The Story of Childhood (30 page)

He last visited Iraq two years ago. It was a relief to see his family. ‘No matter how many poor people there were, everyone was helping each other out, so everyone was happy and sad at the same time. And you saw everyone unite, not like now when everyone's against each other and they're all trying to kidnap children to get money.'

One third of the British Muslim population is under the age of sixteen, and is more likely to grow up in poverty and to leave school without qualifications than average. This is a critical cohort. Many are third generation and negotiating in their daily lives the opposition between Islam and the West that has dominated world politics in recent years. Although research into the attitudes of young British Muslims is minimal, and only beginning to distinguish by faith rather than ethnicity, those working within the community testify that, like Majid, their children have been brought directly to consciousness by events like 9/11, the bombing of Afghanistan, and the war with Iraq.

My interviews with Majid took place before the London bombings of July 2005. Carried out by four young British Muslims, this act of terrorism placed younger members of the community under even sharper scrutiny. After the bombings,
according to the Muslim Safety Forum, the total number of faith-related attacks in the capital rose by 500 per cent compared with the same period the previous year.

Shareefa Fulat is the director of the Muslim Youth Helpline, the country's only support service for young Muslims. Dealing on average with one hundred clients each week, it aims towards the 16–25-year-old age group, although it has taken calls from children as young as twelve.

Fulat says that she did not notice a significant increase in calls after the July bombings. In a sense, the problems that young people bring to MYH are no different from those encountered by their non-Muslim peers – relationship worries relating to family and friends, exam stress, bullying and depression.

But the charity's online discussion forum was frantic with debate following the London attacks. Fulat has seen an increasingly assertive Muslim identity developing amongst the younger generation in the last five years, which she explains can be a powerful tool to combat cultural assumptions about the role of childhood: ‘But it can mean that young Muslims find themselves caught between a traditional community which views most youth issues as taboo, and a mainstream secular society, which fails to provide appropriate support.'

Young people are expected to be deferential to their elders to the extent that they cannot express what they really think. ‘Some have resolved that by turning back to Islam, to find out what it really means rather than accepting their parents' cultural interpretations,' she says. Girls, for example, have discovered that their faith encourages female education. ‘Others have gone in the opposite direction and rejected Islam out of hand.'

Fulat is convinced that this new assertiveness is a direct
response to the political climate: ‘Young people are more conscious of their Muslim identity than ever before. Even if they're not practising, they still identify themselves as Muslim when they wouldn't have done five years ago. There's a sense of victimisation, and a fear that people are going to assume you're a terrorist simply because of your faith.'

This is also the experience of Anjum Anwar, who coordinates the Understanding Islam project across the northwest of England. A post-9/11 initiative, the project works with schoolchildren and teachers, as well as local community organisations, presenting Islam ‘as a body of lived experience'.

‘The youth is much more aware of its own faith,' says Anwar. ‘There is so much anti-Islam feeling across the media and they want to understand why their religion has attracted it. Younger Muslims are investigating Islam, and discovering that it's not the faith itself that preaches violence, but rather that certain people within it do.' Young people are returning to Islam, she says, because they want to be able to challenge the misrepresentations they see.

She finds the media invention of young Muslims as violent jihadists vexing. ‘They're playing a very dangerous game because the general public who don't understand the Islamic faith are influenced by it. They see the youth as dangerous, as causing problems for the security of the country. They think that wherever you have two or three Muslim boys talking they must be planning something.'

It is important to understand that Islam is a monolithic faith, says Anwar. ‘If something happens to a Muslim in Timbuktu it still affects British Muslims. Everybody feels the pain.' She believes that the young people she works with have a genuine sense that Islam is under attack. ‘They are angry. And they are also coming to terms with the need to be the
people Islam wants us to be, rather than just ritualistically praying five times a day. But they need some sort of outlet for this. Now mosques are moving into the twenty-first century and working very closely with schools.'

Anwar describes a generation existing at a complex cultural interface, where every decision – from how to dress in the morning to who to marry – has a Western as well as an Islamic resonance. Young people are reaching for a European Muslim identity, she says. ‘We can't impose the identity of the parents on their children, and we can't expect parents to change overnight. But young people have to forge new identities.'

Anwar suggests that this quest for identity should be supported by schools as well as by older Muslims. ‘The curriculum needs to be widened, because it tends to miss out the contribution made by other civilisations. I know schools which are 100 per cent Muslim, and there the priority must be that they are taught about their own faith, and taught the Arabic language. If you teach a child about his own history you increase self-esteem and knowledge becomes relevant so they work harder.'

For Anwar, the perceived radicalisation of Muslim youth is a welcome development, encouraging dialogue and growth within the community. She is aware that not everyone interprets it so positively. But the Islamophobes have to understand that this generation is firmly embedded in British culture, she says. ‘This is their home. They will protect their home, but they won't give up their faith, and they can still support Manchester United at the same time.'

It is not only Muslim children who have been radicalised by recent world events. In the spring of 2003, in the first days of the invasion of Iraq, this country was witness to a new kind of protest. In the most significant child-led campaign
for a century, schoolchildren as young as ten walked out of their classrooms to attend what were, for most, their first political demonstrations. But they weren't just trotting alongside older activists, or parroting the slogans of their parents. These young people were organising and leading their own protests, leafleting at school gates, recruiting via email networks and cultivating the media.

Adults struggled to identify the root causes of this surge of activism. The younger generation was perceived as apathetic, children as small-visioned and self-interested. Kids cared about whales, recycling and the occasional prisoner of conscience. Adolescent idealism was as much about the self-definition and challenge of proclaiming one's vegetarianism as it was about genuine belief. It was easily dismissed as a short-lived trendification of protest, fuelled by mass hysteria and the lure of legitimised misbehaviour.

On Thursday, 20 March 2003, the country awoke to the news that Operation Iraqi Freedom had begun. I spent the day in London's Parliament Square, reporting on the school walk-outs for the
Guardian
newspaper. By late afternoon, several thousand young people had amassed there. I spoke to Muslims and Christians, public school rebels and – granted fewer – working-class kids, a fair number of chancers, and many more true believers. There was an adult presence too, but they certainly weren't taking the lead. Many of those I interviewed had finely tuned critical faculties. Their assessment of news sources and their alertness to propaganda was impressive. These children were sceptical, but not cynical, and mainly well-informed about why they were there.

Over the coming days, the scene was replicated across the UK – 5,000 in Birmingham, 3,000 in Manchester and Edinburgh, 1,000 in Sheffield. Condemned by the police and teaching unions, many of the youngsters who took part were
marked down as truants, with a significant number of absences resulting in suspension or expulsion.

Michael Lavalette is an expert in the sociology of childhood at Liverpool University, with a particular research interest in the study of popular protest. He suggested that this wave of collective action bore many similarities to past youth protests. ‘They all happened in a particular context of general unrest across the country,' he told me. ‘In 1889, 1911, during the 1970s and again in the mid-1980s, over short periods of two to three weeks, large numbers of children walked out of their schools.'

In 1911, for example, at the time of the Great Unrest, a wave of school strikes affected some sixty towns and cities across the country. Students walked out in protest at the brutal corporal punishment then meted out by teachers, and called for free access to education for all. ‘They were affected by the rebellious spirit of the age,' said Lavalette. ‘Many had seen their parents out on strike. They were extremely well organised and quickly established a national set of grievances and demands.'

Lavalette was dubious about the suggestion that the anti-war protests were incited by adult campaigners seeking to bolster their own agenda. ‘With any form of collective action, politicians always like to blame an agitator. It turns everyone there into sheep, and it's incredibly patronising to the children. They may have taken their tactics from adults, but these actions were led by the young people themselves.'

Citizenship education, aimed at ‘improving political literacy and community involvement', became compulsory in the autumn of 2002, the year before those protests. It was suggested at the time that children's new-found engagement was a direct result of these classes. But later research would appear to contradict this. The largest ever survey of pupils'
opinions on their citizenship classes, published three years after their introduction, found that, while most enjoyed the subject, 67 per cent of students questioned said that they remained uninterested in politics.

This was inevitably construed as further confirmation of young people's apathy. But a less cursory examination of the results reveals another dimension. What the survey actually showed was that young people continued to mistrust politicians and had minimal interest in participating in conventional politics. But this did not translate into apathy.

Although the majority of students in all year groups said that they did not support any party, less conventional forms of participation were far more popular. More than half had taken part in a range of political activities, including signing petitions, attending public meetings or taking part in demonstrations. Seventy-five per cent of Year 12 children indicated that they intended to vote in the future, and 68 per cent read a national newspaper, while a fifth used the Internet to look up current affairs.

Perhaps the disparity between interest in world events and interest in conventional politics comes down to language. The very mention of ‘politics' puts off many young people. It is worth noting that
Newsround
, consistently the most watched terrestrial children's programme, seldom uses the P-word or reports on the day-to-day running of Parliament, concentrating instead on single issues.

Kierra Box was seventeen at the time of the anti-war protests in 2003. Along with two friends, all pupils at a north London comprehensive school, she organised Hands Up For Peace, an Internet-based campaign which invited children across the country to decorate a single handprint with their name, age and a message of peace. On the day that the war began, they planted some of the 2,500 hands they had received
on sticks in the grass of Parliament Square. The organisation has since re-invented itself as Hands Up, and continues to support and connect young activists.

Box, now studying English and history at university, was never convinced that citizenship classes were contributing to young people's political awareness. ‘The educational establishment pushes you all the time: “You should be interested in having debates about sex, about drugs, because that's what we need you to be aware of. You must be informed about these young people's issues.” But then there was the firemen's strike, the teachers' pay dispute, tuition fees and the war, all of which were far more relevant to our lives. Yet we were told to ignore all of that, and just concentrate on not getting pregnant, not taking an overdose and getting a job with good prospects.'

The war provided unusual public exposure for youth activism, she says, as did the G8 protests in July of 2005. ‘There's still of lot of interest and passion, but it's gone underground again, because there generally isn't space in mainstream politics for young people to get involved. The war made them realise that they could set up organisations on their own. They're still doing it, but now on a local level. It's there all the time, but there isn't the same media interest now.'

Recently, through Hands Up, Box has come across a group of children who campaigned to save a bus route that took them to school, and another who had successfully fought the deportation of a refugee family. ‘With G8, again it was seen as coming from nowhere. But people don't get politicised in a week before a big event, or because pop stars tell them to. They start out thinking locally, and then when the chance comes to affect something globally they take it.'