Dewsbury, UK: Where The Ice Cream Lady Wears A Burka, Pubs Turned Into Mosques

From the Daily Mail:

Jean Wood is determined to spend the rest of her days in Savile Town, a small enclave of terraced streets in the once proud Yorkshire wool town of Dewsbury. This is where she grew up, went to the grammar school and got married at the nearby handsome parish church nearly half a century ago. 

A widow of 75, she likes to visit her grandchildren and tend the flower-filled garden of her detached house on a steep road leading down to the area’s community recreation ground, where the cricket club was once the boast of Savile Town. 

Few of her friends or relatives live in this part of town any more. Jean is one of only 48 white Britons who have stayed on, while all the other 4,033 Savile Town residents, according to the latest 2011 census, are of Pakistani or Indian heritage. 

Their forebears were enticed here as cheap paid labour for back-breaking jobs in the wool mills in the late 1950s. Hard-working, they were soon buying up the terraced houses, building their own mosques and opening corner shops selling burkas, prayer mats and perfumes containing no alcohol, in line with the strict teachings of the Islamic Holy Book the Koran. 

Today, it has gained another kind of terrifying notoriety. First, the leader of the gang of four bombers who attacked London on July 7, 2005, came from here. When Mohammad Sidique Khan bade farewell to his pregnant wife on the morning he led his fellow attackers to the capital to claim 52 innocent lives in explosions on Tube trains and a bus, it was from a council house in a quiet cul-de-sac not far from Jean’s house. 

Next came Britain’s youngest convicted terrorist, Hammaad Munshi. He was arrested in 2006 when he was 16 while walking home from the local comprehensive carrying two bags of ball bearings – a key component of a suicide vest. 

Police later found a guide to explosives and notes on martyrdom in his bedroom. 

Yet can everything be blamed on the internet? Others believe much of Savile Town, now one of the most racially segregated places in Britain, has become so dangerously steeped in a violent brand of Islam that young men there are encouraged to be suspicious of, and even hate, the West. 

When I visited recently, as families played on the recreation ground where the cricket pavilion was torn down long ago, almost everyone seemed to be Muslim. Even the woman serving ice cream from a van bearing the slogan ‘Nice and Creamy, Cool and Dreamy’ was wearing a burka so extensively covering her face that even her eyes were hardly visible. 

And almost every girl waiting their turn in the queue was clad in Islamic robes, including those of five, six and seven. Not far away there is a Sharia Court which was criticised recently in a House of Lords report for discriminating against women in the matrimonial disputes it oversees. 

The area has several private madrassas – Islamic schools where young boys (and some girls) learn the Koran by heart. 

Today only two pubs remain out of the nine that once dotted the streets. The others have either been demolished or turned into mosques. Towering over the street where Jean Wood was raised is the giant Markazi mosque. It was built in the 1980s with Saudi Arabian money on a piece of land where the local bowling green club stood and locals used to tend their allotments. 

Now it is the European headquarters of Tablighi Jamaat, a global Islamic missionary movement with an austere, ultra-conservative religious creed nurturing the belief that British values pose a threat to Muslims. 

One of Tablighi Jamaat’s leading advocates, the scholar Ebrahim Rangooni, has proclaimed that the movement’s purpose is to rescue Muslims ‘from the culture and civilisation of the Jews, the Christians and other enemies of Islam.’