In divided spots, local bonds can help

By B.C.

A FEW years ago, I asked a Muslim, Kashmiri-born politican who had won prominence in Britain about his view on the government's latest plans for combating extremism and promoting social cohesion. "Well, I look at this as a Yorkshireman," he replied, with only a hint of irony. "We Yorkshire folk never like it when Londoners tell us what to do."

Common loyalty to a city or a region, transcending religious, ethnic or ideological affiliations, often produces memorable vignettes. Earlier this year, television cameras homed in on a hijab-wearing teenage girl, cheering wildly as the footballers of Bradford City, her home team, played an away game against a rival cub. Interviewed afterwards, she was torn between defensive loyalty to her native Bradford, one of the most heavily Muslim cities in the north of England, and embarrassment over being singled out. One day, perhaps, the serried ranks of Bradford fans will include lots more hijab-wearing women (that being the standard female attire in certain parts of the city) chanting enjoyable insults to rival cities and teams, in unison with rowdy men of all persuasions.

Or take a more current example, again from northern England. In Bolton, another city with a large Muslim population, residents of all religions and races have felt a surge of nativist pride in the boxing feats of Amir Khan, a pugilist of Muslim Pakistani origin who loves to wave the British flag even though he has spent a lot of time recently in America.

Fostering local loyalties, as a counterweight to group prejudice, is more than a game. Over the past two weekends, the xenophobes of the English Defence League have tried to disrupt the peace of one British city after another by staging marches whose aims include driving a wedge between "white" and Muslim residents. There are also Islamic extremists who have a similar purpose, including the perpetrators of the murderous attack on a soldier in London on May 22nd. In most places, the response has been an appeal to local pride, urging people of all religions and ethnicities to say: "We will not let these outsiders spoil the atmosphere in our city..."

That tactic seemed to work well in the cathedral city of York, a more genteel place than Bradford, on May 27th, when a small EDL protest outside a mosque was defused after people of all backgrounds closed ranks to help preserve the peace; and the would-be troublemakers accepted an invitation to a mosque to sample some tea and cakes. After the Islamist bomb attacks on London's transport system in July 2005, the city hall and some big firms mounted campaigns to foster pride in being a Londoner, regardless of creed or colour. It helped that the victims of the bombings were drawn from various ethnicities and included some Muslims.

Luton, a city blighted by industrial decline on the northern edge of London, is a less obvious focus for civic pride than York, London or even Bradford. But churches, mosques and other faith and community groups have come together to support the idea of "Luton in Harmony"—a city distinguished, if not by much else, by the ability of its different cultures to rub along together. Perhaps there are echoes here of the ingenious slogan devised in the 1960s for the American city of Atlanta, which was declared to be "too busy to hate".

But there is no guarantee that common local loyalties will always work as a defuser of tension. Ask anyone who has lived through the early stages of a broad conflict between groups, be they confessional, ethnic or ideological. As tension escalates and spreads, individuals and families find themselves continuously making and remaking a calculation about their immediate neighbours: are they fellow burghers with whom I share a common local pride, and a common duty to promote the interests of our town, or are they adversaries because they belong to a group which is antagonistic, on many fronts, to my own?

As conflict billowed through Nothern Ireland in the 1970s or the Balkans in the 1990s, previously smooth inter-communal relationships broke down in one place after another because broad hostility between groups gradually trumped whatever remained of local solidarity or local habits of neighbourly behaviour. People began to think of themselves first as Protestants or Catholics, or as Serbs, Croats or Muslims, rather than inhabitants of a town or region in which all groups had a legitimate stake. When peace comes, that process goes into partial reverse, but only slowly.

To take another even more current example. The Turkish cities, starting with Istanbul, where disorder has raged in recent days are all locations which have historically inspired great civic pride, and in eras past this urban loyalty could sometimes transcend religious and other social divisions. The Turkish word "Istanbullu" and the Greek equivalent "Politis"—both meaning a resident of the city on the Bosphorus—have exactly the same connotations: urban sophistication, a feeling for past glories tinged with melancholy. But common attachment to a single urban space has not able to prevent previously cosmopolitan Mediterrean cities such as Alexandria or Izmir from turning into mono-ethnic, mono-religious ones; nor does it instantly solve the problem of co-existence between devout Sunni Muslims and everybody else.

Back to the north of England for a second. I asked a well-informed Muslim Bradfordian about the atmosphere in her city in recent days, with stories of "Islamophobic" incidents being reported up and down the country. "It's in the balance," she told me. People she knew were torn between loyalty to the whole city and a feeling that they should stick to their own mainly Muslim neighbourhoods where they felt safer. As of now, of course, there seems not the slightest risk of Britain's divided cities sliding into inter-communal conflict comparable to Bosnia or Northern Ireland. But pride in "our city" may need to be carefully fostered to make sure that remains the case.