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willing to accept anybody else because we have the same ideas, same thoughts. Each one of us will maybe play a different role from the other, but all collectively to gain a wider picture. Once I get my passport back, I definitely see myself, inshallah , not out of pride, not out of arrogance, not out of ambition, but rather because I believe I have the ability – I pray to Allah to give me more ability – to become a face for Islam in the future, something Muslims have been lacking for a very long time.’
    His answer put still greater distance between us. My small sense of being Muslim, gained so haphazardly over the years, was not enough to enter into the faith that Butt had found.
    Now, travelling back from Leeds to London, I realised how short I was on Islam. I knew that the young men I had met in Beeston, and Butt, felt neither British nor Pakistani, that they had rejected the migration of their parents, that as Muslims they felt free of these things. But for me, with my small cultural idea of what it meant to be Muslim and no notion of the Book and the Traditions, the completeness of Islam, it was impossible to understand the extra-national identity that Beeston’s youth and Butt had adopted. I wouldn’t have been able to see how it might take the place of nationality. My personal relationship with the faith was a great negative space. And despite this, I was also somehow still Muslim.
    So, with only an intimation of their aggression; their detachment and disturbance; and some sense that Islam had filled the vacuum that other failed identities had left, I came back to London and wrote my article. It was an accumulation of my experience with radical Islam in Britain. I wrote that the British second-generation Pakistani, because of his particular estrangement, the failure of identity on so many fronts, had become the genus of Islamic extremism in Britain. The article appeared on the cover of a British political magazine alongside my interview with Hassan Butt and, proud to have written my first cover story, I sent it to my father.
    I received a letter in response, the first he’d ever written to me. But as I read it, my excitement turned quickly to hurt and defensiveness. He accused me of prejudice, of lacking even ‘superficial knowledge of the Pakistani ethos’, and blackening his name:
    Islamic extremism is poisonous, as is that of the IRA and the RSS [a Hindu nationalist party]. The reason why it is on the rise is because of Palestine and Iraq. If Hindus were bombed, occupied and humiliated you may find the same reaction . . . By projecting yourself as an ‘Indian Pakistani’ you are giving this insulting propaganda credibility as if it is from one who knows it all.
    Cricket, that old dress rehearsal for war on the sub-continent, came up: ‘Look at the way the Lahore crowd behaved after losing a Test match and compare that to the “Lala crowds” in Delhi. It seems the Hindu inferiority complex is visceral.’ A lala was a merchant, and here my father articulated prejudices of his own, textbook prejudices in Pakistan, of Hindus as sly shop-owners, smaller, weaker, darker and more cowardly than Muslims. ‘Oh, I’m so glad you weren’t a little black Hindu,’ my half-sister would laugh, or ‘I hate fucking Hindus, man,’ my half-brother once said. Pakistanis, for the most part converts from Hinduism to Islam, lived with a historical fiction that they were descendants of people from Persia, Afghanistan and elsewhere, who once ruled Hindu India.
    I wasn’t sure which side my father placed me on when he wrote his letter, whether he thought of me as one of them or, worse, as a traitor he had spawned. He did say, ‘Do you really think you’re doing the Taseer name a service by spreading this kind of invidious anti-Muslim propaganda?’ To me, that was the most interesting aspect of the letter: my father, who drank Scotch every evening, never fasted or prayed, even ate pork, and once said, ‘It was only