The enigma of the veil

by REBECCA FOWLER, Daily Mail

The young woman lowers her veiled head and dutifully takes off her shoes to enter the women's prayer room at a London mosque. There is something compelling in her piercing dark eyes, but her voice is strangely ordinary as she declares her allegiance to the Moslem holy war. She has a slight cockney accent.

At the age of 24, Tabassam is the half-hidden face of Islamic fundamentalism in Britain. She has worn a veil since she was 16, and she now also uses it to cover her features in photographs. She fears for her safety after attending a demonstration at the Pakistani embassy last weekend.

Even her neighbours in South London have stopped talking to her since she publicly declared her support for Osama Bin Laden's jihad (holy war). They used to stop for a chat if they saw her outside the front door, but these days when she passes they go inside without saying a word.

Yet Tabassam has still agreed to meet to explain why any woman or man raised in Britain would support the Islamic spiritual call to arms, after the atrocities in the U.S. in which up to 7,000 innocent people perished, including a number of Moslems.

In fact, she considers it her spiritual duty enthusiastically to defend her commitment to her faith. As Tabassam's two daughters, aged one and three, play with crayons beside her, she outlines her unnerving mission to justify her support of the Taliban regime from her London home.

'As a Moslem, you have a duty to protect yourself and your Moslem brothers and sisters,' she says. 'I am a Moslem before I am British. It's not a question of whether I would fight for Osama Bin Laden. It's a question of whether I would fight for Islam, and if they do bomb Afghanistan then it is our duty.'

Although she insists that she condemns the killing of any innocent people, she dreams one day of a Moslem state ruled by the ancient Islamic laws - including capital punishment and the stoning of adulterers - and she is dismissive of democracy.

'I've lived in a democracy all my life,' she says. 'And as far as I'm concerned it doesn't work. Look at the homeless people, look at the people who have nothing here. Islam is a system that allows everyone to be free, in which the only sovereignty belongs to God, not to a man like Tony Blair.'

As she momentarily breaks off to rescue her young daughter from falling over, it is almost impossible to marry the image of this laughing young mother, who is charming and humorous, and the hardened woman who transforms into a belligerent zealot at the mention of Islam.

Any failings of her own culture are immediately blamed on U.S. foreign policy, which she insists has drained predominantly Moslem nations of their wealth and independence.

But Tabassam's world is one of endless and infuriating contradictions. How could she seriously support a war in which innocent people will almost certainly die?

How can she support the Taliban regime, which has driven hundreds of thousands of fellow Moslems to the brink of starvation as they flee for the borders? How could she not want to see the campaign of terrorism brought to an end? Why does she stay here if she is so scathing of life under democratic rule?

And most of all, how could she have grown up in Britain and not value the freedom of speech that allows her to speak out so openly in the first place? That is one of the very rights that we are now intent on protecting against terror-ists for future generations - including her own daughters.

As Tabassam espouses her faith with unquestioning devotion, it would be easy to imagine her being born into extremism, raised in virtual purdah in London.

Nothing could be further from the truth. She was brought up by moderate parents, with only a passing interest in practising their faith.

Like a growing number of her generation of British-born Moslems, Tabassam has taken up the faith with far more zeal than her parents ever did. While her mother and father were more interested in integrating, being accepted, working hard and educating their children, she has returned to her roots with a passion.

'The Government always chooses these so- called moderate Moslems to represent us in Parliament,' she says. 'That's their idea of the acceptable face of Islam. But the fact is either you are a Moslem or you are not. You practise or you do not. There is no compromise.'

Tabassam's father, who came to London from Pakistan when he was 11, made leather jackets for a living. Her mother, who was born in Middlesbrough but whose parents also came from Pakistan, stayed at home to raise their four children. They hoped that their two daughters and two sons might go to university.

It was clear that Tabassam, the oldest, was a bright girl. But she also enjoyed the typical trappings of teenage life. She listened to pop music - she had posters of boy band Take That on her bedroom wall - and there was talk of her becoming a teacher or a nurse.

She began A-level courses in English and health and social studies at the local college at the age of 16. But then the Gulf War broke out, which she claims was a turning point in her life.

'I'd always tried to be the same as everyone else,' she says. 'But I was never the same. I was always the "Paki" or the Asian girl trying to fit in. When the war started against Iraq, people began asking me questions about being Moslem and it made me question myself.

'My parents were wondering what had happened to me and why I was suddenly so interested in learning about Islam. I found it wonderful and brilliant. It covered every aspect of how you should live your life.'

Tabassam had a profound conversion. Instead of pursuing a place at university, she took a job at a local chemist's in order to fund herself through a two-year course in Sharia law - the strict Islamic code which states that death should be the punishment for murderers, rapists and drug smugglers.

She encouraged her parents to renew their faith in Islam and took to covering her head.

'We're not oppressed because we cover,' she says. 'We are simply following the word of the creator as written in the Koran. It is the women here who are slaves. They are slaves to a society that tells them they must be a size 8 and be skinny to the point of anorexia.

'The creator, for us, is neither a man nor a woman. And men are also expected to cover. They are not allowed to show the area from their navel to their knees.'

Tabassam's zeal for her newfound faith grew by the day. She joined the circuit of Islamic conferences (in which fundamentalists gathered to exchange views) and met her husband, an electrical engineer.

His faith was even stronger than hers and he telephoned her father to request permission to speak to Tabassam. They were married within three months.

Now, her days consist of the five obligatory daily prayer sessions, caring for her family, and lecturing to other women, on 'Fiqh' - the various systems of Islamic life, from education, economics and punishment to the reasons why women cover themselves in public.

She rises at 6.30 every morning for the dawn prayer session. She then goes back to bed until 8am, when her daughters awake. They are already being taught about Islam using Islamic cartoons and story books, and they all attend the mosque on Fridays.

When men visit her husband at their home, she immediately goes into another room and does not socialise with them. But the family does enjoy some aspects of Western culture. The only meat they eat is halal, but their favourite food is pasta and they often go to restaurants.

She still listens to pop music, as long as it does not contain references to sex or religion, which limits the choice, and she no longer likes former Take That star Robbie Williams. Despite her misgivings about the American imperialist culture, after we met she took the children to McDonald's for a filet of fish.

Both Tabassam and her 19-year-old friend Umm Abdullah, who has accompanied her to the mosque to speak about their faith, often go to the homes of other Islamic women in order to teach. They are meticulously well-practised in defending all aspects of Islam.

When tackled about any of the atrocities allegedly carried out in the name of Islam, they either dismiss them as false Western propaganda or believe that the attackers were not true adherents of the Koran.

They are particularly keen to denigrate Saudi Arabia, which they say has allowed Western 'infidels' to be stationed in the land of Mecca and joined the alliance against Bin Laden.

'For 1,500 years there is evidence that only a few hands were chopped off in the name of Islam,' says Umm Abdullah. 'Perhaps only a total of 500. Now, in Saudi Arabia, the authorities use it as an excuse to hurt anyone they don't like, including coloureds and Pakistanis.'

By contrast, they will not condemn Bin Laden for allegedly masterminding the U.S. terrorist hijacks. Although they condemn the violent death of innocents, they insist that there is still no evidence linking him personally to the attacks.

'He is our Moslem brother and is still in the fold of Islam,' says Tabassam. 'He is our brother until he chooses to leave that fold, so we must accept his word that he was not involved. It is also the duty of all Moslems to defend themselves and anyone else against attack. We are simply following our duty.'

When those first shocking images of New York in flames were broadcast to the world, Tabassam was watching Crossroads on television.

They interrupted the programme with footage of the World Trade Centre towers and she was as stunned as anyone to see the horror unfolding.

'Obviously I was sad watching it,' she says. 'There were also over 1,000 Moslems in there, as well as all of those who live in the area around.'

But Tabassam was also furious that the immediate assumption was that the attacks were linked to Moslem terrorists. Even now, in the face of mounting evidence, she is still reluctant to accept that the deaths of so many innocent people could be linked to Islam.

For comitted Moslems, there are three types of jihad - which translates directly as 'struggle'. It might take the form of verbal support, which Tabassam is now giving, or economic aid, or ultimately it might mean going to Afghanistan to offer physical help.

'It is sinful to be oppressed and not speak up about it,' she says. 'The way Moslems are being treated here now is disgusting. The fact that my neighbours no longer speak to me, that Moslems have been attacked in the street, their veils pulled and their clothes set on fire, and that mosques have been attacked is all terrible.

'And it is also terrible that the Prime Minister is saying that this country will attack Afghanistan, which is home to our Moslem brothers and sisters.'

Inevitably it raises the question, once again, of why Tabassam and her family stay here at all. If democracy is repellent to them, if the Government's position on terrorism is so misguided, if they feel a stronger allegiance to the strife of Moslems in Afghanistan than the bid to bring terrorism to an end, what holds them here?

'I was born here,' she says. 'And you do not choose where you are born. I'd love to get on a plane and go to Pakistan with my family. I cannot do that straight away, but it is my dream.

'Anyway, as Moslems we do not recognise borders. It is all God's land. But I pray for my brothers and sisters in Afghanistan, and I pray that there will be victory soon.'

It is impossible not to choke on this last crushing contradiction. The very freedoms afforded to Tabassam to speak out so openly in the first place would be among the first casualties of such a victory.

And so would the notion that we could sit together here in the prayer room of a British mosque, children playing happily around us, freely arguing the differences of our faith in a mood of polite and even good-natured tolerance.