Visiting Bradford

This week I trekked to Bradford to the Grange College to meet a group of fourteen and fifteen year old pupils.

A few months back I had been involved in a documentary called What Muslims Want. It was based on a National Opinion Poll survey of British Muslims in the aftermath of the 7/7 London bombings.

Ten teenagers had written to me after the programme disagreeing with some of the findings. So, I had promised I would come up and talk with them.

There are few direct trains from London. You change from the Intercity Express in Leeds onto a rickety cake tin of a train that rattles the twenty minutes up to Bradford.

My muslim cabbie, talked of how Bradford had, if anything, become more rather than less cut-off from elsewhere. He talked of how easily British Pakistanis in particular could move into the city suburbs without notice. So little taxi work is there that he came back again an hour and a half later to pick me up.

The college buildings are recent systems built. The staff at reception are white as are the head teacher and many of the class teachers. Suddenly I found myself sitting amid an informal horseshoe of exclusively muslim pupils. Many of the boys shaved; the majority of the young women wore hejabs or other head coverings, a few simply allowed their long black hair to tumble freely over their shoulders.

The ice was broken with a dysfunctional round of Family Fortunes: there was much mirth and my ignorance of the rules.

More than anything they complained that I had represented them as living more separate, more religious, more radical lives than their parents. Yet when we debated it, even they began to accept this was indeed the case. Despite white estates on three sides of the College, ninety five per cent of the in take is asian, the majority of that muslim.

From a taut and uneasy beginning the session relaxed - we talked of many issues they found hard to raise in normal class. I was surprised to find how little they knew about Kashmir, a dispute normally high in muslim concerns; and how much they knew of the suffering of the muslim population in Chechnya. The women admitted to unease about the posters with bare shouldered Indian actresses on the classroom walls. The boys talked music and football.

We talked of the Ofcom ruling on Big Brother and Jades outburst against Shilpa Shetty. Without exception, they were relieved the incident had screened, 'It's what we suffer all the time', they said, 'for once we saw it happen on the telly....you know that, more than anything else, makes us retreat to our own community.'

As we drank orange juice and devoured iced buns, I felt optimistic, buoyed by their intelligence and energy. Yet the pressure to reject and divide is strong and I came away wondering how their children will be will we have addressed the racism and prejudice that gnaws at their present lives?

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