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Tuesday 17 April 2001

Why Asians have adopted this culture of violence

By Theodore Dalrymple

SUNDAY night's riot in Bradford came early in the British rioting season, the weather being not yet fine or hot enough for everyone to join in and express his outrage at the injustice of the world. There is nothing quite like rain, or even the mere possibility of rain, to soothe the savage breast.

In Bradford, Asian youths clashed with white youths, and shops and cars were damaged or destroyed. The riot might at first sight indicate an inflamed state of race relations. Actually, the situation is much more nuanced: the riots demonstrate that Asian youth is becoming more anglicised, in the worst possible sense. They now belong to the primitive "who you looking at?" culture of the young natives, a culture in which egos are as prickly as consciences are weak.

A decade ago, for example, there were hardly any convicts of Asian origin in the prison in which I work. The few that there were had generally committed VAT fraud in their middle age, or some such crime that hardly causes old ladies to tremble as they walk down the street or wonder whether they should go out at all.

In the past 10 years, however, I have noticed a startling shift. Asian convicts now abound, all young men, and they have committed just the same kind of crimes as their white and black equivalents. They wield machetes in places where there is hardly a blade of grass to be seen; they carry baseball bats but do not even know what a baseball looks like. They have become violent, aggressive, drunken and drug-addicted. As one might expect, their educational standards are falling: they are now almost as ignorant and uncultured as their white neighbours.

There are other indications, too, that they fit increasingly well into modern British youth culture. The young men tattoo themselves, though their complexions are not really suited to this "art"; they adopt the same fashions, they eat the same fast food in the street, they listen to the same music, they wear the same ironmongery in their faces, they have a gold front tooth to demonstrate that they are successfully evil and not to be trifled with, they walk with the same vulpine lope, they shave their heads in the same way. I asked one young Asian man why he adopted all these repellent fashions.

"I want to look stupid," he replied. "I want to look aggressive and violent. I want people to cross the road when they see me." At first, it was only the young men who adopted British popular youth culture. But the girls are now beginning to join in as well. Illegitimacy among them - unheard of a few years ago - is on the rise. More unmarried Asian girls are turning to a life of abandonment by the fathers of their children. They are attracted by the same kind of primitive masculinity as their white and black peers, and fail just like them to learn by experience.

In short, the same culture of radical individualism, untempered by any appreciation of its consequences or of social duty, is making inroads into the Asian population of this country. There is another striking fact about this development: it has gone far further among the Muslims than among the Sikhs and the Hindus. For example, the overwhelming majority of Asian prisoners - much in excess of their proportion in the Asian population as a whole - is Muslim. It is they who take the heroin, form gangs and commit most of the violence.

Why should this be? The Muslim parents are themselves law-abiding. They give their children no encouragement, quite the contrary, to participate in British popular youth culture, which they rightly fear and despise. They have only to look around them at the mass illegitimacy and complete absence of self-respect in the native population for their natural conservatism to be reinforced.

The answer, I think, is that their code is much more rigid than that of the Sikhs and the Hindus. Take the question of arranged marriage: very often among the Muslims a marriage is arranged at birth, often to a cousin, and the parents of the bride or groom regard the fulfilment of the promise made at birth as a matter of honour so important that they would quite literally rather see their child dead than refuse to marry the chosen spouse. Preserving one's reputation in the community matters more to them than anything else. The life, let alone the happiness, of the child is unimportant by comparison.

Among Sikhs and Hindus in this country, the arranged marriage is much less rigidly imposed, and provided that both parties agree with the system as a whole, it is extremely successful. Brides-to-be may be shown several prospective grooms, more or less at the same level of accomplishment as themselves. They have the right of veto: and thus a subtle blend of personal preference and social obligation makes the system work.

When a rigid code of conduct breaks down, it breaks down completely, and results in total demoralisation. That is what has happened to the British working class, much of which struggled for so many years for respectability in the face of enormously difficult circumstances. Liberated from social pressure to conform to certain standards, and told that being yourself - that is to say, doing what you please when you please - is the highest good to which man can aspire, it was left completely without cultural or moral bearings. The results have been catastrophic.

The young Muslims are experiencing the same disorientation, a few years later. This does not mean that they will get on well with their similarly demoralised white neighbours and peers: on the contrary, race hate will give both groups the semblance of a raison d'etre.

And no doubt there will be a fundamentalist backlash as some among the Muslims realise what a primrose path to damnation anglicisation is. But this does not alter the fact that the white working class and the Muslim youth have much in common. At the root of the clashes in Bradford is modern popular youth culture, which is itself the product of 1960s "liberation".