MANCHESTER // Muslim groups, Christian pastors, Jewish community leaders and devout Hindus were all gathered in Manchester’s St Ann’s Square for a memorial event for those killed in the terror attack.
The vigil, organised by the Ramadhan Foundation, a local Muslim non-profit, was held on Wednesday night amid a mixed mood of apprehension and assurance.
As populist nationalism surges across the western world, and as the UK heads into a general election in two weeks, Manchester’s Muslims were eager to separate their religion from the acts of violence committed in its name.
Police have identified 22-year-old Salman Abedi, a man of Libyan descent, as the suicide bomber who killed 22 people at the Manchester Arena on Monday night.
Ten others, including two of Abedi’s brothers, are still in custody in Manchester and in Tripoli, the Libyan capital, and police have suggested that a support network helped Abedi carry out the attack. Another woman who was detained in Manchester has been released.
Manchester’s community of British Libyans issued a statement condemning the bomber’s actions.
“This attack was an attack on all of us … All those responsible for senselessly destroying the lives of innocent people do not deserve to live in our community and should be behind bars,” it said.
At St Ann’s Square in the centre of the city, Mansoor Ahmad Khan, the regional head of Al Islam, an association of Ahmadiyya Muslims, admitted to feeling concern about the public image of Muslims after terror attacks.
"Whenever such things happen, you know, there's a worry," Mr Khan told The National. "There's a worry that people will begin to think badly of us as a group, or they will use this as an excuse to discriminate."
Although Manchester has been mostly peaceful since the attack, several incidents have jittered the nerves of the city’s Muslims.
On Tuesday, the English Defence League (EDL), a nationalist group, staged a protest urging people to “stand up to Islamism”.
In a separate incident, a pedestrian shouted at a 14-year-old girl walking to the Manchester Islamic High School for Girls: “When are you going to stop bombing people?”
“What’s the point of reacting?” Mona Mohamed, the head teacher at the school, said in a radio interview. “That’s not the way we’re going to tackle terrorism.”
The door of a local mosque was also burnt down early on Wednesday morning, although the mosque’s imam, Mohammad Sadiq, did not know if it was connected to the bomb attack.
Mr Khan worries about such incidents as well as larger political repercussions.
The United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), a far-right party that won 12.6 per cent of the national vote in the 2015 election, has already pointed to Islamic schools as a threat to the country and wants to ban the full-face veil.
One of its parliamentary candidates for the upcoming election, Anne Marie Waters, tweeted last year: “The only ‘evil’ we have legalised is Islam.”
At the moment, UKIP is polling at less than five per cent, according to polling agency YouGov.
The hope is that more voters do not allow themselves to be influenced by the Manchester attack and move towards UKIP, said Najib, a taxi driver from Kurdistan who identified himself only by one name.
Najib moved to Manchester 19 years ago, and he fears that such attacks will bolster the UK’s wariness of immigrants. “This country has been very good to me. But I hope it won’t close itself off,” he said.
Aside from UKIP, British politics is tussling with the question of how open its borders should be.
The success of the “Leave” campaign in last year’s Brexit referendum was driven, in large part, by its argument that the country would be more secure if its borders were less porous to immigrants streaming in from the Middle East through Europe.
Ahead of next month’s election, prime minister Theresa May’s Conservative Party has pledged to slash annual net immigration to figures in the tens of thousands rather than in the hundreds of thousands.
Muslims who are already in the UK, including those who have never lived anywhere else, hope they will not have to contend with a rise in anti-Islam sentiment.
One of the participants in Wednesday’s vigil at St Ann’s Square was Gulnar Bano Kham Ghadri, a born-and-bred Mancunian who helps set up community non-profits.
Ms Ghadri recalled how, after 9/11, she faced derisive and abusive comments from passers-by: “‘Oh, look at you, Paki, with your [head] scarf,’ they’d say.”
She wore a headscarf on Wednesday as well – except it was a silken Union Jack flag.
After the Manchester attack, Ms Ghadri said, “I’ve actually received more respect than normal. I’ve been on trains and trams, in hospitals and on buses, I’ve been to a lot of places. And I’ve been treated so well.”
“It’s really, really unique. But that’s Manchester.”
ssubramanian@thenational.ae
