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I was minutes away from stepping on a train at Kings Cross when a bomb ripped through the station on the morning of July 7, 2005, killing 56 people.
At the time, I lived in a building off Pentonville Road, one of several bustling roads adjacent to Kings Cross. The station had been cordoned off and manned by dozens of Transport for London officers. I stood among the crowd of confused people gathered as rumours flew of an explosion taking place underground due to a power surge on the London Underground power grid.
It was hours before the explosions were confirmed as terrorist attacks. CCTV footage later revealed that four men carrying large backpacks had arrived in London by train at about 8:30 that morning. They split up and went in different directions through London’s Underground subway system. Twenty minutes later, three trains and a bus blew up.
It felt eerie, almost surreal to live and work in central London after that. I recall one photo a week after the attacks splashed across the front page of The Independent. Shahara Islam, a 20-year-old British Muslim had died on the number 30 bus at Tavistock Square as she made her way to work as a bank teller in north London. It hit me at that moment: The callous bombers who felt justified killing ordinary people on their way to work to appease some warped version of Islam really didn’t care one way or another who would be hit. Muslim or non-Muslim, it made no difference. We were all the enemy.
I had an opportunity to get an insight into the motivations of the bombers later that month. Through a covert arrangement by the astute editor of The Muslim News, a London-based newspaper I used to freelance for, I was granted an exclusive interview with Hasina Patel, the wife of Mohammad Sidique Khan, the suspected ringleader of the attacks. This was beyond unprecedented in terms of a journalistic scoop — no British journalist had been granted access to any of the bombers families prior to this.
Mohammad and Hasina lived in Dewsbury, a small town cushioned in the leafy hills of West Yorkshire, about four hours north of London. When I arrived by train, I planned to stay for a few days with a friend before interviewing the family. I wanted to scope out the town, get reaction from its residents to the London bombings and interview friends of Mohammad. On my last day, I showed up at the doorstep of their home.
Hasina was waiting for me, accompanied by her mother and one-year-old daughter Maryam. She had a steely expression in her eyes but maintained a cool and composed exterior. We spoke for nearly one hour. How did it feel, I asked, finding out that 57 people had lost their lives just a week before, at the hands of an attack her husband was suspected of meticulously coordinating? Did she have any inkling at all of his plans?
It was so hard to imagine that the husband of this seemingly ordinary woman and father of the sweet baby babbling softly in front of me was a cold-blooded killer.
In her responses, Hasina was as candid as she was ambiguous. She was also in denial. “I never knew his friends or the others [fellow bombers Hasib Hussein and Shehzad Tanweer],” she told me. When I pressed her about the CCTV camera footage that clearly depicted her husband’s face, she said simply in a thick Yorkshire accent: “That’s not proof, is it?”
What struck me was the casual manner in which she spoke about the racism she endured living in Dewsbury. “Racism is just a part of every day life,” she said. “You’re always an outsider.” It made me wonder whether Mohammad had also faced such discrimination and whether it, in his mind, justified committing the attacks. It also made me realize just how far apart our experiences had been — Hasina, born and brought up in Dewsbury — and me, born and raised in Toronto. I had never felt socially excluded in the way Hasina described.
My interview with her was never published. Just before I left their home, one of Hasina’s brothers arrived at the door, angrily questioning my motives. I left in a hurry amidst threats and a shouting match between him and other family members and jumped back on the next train to London. For days afterwards, the editor of The Muslim News was subjected to death threats from Hasina’s brother and threats to sue the monthly newspaper. He wearily succumbed.
It dawned on me after the interview just how much the Patels distrusted the media. But I knew they weren’t alone. It was a sentiment I came across over and over when reporting on stories relating to Muslims living in the U.K. Unlike Canada, Britain has more than a few mainstream newspapers that brazenly demonize Muslims and immigrants.
Nonetheless, Canada has since experienced its share of homegrown radicalism. While the number of homegrown extremists — and general Muslim animosity towards the government and news media is far from that in the U.K., it would be naive to think that we would be immune to falling into that kind of toxic climate.
With the introduction of Quebec’s charter of values and reckless policies like Bill C-51, Canada is treading into dangerous territory. Prime Minister Stephen Harper is falling into the same trap the British government is in tackling extremism on its own turf. In his bid to make Canada “safer”, Harper’s calls to remove basic civil liberties is only leading to Muslims being subjected to unprecedented scrutiny and seriously undermining Canada’s global reputation for inclusivity.
Why not genuinely collaborate with Muslims instead to fight a common enemy? As the former U.K. Conservative Party co-chair Sayeeda Warsi put it, “Remember Prime Minister: Muslims hate ISIS too.”
Image: Flickr/Neha Viswanathan
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