LONDON: The M1, down which three of the suicide bombers drove on their final journey, is famous for its grey monotony. But its dullness is in contrast to the diversity of the Muslim communities for which it is the backbone. Retracing their route in reverse from London, to Luton, Leicester, Derby and Leeds, is to travel through Muslim Britain. British Muslims are experiencing the crisis wrought by the attacks in vastly different ways, and the most pronounced of those is the chasm between the young and old.

Saleem Tayyab had just finished in the kitchen on Tuesday evening when he heard that the bombs were detonated by British Muslims. A 33-year-old father of four, he is moderate, hard-working, urbane. Thirty-one years ago, his father founded Tayyabs on a street behind the East London Mosque, barely 500 metres from the Aldgate bomb. The garment workers who first ate their freshly cooked kebabs are long gone but the Tayyabs’ family business has thrived.

Saleem is shocked and apologetic but confident that “everybody” in the country “knows the difference between mainstream Muslims and organisations that are responsible” for the terrorism. Like many older Muslims, he speaks of children being “brainwashed”. “They can’t sit at home and decide to blow themselves up. It’s a larger story than that,” he insists. Thirty miles up the M1, Luton, the chosen rendezvous for the suicide bombers sweats out the heatwave. Periodic anti-terrorist raids by police have given the town’s 30,000 Muslims an extremist hue. Muhammad Sulaiman, 68, was president of the Central Mosque when the Syrian-born cleric Omar Bakri Mohammed spoke there a couple of years ago. When they heard his message they unplugged his PA and manhandled him off the premises. But his jihadist group al-Muhajiroun and its successors continue to hand out leaflets, campaigning and recruiting on the streets nearby.

The mosque leaders insist there are barely half a dozen extremists in Luton and all are banned from the town’s 12 mosques. “The police are well aware of these guys,” says Qurban Hussain, deputy leader of the borough council. A Liberal Democrat candidate in this year’s general election, Mr Hussain is sharply conscious of the extremists: he received death threats for standing for a “western” political party in the May elections, even though it was the anti-war Lib Dems.

Like every older Muslim encountered along the M1, Mr Hussain emphatically denounces the suicide bombers. He speaks of an intelligence failure but is happy to scrutinise his own community. “This is another tragedy: the generation gap between young and old in the ethnic minorities is much greater than in the indigenous population. Our elder generation were law-abiding and hardworking. Where they failed was they put all their God-given hours into work and didn’t spend time with their children. When these people are brainwashed, they are brainwashed to an extent that they don’t talk to their parents.”

As the dome of the Masjid Umar sparkles in the evening sunshine, 100 children gather for Islamic classes on the generous playing fields of Crown Hills Community College in Leicester. “Twinkle twinkle little star,” four five-year-old girls in white jilbab and hijab sing. “Allah created you, and He created me/In truth and so perfectly.” They finish with prayers for the victims of the London bombs.

Driven to their classes by parents in VW Passats, these children study Arabic and the holy Quran five evenings a week. “We want them to be proud Muslims and proud British citizens,” says Ibrahim Mogra, their gentle, engaging teacher, also a committee member of the Muslim Council of Britain.

“This is our country, this is home. There is no reason for them to feel second-class or alien. If you ask them who they are, they would say Muslim and I think that’s right. As a person of faith, for me, God comes before everything. But there is no contradiction. I’m Muslim, I’m British, I’m Asian, I’m an imam, I’m a teacher.” After their lessons, young pupils point out double standards in government and media treatment of their faith. Of course the bombs were wrong and destroyed innocent people’s lives, but look at what fuelled it: Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine.

“In Afghanistan people die every single day but that’s never mentioned,” points out Irshad, 14. “Nobody is there to help the people in Palestine.” Arshad, also 14, finishes the argument: “It’s not a war against terrorism, it’s a war against Islam. That’s how some people see it.” Past old garment factories being converted into designer flats, evening prayers at the shiny modern Masjid Umar mosque brings working-class Muslims on to the streets. It is wearily routine for reporters to rush to mosques whenever there are outbreaks of extremism. As Mo, a young Muslim who works at a BT call centre, points out, reporters didn’t swarm around Catholic churches whenever the IRA blew someone up.

Mo buys me a soft drink from the local kebab shop. “Stay here, I’ve got something to show you.” He returns with a sheet of typed paper that his sister stuck to her bedroom wall. “Former heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali visited the remains of the World Trade Centre,” it reads. “When reporters asked how he felt about suspects sharing his Islamic faith, Ali responded pleasantly, ‘How do you feel about Hitler sharing yours?’ Ever wondered ... why a nun can be covered from head to toe and she’s respected for devoting herself to God, but when a Muslimah does that, she’s considered oppressed?”

Despite his wispy blonde beard, Hussain, 27, still looks better suited to Scott, his former name. “I wouldn’t be surprised if the bombs were planted by MI5,” he says, a conspiracy theory suggested by more than one young Muslim milling around the mosque. Yet even the most unapologetic appear a million miles from being potential bombers. Hussain’s white non-Muslim family does not understand his conversion. “I let them have their opinions and agree to differ,” he says. In Derby, 12 miles off the M1, Yahya Akhter, a local bookseller, says al-Muhajiroun “are very active” at the nearby Jamia mosque, haranguing and handing out leaflets outside. The group were accused of recruiting Derby resident Omar Khan Sharif, who was found dead after attempting a suicide bombing in Israel two years ago in which four people died. Mr Akhter sells Islamic books and shalwar kameez. The 38-year-old, who came to Britain from Kashmir 10 years ago, believes the generation gap is based on the language barrier between English- speaking young Muslims and their elders.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service

THE beaches for all the beautification exercises and drills that are carried out in Karachi, in the domain of officialdom, remain unsafe. They remain as unsafe as ever and deadly as the monsoon tides hurl defiant waves taking innocent human lives.

One sounds pessimistic and doubtful because the beaches of Karachi, Hawkesbay, Sandspit and Clifton for decades now have had the reputation of being risky propositions. For many years, local administrations, including the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation that we had, had been issuing warnings to a nonchalant public to stay away from the sea, especially when the tide was high. The end result: Karachi’s holidaying crowds go into the sea, play with the waves, and lose their lives. That’s it.

Lives have continued to be lost, and this time, once again, a young man lost his life trying to rescue others. The promise that a “flag system introduced for safety of beachgoers” brings no cheer. We’ll talk of the orange-coloured flags in a while. First, the selfless man who died trying to save others.

Omar Mughni, 24, died on Wednesday while trying to save the life of some children whom he saw trapped in the water, and drifting to death. Watching them from the shore, he sprang into action, and reports indicate that he succeeded in his attempt, but lost his own life in the process. One is reminded here of a woman journalist who also died while trying to save the life of someone else. In fact, from time to time, stories of this kind of selfless heroic behaviour have surfaced, making one contemplate three points: to marvel at the courage of individuals who plunge into troubled waters to save dying people; and to be disappointed and even pained at the thought that as a society, we have failed to stop people from going into the sea, and at the same time be angry that successive local administrations have failed to deter effectively people from swimming or walking in deep waters.

The reason why this failure has taken place is that perhaps the local administration itself has not been seized of the critical significance of this repeated loss of human life, every summer in particular. The answer possibly does not lie only in physical steps to be taken at the beach, but in creating awareness among the people. It is an uphill task and a long process. Every year, like this case, there are drowning tragedies and there a high profile response from media and officialdom. End of the story, really?  

But not so evidently for those families whose members perish this way, failing to overcome waves and their unbending fury. I have read, in the case of Omar Mughni, his family members and friends waited all the night and the next day in suspense, agony and tears. Not easy to even imagine what they underwent.

The incident reportedly took place at a point near Kanupp. Omar saw some people (one report says it was one individual) falling into the sea while fishing. He jumped into the sea to save their lives. One of the two, whom Omar wanted to rescue, died and his body was recovered after three hours. However, Omar went missing to be recovered only after some 30 hours. His father, Col (retd) Mughni, was brave when he said that he was proud that his son had died as a martyr, while trying to save human life.

It took the effort of 150 divers and a helicopter of the coast guards to recover Omar’s body from one of the underwater “caves”, and one cannot imagine the anxiety of his family members and friends who reportedly stayed at the site. “Omar’s body wasn’t decomposed, and still retained certain freshness,” disclose his family friends. Is this an attribute of the higher values that men live and die for?

Let me mention here another story that has appeared in an English daily which says that 25 cases of missing children are reported daily along the beaches of Karachi. This is what the life guards have said.

It is worth contemplating what they have said: “More than 1.5 million picnickers visit beaches with their families, and take little care of their children when they are swimming and jogging. Everyday our life guards find missing children and hand them over to their parents. A majority of such cases are reported at Seaview, where families visit at night.”

It is said that 20 life guards are stationed at the Seaview beach, whose job is to find missing children, and extend safety to the holidaying crowds. Cases of missing children increase at weekends, and in such instances when the guards cannot trace out the relevant families, the kids are handed over to the police. The carelessness of families vizaviz their children when they visit public places is a quietly growing, even unnoticed phenomenon, remarked a housewife, who believes that both parents are so busy enjoying that they forget their responsibility towards their children.

Taking into account the measures that the administration and authority take on any given issue and the collective response that public gives to it, there is reason to believe that the safety of our beaches is not yet in sight. Admittedly the city government has introduced the system of hoisting orange flags with ERC inscribed on them. These flags will mean that the watch and ward service with lifeguards was available up to the point of the flags along the beaches. After that particular point the beach is unsafe. At present, there are 46 lifeguards available from 9am to 7.30pm for the 29km-long beach, which is obviously insufficient. At least 50 more guards are required. There is also a shortage of other essential items for the Emergency Relief Centres. Interestingly, there is no landline available to it instead there is a cellphone facility. There is also lacking necessary equipment like motorboats, diving kits, lifejackets etc. And, of course, there is also lacking public compliance when it comes to listening to the advice and the instructions lifeguards give them. And there are jurisdiction question marks about the beach, which makes one ask “whose beach is it, anyway?”

The state of our beaches here and the dangerous propositions they have been for as long as I can remember them are also a manifestation of the appalling state of domestic tourism. If domestic tourism had been provided with an infrastructure to be born, and flourish, safe beaches would have come quite naturally, observed one well-travelled individual. He avoids the local beaches. Others, like myself, feel discouraged to out all that distance, to what are really uncomfortable propositions if the purpose is recreation and relaxation.

With the tragic loss of life of two young men, one is reminded of the fact that what begins as a holiday may end in death and the beach safety is still nowhere in sight.