In Britain, Muslims Worry a Delicate Balance May Tip

The Muslim businessmen who tend the East End textile shops went home early. So did the vendors at the Whitechapel Market after police swooped down on suspicious garbage bags.

Down the street, a group of Muslim women and children edged nervously past a muscle-bound white youth who was shouting into his cellphone, “Yeah, mate, where I am, everyone looks like an Al Qaeda terrorist!”

Thursday’s attacks at the Liverpool Street Station and three other sites touched off fear in London’s down-at-the-heels eastern districts, where the city’s most recent and poorest immigrants have always settled. With suspicion in the attacks quickly focused on Al Qaeda, Muslims in the area were bracing for a backlash -- and trying to prevent one.

“We hope we can withstand that. I cannot guarantee it, but in our community we are hopeful,” said Abdul Bari, director of the East London Muslim Center.

A sign taped to the center’s door read, “Bomb Blasts: anyone affected by the blasts or helping those affected please come in.” Bari’s mobile phone rang continually with offers of help or requests for coordinating responses to the crisis.

“The community should be vigilant so that anyone wanting to cause pain and loss from any community should be marginalized,” said Bari, a tall, slim man with a graying beard. “With calm, dignity and a little bit of wisdom, we can find a way.”

More than 2 million Muslims live in Britain, making up nearly 4% of the population. London has long welcomed migrants from the Arab world -- be they Persian Gulf Arabs who come temporarily to escape the summer heat of the Middle East in the upscale Edgware Road district, or asylum seekers who have resettled here permanently and engaged in moderate to militant activism against authoritarian governments in their native lands.

Many in the Islamic community here pride themselves on being more integrated into British life than immigrants in other European countries. The Muslim Council of Britain, an umbrella movement of hundreds of smaller organizations, has spoken out in favor of cooperation with police against terrorism.

Since late 2001 though, ambivalence has crept into the relationship.

Muslim leaders who were persuaded by Prime Minister Tony Blair to endorse the American-led attack on Afghanistan found they lost credibility on the street. Muslim activists have recently taken the government to task on a number of issues -- including female clothing and its policy on Kashmir and Chechnya, where Islamic groups are fighting for independence.

Blair’s backing of the Iraq war and his sending troops to the country have also created a strain. The Respect party, an antiwar political splinter group appealing to disaffected Muslims, won electoral victories in East London in May.

After civil war broke out in Lebanon in the 1970s, followed by waves of political repression in the 1980s and 1990s, many Arabs and other Muslims made London their home. Among them were radicals who came to recruit and campaign for their causes in the emigre media.

They raised money and recruited supporters among disaffected Muslim youths, some of whom went off to military training camps in Yemen and Afghanistan and onto battlefields in places such as Bosnia-Herzegovina and Chechnya.

Critics have argued that British willingness to offer asylum has allowed radicals, criminals and terrorists to find haven here, along with innocent Muslim exiles.

Among the recipients of Britain’s hospitality was radical Syrian cleric Sheik Omar Bakri Mohammed. His family has lived off British state benefits since he claimed asylum in Britain 19 years ago. His most recent public appearance was at the head of a 250-strong protest outside the U.S. Embassy in London in May.

According to the right-wing Daily Mail newspaper, the activists praised Osama bin Laden and chanted “Bomb New York” and “Kill George Bush” while burning two U.S. flags. The demonstrators also asserted that Abu Musab Zarqawi, the Iraqi insurgent who boasted of beheading numerous captives -- including British citizens Ken Bigley and Margaret Hassan -- was about to wreak havoc in Britain because of its support for the war. Some in the crowd chanted, “UK, you will pay -- Zarqawi is on his way.”

Until 2001, the British government’s approach was to monitor extremists rather than to shut them down, said Magnus Ransdorp, an anti-terrorism expert at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Bans and arrests would simply drive the groups underground, the thinking went, making it more difficult to control them.

Mahan Abadeen, editor of Terrorism Monitor, published by the Jamestown Foundation, suggests that Britain traditionally let Muslim political activists operate from London because they tended to oppose authoritarian governments in the Middle East.

“Most of their activities have been focused on their governments back home ... therefore their activities interact much more closely with UK foreign policy than UK domestic policy,” he said. Had there been a major terrorist attack in Britain sooner, he said, that “would have forced the UK government to rethink its strategy and maybe constrain the environment of the Islamists to operate.”

The 9/11 attacks prompted Blair’s government to enact tough anti-terrorism legislation. But its change of direction has been opposed by a foreign service known as “the camel corps” for its Arabist sympathies. Blair has also found his hands tied by public hostility to the Iraq war and what is widely perceived here as an erosion of civil liberties.

A law allowing the indefinite detention of those suspected of terrorism was overturned last year by Britain’s Law Lords -- the country’s final court of appeal -- which ruled that it breached human rights legislation.

The Prevention of Terrorism Act was then passed in March after a marathon debate in Parliament, and it brought in a new system of “control orders” -- in effect placing a terrorism suspect under house arrest without judicial process if the home secretary believes it is necessary. In June, Alvaro Gil-Robles, head of Europe’s human rights watchdog, the Council of Europe, said the new control orders also violated basic human rights.

How Thursday’s attacks would change the political climate remained unclear. Islamic organizations rushed to condemn the bombings -- the Muslim Council of Britain, Islamic Forum Europe and the Muslim community in East London all issued statements expressing their shock.

“Our immediate concern is for the injured and bereaved,” said Bari of the East London Muslim Center. “We are appalled and outraged at whoever has done this.”

But many people worried that it would not be enough to prevent a backlash. “It can be easy to make divisions between communities,” said the Rev. Alan Green, an Anglican vicar who has acted as chairman of East London’s Inter-Faith Forum for the last three years. “Although there’s goodwill here, a terrible tragedy like this can make these links very fragile.”

The thought was seconded by Adel Ali, 32, the son of a retired Kuwaiti general who was walking with his parents in Edgware Road, an area of lavish Lebanese restaurants with belly dancers and singers in baggy pants and veils, emigre newspapers, women in swirling robes with hidden faces, and men smoking bagila pipes and drinking thick sweet coffee at cafes.

“We are worried about the people who have lost their families -- that they will see all Arabs as a terrorist group,” Ali said.

“The right Muslims are the peaceful Muslims, not Al Qaeda,” he added. “Al Qaeda does not do what Islam says. We are very upset that this is what happens here, or anywhere.”

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Times staff writer Bettina Boxall contributed to this report.