbours?’ He added: ‘Believe me, ordinary people at a grass roots level want to live together, want to talk together. They simply need opportunities, a little enabling and empowering.’
One answer has been to set up community-level structures that bring people together. The Bradford Council of Mosques was founded in 1980, to encourage dialogue within the Muslim community and to provide Muslim representation in mainstream civil affairs. Its success played no small part in establishing the London-based Muslim Council of Britain.
Yet small-scale structures were just as important, Ahmed said. ‘We run an interfaith prayer group that’s open to all.’ They prayed and ate together and discussed issues that concern the whole community. ‘These people are proud of their identity and proud of their faith yet find a space to get together of their own free will.’
Bradford Council of Mosques had worked hard to encourage mosques to open their doors to different faiths. ‘Islam is not a private, limited company,’ Ahmed said. ‘There are no shares in it. It’s a universal, public company and our mosques should reflect that. Anyone should be able to walk into a mosque and, if they want to pray, they should be able to.’
The award-winning Madni Jamia Mosque, for instance, runs open days and exhibitions. ‘Hundreds of visitors from other faiths have visited the Mosque. If 80 mosques can follow it, the image, position and the relationship of Muslim communities would undergo radical change. When people come and talk together, eat and pray together and all in each other’s places of worship—well, there’s no substitute for that.’
Philip Lewis agreed. He came to Bradford in 1985, as the Bishop’s interfaith advisor, after six years working at a Christian study centre in Pakistan. Unlike political parties, churches ‘are there for the long haul’, he said, and the clergy have long played an important role in opening dialogue between different faiths. The social role of the Bishop can be especially important during a crisis, ‘whether it’s the Rushdie affair or street riots’, as a person who can initiate dialogue between community groups. ‘If we’re to live well in our cities, with religious and ethnic diversity, we have to multiply those safe spaces where we can meet, interact and talk frankly to each other,’ Lewis said. And Bradford’s civic network had enabled communities to come up with their own strategies that were right for Bradford.
They had also pioneered an inter-cultural leadership course for young professionals of different faiths. ‘The four-day course in the Dales taps into the energy of the new generation, offering a safe space for them to ask all the hard questions about each other’s religions,’ Lewis said. It covered religious literacy, conflict resolution, leadership, and media skills. It was developing trust and friendship across religious and ethnic divides among young people in their twenties. ‘After six years of running the courses twice a year, these young people are popping up in important leadership roles across the city and are proving strong role models for younger people in their communities.’
Another vital group has been Bradford’s religious leaders themselves. Lewis highlighted the ‘profound asymmetries’ in civic duties and experience between clergy and imams. ‘If you are a priest or member of the Christian clergy, it is assumed you will have a public and civic role and you are trained for it. That is seldom the case for imams.’ Bradford was starting to address the imbalance with leadership courses and a new working party of imams and clergy to foster more sustained interaction.
For both Ahmed and Lewis, building and strengthening a civic network is a vital step in any multi-faith community. ‘You need to multiply localised spaces for different people to meet each other,’ Lewis said. ‘You need to know the character of your city too—you have to play with the grain of your institutions to find out the spaces where active collaboration is possible.’
Dr Philip Lewis’s latest book Young, British and Muslim is a positive analysis of the role that young Muslims play in public and national life. (Continuum Books, £12.99)
Esme McAvoy
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