Webloggin » Muslims in Britain’s Northlands

Many, many moons ago, I lived in the North of England. I’d hoped to live in the South, land of Oxford and Cambridge, but fate sent me north and I ended up without any regrets. I discovered during that long-ago sojourn that my much-desired South was more international than the North, in that it had a larger international population and catered more to tourists. The North, in contrast, was solid, old-fashioned English and I, as a lifelong Anglophile, was very appreciative of that fact. The North did, of course, have a foreign population — I was one of those foreigners — but the predominant ethos was British. And yes, there were Muslims, but they were just one group amongst many, distinguished, not by their exotic dress or (in the case of women) veils, but simply by their darker complexions.

That’s changed so much. Courtesy of an LGF post, I present for your viewing delight a BBC Panorama film made about Blackburn, England, one of the old Northern manufacturing towns. One of my very dear friends lived in Blackburn, and a more working-class English rose you couldn’t have found. I’ve lost contact with her, but I do wonder what she and her family, all of whom were still living in Blackburn when last I knew, make of the changes around them:

Incidentally, the veiled women who keep popping up in the above little video remind me of the fact that I’m seeing more and more veiled women in my own hip Marin community. Their increased presence means one of two things: Either (1) that there is a growing Muslim population here or (2) that the Muslim population that already lives here is getting more fundamental in its behavior. Either alternative is worrying to me, not because I have any bones to pick with moderate Muslims freely practicing their religion and lifestyle in a pluralist society, but because a federal employee who is in a position to know told me that Marin is considered one of the hot spots for jihadist Islam in the United States. In this regard, my friend told me that John Walker Lindh, who got radicalized at a local mosque, is not anomalous. And if there are exponentially increasing numbers of Muslims here, and/or increasingly radicalized Muslims, that does not bode well for the tranquility of my community in years to come.

[Discuss this post with Bookworm over at the Bookworm Room...]