‘Bradford…it’s a very beautiful town and a very hard town’, said singer Justin Sullivan in 1984, ‘it’s sort of died’. Deindustrialisation had hit the hometown of his punk rock band New Model Army even earlier and harder than other British cities. Nestled among the hills and moors of West Yorkshire, Bradford had become wealthy in the nineteenth century through textile production and trade. It attracted both landless Irish migrants and merchants from the continent, often Jews, who built sandstone warehouses in the neighbourhood now known as Little Germany. The modernist 1960s saw the emergence of concrete buildings, arterial roads, and tower blocks, with the council assuming continued economic growth and a monocultural society.
© Moritz Föllmer
But even back then, a new wave of immigration was fundamentally changing Bradford, resulting in a kind of urban planning from below under increasingly difficult economic circumstances. Migrant workers and soon entire families from the Indian subcontinent were settling mainly in the Victorian terraced houses around the city centre, whereas the suburbs and towns belonging within the Bradford Metropolitan District (such as Haworth, famous for the Brontë sisters) remained predominantly white. While there were Hindus and Sikhs among the immigrant families and a small Afro-Caribbean community formed too, the vast majority were Muslims, most of whom came from Azad Kashmir in north-eastern Pakistan.
Muslim protests, the Muslim middle class
Since the 1980s, this has turned the now post-industrial city into a testing ground for Britain’s multiculturalism, particularly its relationship to Islam. The public burning of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses in 1989, and the riots of 1995 and 2001, made negative headlines both nationally and internationally. Since then, scholars of religion, sociologists, and historians have tried to explain the motives behind the unrest. The Muslims involved saw their protest, whether peaceful or violent, as a continuation of local activism that had initially been triggered by racist attacks and extreme-right agitation. In that sense, they were defending their religiously and ethnically based self-conception against the writer, whom they perceived as blasphemous, and later against the police, whom they experienced as hostile. In so doing, they could invoke local politics, which in the 1980s had committed itself to supporting particular identities, thus continuing a British tradition of multiculturalism. The New Labour government, which took office in 1997, responded to the unrest with a mixture of national integration efforts, attempts at economic regeneration, and a consumerist rhetoric of diversity.
©Moritz Föllmer
Abb 2 © Moritz Föllmer
Walking through present-day Bradford, which was UK City of Culture in 2025, makes one appreciate the dynamism of this urban society. While some nineteenth-century textile factories stand empty, others have been converted into apartment complexes. The atmosphere in the square in front of the huge Victorian city hall is as relaxed as it is in the new shopping centre The Broadway, in the streets around the university, and in the Gothic revivalist Wool Exchange, where you can now browse in the bookshop and read in the café.
© Moritz Föllmer
Above all, notwithstanding the obvious poverty, the presence of a confident Muslim middle class in one of Britain’s most entrepreneurial cities is striking. You can walk past various mosques, temples, and shops selling ‘Islamic lifestyle’ products, and enjoy a Desi breakfast at J’Adore, which is busy even on weekdays and has caught up with the world of middle-class consumption, both in its somewhat pretentious name and its price range. While the riots of 2001 targeted, among other things, a BMW garage in Manningham to the north of the city centre, which was perceived as a business for whites, nowadays you soon give up counting the German cars parked in this largely Asian neighbourhood.
© Moritz Föllmer
A.A. Dhand and Saima Mir
In the country of Sherlock Holmes and Miss Marple, this new confidence includes crime fiction. A.A. [Amit] Dhand and Saima Mir have set out to change the cultural underrepresentation and widespread stereotyping of British Asians. They draw on observations they made, respectively, in his parents’ neighbourhood shop and then as a pharmacist, and as a former local journalist. Dhand, the agnostic son of Hindu parents, still lives in his hometown. He describes real buildings, streets, and even restaurants, so his books can be used as literary travel guides. Mir, who became known for an article about her journey from two marriages and divorces to become an ‘emancipated Muslim woman’, has been living in London for a long time now. She writes in a style that is more detached from the real Bradford, which is nevertheless easy to identify.
Both A.A. Dhand and Saima Mir are proud of their origins, but as university-educated representatives of the second generation of immigrants, they are critical of the pressure to conform exerted by conservative families and closed communities. They culturally enhance the city, which is still widely considered impoverished and dreary, despite at the same time portraying it in the gloomy light and moral grey of crime fiction. Four of Dhand’s six novels revolve around Detective Inspector Hardeep ‘Harry’ Virdee, who, typical of the genre, interprets the rules of police work rather loosely. The focus of Mir’s two novels to date is Jia Khan, whose father runs a criminal clan empire until she takes it over herself – a constellation that, unsurprisingly, has given rise to comparisons with Michael Corleone in The Godfather.
Alienated Sikh: Detective Inspector Harry Virdee
What pictures of multicultural society do the two crime novelists paint? Harry Virdee is a Sikh, but he married Saima, a Muslim woman. His father disowned him for this, although it later becomes clear that this rigid stance is rooted in traumatic memories of displacement and flight in the wake of India’s partition in 1947. “I wanted to write about monocultural meeting multicultural”, says Dhand revealing an important motivation behind his novels, which in many ways narrate a world of mutual isolation. Multiculturalism in Dhand’s sense takes place in Harry and Saima’s home. Harry has become non-religious, but still adheres to the daily custom of touching if not his mother’s feet then at least her slippers. Saima prays, celebrates the end of Ramadan and combines symbols and rituals from both religions. The couple have named their son Aaron and raise him as a ‘British boy’ of the middle class.
© Moritz Föllmer
Harry Virdee has no time for careful investigative work because the fragile coexistence of different cultures in Bradford is repeatedly threatened. After the murder of a dubious Muslim businessman, extreme-right politicians stir up latent ethnic conflict in order to provoke a repeat of the riots of 2001. His free-spirited niece is found dead, forcing him to prevent his criminal brother from seeking revenge. A serial killer is targeting Asian women for their relationships with white men. A terrorist group is holding worshippers, including Saima Virdee, captive in a mosque and is threatening to detonate a bomb. To avert these dangers, Harry moves between white prostitutes and sexist car mechanics, Muslim taxi drivers, and Catholic nuns. He reactivates his rusty Punjabi to talk to Asian families, ventures into social housing blocks where white youths tolerate Sikhs as shopkeepers at best, and collaborates with the dubious Home Secretary Tariq Islam.
© Moritz Föllmer
Muslim moderniser: clan leader Jia Khan
At the beginning of Saima Mir’s first novel, her protagonist Jia Khan works as a criminal defence lawyer in London – “twice as good as men and four times as good as white men”. With her Oxford degree, Savile Row suits, and vegan diet, she has distanced herself from the world of her father and mentor, a devout Muslim from Peshawar who rose to become the king of Bradford’s underworld in the 1970s. But she has also left her husband Elyas, a journalist, and her son Ahad. Jia initially returns only for her sister’s wedding, but, following her father’s murder, she takes over as chair of the Jirga, an assembly of elders with its own rules. She must now hold the clan together with both warmth and coldness, defending it first against Eastern European drug dealers, and then against a conservative Muslim woman with rival ambitions.
© Stephen Craven cc-by-sa/2.0/
Jia becomes ‘the Khan’ by ushering in a shift from the traditionalism of the elders to the syncretism of the younger generation. She hires tech-savvy British Asians to bring the established drug empire into the digital age and intertwine it with the development of software and financial products for the global Muslim market. At the same time, she is part of a complex nuclear family of the middle class, because she, her husband, and her son are growing closer again without ever being able to overcome the emotional distance and tension that arose during their separation. Jia navigates between different worlds: she has read feminist literature and prays daily, drinks both English tea and chai with cardamom, visits Eastern European families barbecuing pork sausages, and celebrates her own culinary tradition. And she confidently faces members of London’s upper class because she knows the strengths of her community with its anti-imperialist energies as well as Pakistani and northern English roots.
© Moritz Föllmer
Bradford and multiculturalism
The Bradford conflict over The Satanic Verses arose not least from the contrast between the cosmopolitan Salman Rushdie’s hybrid understanding of culture and multiculturalism as demanded by local Muslims, in the form of state protection of particular identities. A.A. Dhand and Saima Mir’s novels open up a different and more current perspective. They present Bradford as a fractured yet dynamic urban society and as a juxtaposition of different cultures that is largely beyond institutional influence – although this co-existence ends in the outer districts and suburbs and is constantly at risk of explosion. At the same time, they point to shifts from preserving cultural tradition in a foreign environment to the self-confident combination of different influences and identities, the crossing of boundaries in everyday life, and a stronger role for women. Dhand and Mir portray this understanding of multiculturalism in their writing, represent it biographically, and publicly advocate for it. In this respect, they not ‘only’ write crime novels, but are British Asian intellectual voices from a supposedly left-behind northern city.
© Tim Green cc-by-sa/2.0/