‘Christ is king’ and Pakistani cricketers are thought suspect, 25 years on
News that Pakistan’s national under-19 cricket team was targeted by a threatening crowd of yobs in the English city of Portsmouth in the mistaken belief they were illegal migrants is a sign of the times.
The post-9/11 world, one in which the dangerous demonisation of Muslims, migrants and foreigners of all kinds has only escalated.
The Portsmouth yobs were stood down by a populist local politician but the threat towards anyone non-Caucasian and non-Christian was implicit. Just days before, masked men purporting to be British “patriots” had congregated at an anti-migrant protest in the port town of Dover shouting “Christ is King”.
Immigration and Islam are galvanising populist sentiment in Britain and mainland Europe. In Germany, the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) has decisively won one state election that could put the far right in a position of executive and legislative power for the first time since the Nazis. The AfD is well placed for two more elections on September 20.
Much of this is stoked by fear – not of terrorism, so much as takeover, what Elon Musk, members of the Trump administration and keyboard warriors call “civilisational erasure”.
The focus on Islam and immigration may seem odd in this moment in time. Muslims make up just 6% of western Europe’s population and illegal immigration is falling, both in Britain and Germany.
And yet it’s of a piece with the way Islam has generally been understood in Europe from the earliest times. In the 12th century, Peter the Venerable, abbot of the Benedictine abbey of Cluny in France, commissioned a Latin translation of the Quran from the English priest Robert of Ketton.
Robert had spent time in Spain, where the Umayyad caliphate had been presiding over a golden period in art, architecture, medicine and learning. His translated Quran was widely distributed among the libraries of Europe, but it’s not clear if it helped close the distance between Islamic and European thought. In Ketton’s translation, the classical verses that deal with subject of divine inspiration of Muhammad were dealt with “not accurately but without misrepresenting Islamic belief” according to a prominent scholar. Christians were also not made aware of the difference between Christ and Muhammad and Muslims’ view of idolatry. For Christians, the Bible derives its significance from Christ, but for Muslims, Muhammad derives his from the Quran. Christians persistently labelled Muslims as Mohammedans, worshippers of Muhammad.
This wasn’t the only misunderstanding but some of this has prompted Elon Musk to warn that Britain is headed for a “reckoning” because it has been open to Muslims. What Mr Musk really said was Britain has allowed free rein to people with convictions “antithetical to Western beliefs”, who will try to “implement their views” there.
In the quarter-century since 9/11, which was perpetrated by 19 hijackers from Muslim countries, the US has only hardened in its belief that the so-called war on terror must be equated with a war on Islam. Disgracefully, there have been attacks on the “fitness” of New York’s Muslim mayor Zohran Mamdani even to attend 25th anniversary of commemorations of 9/11.
Worth remembering that within three weeks of 9/11, it was an immigrant Indian gas station proprietor who was shot dead in Texas by a racist felon. Vasudev Patel’s life, ethnicity, faith and preoccupations had nothing to do with the hijackers but Mark Stroman cast himself as an avenging American patriot bearing down on a “sand nigger”. Funnily, even now, Patel is miscategorised by the US system, a sign perhaps that 25 years on, the requisite lessons are yet to be learnt. Here’s what the Texas Department of Criminal Justice says about Stroman’s victim: “Summary of Incident: On 10/04/2001 in Mesquite, Stroman murdered a 49 year old Middle Eastern male convenience store employee during an attempted robbery.”
