“Accidental encounters in a Manchester on edge: Muslims in the city fear a backlash in the wake of this week’s terrorist attack”, Financial Times
By Roula Khalaf, London, May 24, 2017
It was an odd coincidence that I should find myself in Manchester, a city I hadn’t visited since childhood, the day after a suicide bomber massacred 22 people, including children, at a concert arena.
My purpose had nothing to do with the terrorist attack but it was related to the Muslim community. I’ve been filming a feature on Europe and the veil, and one of my subjects was a young Mancunian of Libyan origin who wanted to take it off.
Having woken up to the horrific news of the carnage, I was surprised that Sofia was still willing to meet. On the train from London, I had a pang of anxiety when I saw an alert about the Arndale shopping centre evacuation. Fortunately it was a false alarm.
By mid-morning, after an emotional chat with a taxi driver who had just offered to give blood to victims, I was sitting on a bench in St John’s Gardens listening to Sofia. Before the end of the day I would discover that the young woman I had spent time with had known the bomber, British-born Salman Abedi, whose Libyan parents also had settled in the UK. Sofia had been friends with his sister; for a while, they moved in the same social circle. “I’m disgusted that I knew him,” she says when I get in touch later to ask whether she had ever come across Abedi. “He was a bad boy type involved with gangs who flipped and became very religious.”
Sofia, who asked me not to use her real name, is a bright 20-year-old. She’s waiting for me dressed in black tights and a grey top, but her hair, neck and shoulders are covered with a scarf. In a confident voice, she says she took up the hijab in her teens after a visit to Libya, where she discovered her family’s roots. Her decision, though, was driven above all by the need to please her conservative father. She has struggled with the headscarf ever since, never embracing its religious meaning or appreciating its spirituality. Sometimes, when she’s on an outing with friends, she removes it.
Like other Muslims I meet in Manchester, Sofia is anticipating a backlash in the aftermath of the attack. Already, on social media, the cries of “Muslims must do more” are proliferating. She recalls the suspicious looks her headscarf solicited on a Manchester bus after the Westminster bridge attack in London. The previous evening, as news of the suicide bombing broke, her mother advised that it was time to take off the hijab. “The people who commit these attacks don’t care where you’re from,” Sofia says, echoing a common refrain among other Muslims I met on my day in Manchester. “People have to realise that we too can be affected by the terrorism.”
At the same time, when, in our morning conversation, I ask her about radicalisation in Manchester, she admits she’s worried. “We can’t keep apologising about stuff we didn’t do. But also we don’t talk about it as a community — and we need to.” I understand her words better when the name of the bomber is released hours later and I telephone her on the off chance that she could provide information. She sounds agitated.
Sofia hadn’t seen Abedi in two years but she knew, as her friends did, that he’d become a radical Islamist. Yet it wasn’t a topic that anyone was comfortable discussing. She timed Abedi’s turn to extremism to the 2011 Libyan revolution and suspected a link between the overthrow of Muammer Gaddafi and the fact that the bomber’s parents had been persecuted by his regime. Abedi’s conversion curiously mirrors that of groups within Libya who took part in the revolt and have been fighting each other ever since. Some of these jihadis have since embraced Isis.
Although western extremists are often indoctrinated online these days, Sofia is adamant that the mosque he frequented on the south side of Manchester could provide clues. I head there to find two trustees anticipating the media circus about to descend on them and determined to clear their mosque’s name. They say many Libyans worship here because some sermons are in Arabic; two of their imams are Libyan, the third Syrian. But while Abedi’s father was a regular, they know nothing of the son and had never seen him.
I leave Manchester wondering whether Sofia’s anger towards the mosque is exaggerated and waiting for the investigation to put the Abedi puzzle together.