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Savile Town in Yorkshire that has almost no white residents

From the window of her flat overlooking the canal path in a suburb of Dewsbury in Yorkshire, a blonde woman watches two female figures walking past as they chatter in a foreign tongue.

Both the passers by are covered in black Islamic gowns, only a glimpse of their eyes show from the 2 in gap in the veils across their faces.

They, like many Muslim women who live here, speak little or no English. Lots of them will have no contact with any person from another religion or culture. Many, I imagine, have been brought to the UK to wed the British men of south Asian heritage who have made this area their home.

Even the lady selling ice creams from a van during the summer wears a burka in Savile Town

The wives have restricted lives: bringing up children, cooking for families, or going to women only events at the huge local mosque run by the Deobandis, a powerful sect of Islam whose most outspoken preachers have urged followers not to mix with Christians, Jews or Hindus.

We are in Savile Town, one of the most racially homogeneous parts of Britain: not because everyone is an indigenous Yorkshire man or fake van cleef and arpels necklaces woman, but exactly the opposite.

In fact there are almost no white residents to be found in Savile Town. Astonishingly, a detailed breakdown of the last census of 2011 recorded that only 48 of the 4,033 people living here were white British.

This would not surprise the blonde Lorraine Matthews, looking out at the ladies in burkas from her window. She is a 53 year old dentist's receptionist, one of the handful of white Britons left in Savile Town's grid of terrace streets. Almost all the other residents, according to that census, have Pakistani or Indian backgrounds.

Their forebears were enticed to Savile Town as cheap labour for back breaking jobs in the woollen mills which had made Dewsbury a renowned textile town.

For however unpalatable it may be to British liberals, the fact is that many Muslims here only want to live with those from their own culture

These hard working newcomers bought their own homes, and opened corner shops that sold burkas, prayer mats and perfumes that contained no alcohol, in line with the strictures of the Koran.

Soon the new arrivals had built the mosque which is designed to accommodate 4,000 worshippers. Today, a Sharia court nearby criticised in a House of Lords report for discriminating against women in divorce and matrimonial disputes does brisk business espousing the strict Islamic justice code.

Even the lady selling ice creams from a van during the summer wears a burka, and the mobile butcher going round the streets offers only halal goat, lamb and ostrich.

Stand in Savile Town, as I have, and you will see scores of boys in Islamic robes walking to and from lessons at the mosque's madrasah school, where for hours at a time they rote learn the Koran by heart.

And, distressingly, every girl I saw even those of six and seven playing in the park was wrapped up in a hijab fake van cleef and arpels butterfly necklace and shoulder to toe gown lest a man glimpse her flesh.

Eight of the nine pubs in the area have shut because there are hardly any local customers who drink alcohol. The hair salon, once giving stern perms to Yorkshire ladies, closed down long ago, the Western grocery and clothes shops, too.

Needless to say, with nowhere to socialise or shop for what they like, the local white folk departed, first in a trickle, then a torrent.

Savile Town is one of the most racially homogeneous parts of Britain: not because everyone is an indigenous Yorkshire man or woman, but exactly the opposite

Savile Town was left to become an ethnic enclave. And it seems that this detachment from mainstream society had disturbing repercussions. For this small area has produced several young jihadists who disappeared to fight and die as suicide bombers for Islamic State in the Middle East.

(Mohammed Sidique Khan, the leader of the bombers who attacked London on July 7, 2005, was brought up nearby. He bade farewell to his pregnant wife at their terrace house before leading his fellow attackers to the capital to claim 52 innocent lives in explosions on Tube trains and buses.)

Life in Savile Town was investigated earlier this year by Owen Bennett Jones, the BBC's former Pakistan correspondent, who threw light on the influence of the Deobandi movement over the Muslim population here.

Interviewed for the Radio 4 programme was Mufti Mohammed Pandor, a civil servant and spokesman for the Deobandis. He arrived from India's Gujarat in 1964 as a small child with his family.

The streets of the Savile Town area of Dewsbury, which since the 1950's has seen its white population almost entirely replaced

He lives near Savile Town, and would call himself a British Muslim. Yet he refused to let interviewer Bennett Jones see his wife when the reporter visited the couple's home, although she was permitted to make the tea in the kitchen.

Pandor insists she is completely covered at almost all times, allowing her only to raise her veil for passport checks at airports. His family rarely watches British TV and says all music is un Islamic.

Despite being a religious adviser to two universities Bradford imitation van cleef and arpels butterfly necklace and Huddersfield he told the BBC that Muslim men should only be permitted to enter higher education institutions to study and pray, and 'not to look at women'.

'If Mohammed did not do it, we don't do it,' Pandor told the BBC, saying the Deobandi are a 'back to basics' movement whose followers live in the style of the Prophet's life, 14 centuries ago.

You might dismiss such desperately backward thinking as being the preserve of a small outlandish sect, but the Deobandis run nearly half the 1,600 registered UK mosques, and train 80 per cent of all domestic Islamic clerics who, in turn, play a huge part in influencing the growing population of British Muslims.

Perhaps it's little surprise that the few indigenous Yorkshire people remaining in Savile Town feel somewhat beleaguered.

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