Finsbury Park resident: 'London, like my mixed faith marriage, needs respect and love'

I spent last Sunday afternoon at a street party with my wife and two young children — five-year-old Laila and six-month-old Ezra — near my home in north London. It has become something of annual tradition — the road is closed on both sides to allow children to play freely while the adults all bring food that is shared among friends and neighbours.

There was live music, a baking competition, a hotly contested round of musical chairs and, best of all, the chance to get to know the other folks who live on the street. The sun shone, the children played and all seemed well with the world. It was only later that night, after we had put Laila and Ezra to bed, that I first heard the whirring sound of helicopters above our home.By the time I awoke on Monday, Finsbury Park, which is a 10-minute walk from where I live, had mutated from a neighbourhood to a hashtag. My Twitter timeline revealed that there had been an attack on a mosque — a man had driven a van into worshippers leaving Ramadan prayers and had apparently been overheard saying he wanted to kill all Muslims.

It is unsettling to have terror arrive so close to home but my first reaction was not fear but a strange sense of relief: at least this attack, unlike those in London Bridge and Manchester, was not perpetrated by Muslims — at least this one could not be considered “our” fault. My second reaction was to wonder how I was going to keep the news of this attack away from my daughter.

The fancy word to describe Laila and Ezra is to say they have mixed or dual heritage, or that they are the products of a mixed-faith, mixed-race marriage — the simpler truth is that they are Londoners.

I was raised as a Muslim by parents who came from Pakistan and settled in Luton. My parents assumed I would have an arranged marriage with a fellow Pakistani Muslim and hopefully settle down in Luton but instead I fell in love with Bridget, who is white and was raised in a vaguely Christian family by English parents who moved to Scotland.

We met by chance in 2008 when I found myself sat opposite her on a train heading from the Hay Festival to London. I was living in Ladbroke Grove, Bridget was living in Hackney, and when we decided to move in together we chose her neighbourhood — back then it was still somewhat affordable. We got married in 2010. The following year we had a daughter, Laila, and last year she was joined by her baby brother Ezra.

I have always thought that raising our children in London was the greatest gift I could give them. There are parts of the country where the mere sight of my wife and I walking down the street with our children is enough to turn heads — and not in a good way. London isn’t judgemental, it belongs to everyone and growing up in this city has given Laila a breezy self-confidence.

A few years ago, when I took her to nursery, we were sat opposite someone who couldn’t stop staring at my daughter. Finally the woman asked: “Where were you born?” I have heard versions of that question all my life — basically asking me to explain why my skin is brown — but this was the first time Laila had been exposed to it and so she answered it with imperious disdain. “Where was I born?” she repeated, “in a hospital of course!” That shut the woman up.

On Monday morning I dropped Laila off at kindergarten and took the bus to Finsbury Park. Costa Coffee was like an international newsroom, with young women editing video footage on laptops while television reporters scribbled notes and made calls. I looked at the massed ranks of television cameras and the question that kept buzzing around my head was how would I explain this all to my daughter?

So far in her life I have reasoned that the best way to preserve her self-confidence was to protect her from learning about the hatreds that exist in the world. How am I meant to explain to my little girl that there are some people who look like mummy but who so hate daddy’s religion that they will mow them down with a van? How am I meant to explain there are other Muslims who look like daddy but who hate people like mummy so much they will kill them as they are eating on a Saturday night?

It makes no sense to me — how is it meant to make sense to a five-year-old? I can’t — which is why all I can hope to do for now is try and build a wall around my daughter, a wall of love that shields her from the evil beyond and lets her remain a child with her dolls, story books and her faith that life is beautiful and people are good.

It isn’t so easy to keep that faith as adults and yet, as sad and shocking as the events in London Bridge and Finsbury Park were, they have not dampened my love of London or made me yearn to pack up and move: if anything they have deepened my desire to remain.

In Finsbury Park on Monday I was struck by the number of local white residents who spontaneously approached local Muslims to offer sympathy, hugs and flowers. I heard more than one white person apologise to a Muslim for what happened at the mosque.

They had nothing to apologise for, of course, but their actions reminded me, as did the vigil in Finsbury Park on Monday evening and the public response to the Grenfell Tower fire, that one consequence of tragedy is to highlight how much decency and kindness human beings are capable of displaying. In the words of someone who tweeted me on Monday, “crisis brings out the good in all of us. The few mindless individuals are lost in a sea of good, kind-hearted people.”

I remain hopeful, despite everything that has happened, because while one loser may have crashed a van into a mosque more than a million other Londoners have elected as Mayor a man who is a British-Pakistani Muslim.

I feel positive because while three murderous lunatics attacked innocent diners in the name of Islam on a Saturday night, on a Sunday night an imam chose to defend the man suspected of the mosque attack, also in the name of Islam.

The driver of the van is reported to have said “I’ve done my bit” as he launched his attack. Those words are chilling but they are also a challenge to all of us who don’t subscribe to a hate-filled separatist ideology. We all need to do our bit and not simply leave it to politicians and policy-makers.

If I have learnt anything from being in a mixed-faith marriage it is that it only works through love, respect and acceptance and an awareness that both sides gain more from being together than if they remained apart.

London at its best embodies those values and that spirit. I saw that spirit in the street party on Sunday afternoon and I saw it again in the response to the attack in Finsbury Park on Sunday night, which is why I remain so convinced that London is not broken by such acts of terror — it is revealed.

Follow Sarfraz Manzoor: @sarfrazmanzoor

Sarfraz Manzoor is the author of Greetings from Bury Park, published by Bloomsbury