Why Claiming British Identity Is Complicated

[Celerity]

A scandal in 2014, known as the Trojan Horse affair, exposed what it’s like living in Britain as a British Pakistani.

This article was produced in collaboration with a new podcast from Serial and The New York Times. “The Trojan Horse Affair,” an eight-part mystery, investigates a strange letter that transformed Britain — and the lives of many British Muslims.

We asked three UK-based writers to explore the complexities of the British Pakistani identity in 2022. Click the links below to read their stories.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/03/podcasts/trojan-horse-affair-british-identity.html



The story of Britain’s Pakistani community, the largest Muslim community in the United Kingdom, begins in 1947. Following India’s independence from colonial Britain and the bloody Partition that accompanied it, the creation of Pakistan incited one of the largest mass migrations in history across the region, and beyond. As the sun began to set on the British Empire a wave of non-white immigrants arrived on British soil, including former colonial subjects from a nascent Pakistan.

Since that time, straddling the hyphens between “British,” “Pakistani” and “Muslim” has always been precarious — a negotiation only heightened by a scandal in 2014 known as the Trojan Horse affair, when an anonymous letter was leaked to the press, outlining a supposed plot to infiltrate public schools in Birmingham, the second largest city in Britain, and run them according to strict Islamic principles. The letter was later revealed to be a hoax. But at the time, it provoked national outcry and a political crisis over a city unfairly maligned as an incubator for Islamic extremism.

Of course, the Trojan Horse affair didn’t just affect British Pakistanis. Other Muslims, and especially those at the intersection of various class and racial backgrounds, were profoundly impacted by the Islamophobia and racism that spewed out from the scandal. However, the schools that were the focus of the affair were located in neighbourhoods in east Birmingham with majority British Pakistani demographics. And a number of the teachers prominently embroiled in the Trojan Horse affair were also Pakistani and Muslim too.

In the new “The Trojan Horse Affair” audio series, the reporters Brian Reed, known for his work on “S-Town,” and Hamza Syed, a British Pakistani Muslim who watched the scandal unfold in his home city, seek to uncover who wrote the letter and why. Their investigation examines not only the origins of the scandal, but also the fragility of British identity for British Pakistanis living with the legacies and contradictions of colonialism and counter-extremism policies every day.

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