In the UK Paki vs US Paki discussion, various refrences were made to the Mirpuri community. For those who are unaware of them, they are ethnic Punjabis or Pothwaris who orignate from the Mirpur region, which is one of the eight regions that made up the old Dogra Kingdom of Jammu and Kashmir. According to some sources, they make up 75% of the 1 million UK Pakistanis. In the UK, the word Mirpuri has become an almost an insult, and many deny that they are Mirpuri. Many have taken to calling themselves Kashmiris, which quite rightly irritates the Kashmiris here. I have posted an article that gives some background information and the problems.
The article does lookj at the various themes such as marganilization and radicalization among this community. My question, do you think the Mirpuris are the authors of their own misfortune, or they are a much maligned ethnic group.
Introspection grips British Muslims -DAWN - International; July 20, 2005
It’s early days, but already some of the factors that need to be plotted on to this map are emerging.
First, the families of the three Leeds-based bombers were originally, in all likelihood, from Mirpur, Azad Kashmir. Mirpuris form 70 per cent of the British Muslim population, and the figure is even higher in northern towns. Just as the dominant role of Saudis in 9/11 led to a spotlight on the religion and politics of Saudi Arabia, so attention will focus on Mirpur.
This rural, impoverished district provided cheap, unskilled labour for Britain in the 60s and 70s. Most immigrants were from subsistence-farming communities and had had little or no schooling. They made a huge cultural and geographical leap to settle in the UK – the dislocation is hard to imagine.
One of the things they brought with them was the perception of a long history of dispossession and marginalization. Partition brought terrible bloodshed and the division of Kashmir between Pakistan and India. (This was the issue cited until very recently as the most pressing political priority in the UK by the majority of British Muslims.) Within Pakistan, Mirpur is to the more dominant Punjabis what the Irish have historically been to the British, explained one Mirpuri.
In the 80s the remittances began to flow in, fuelling an extraordinary boom in Mirpur, bringing computers, televisions, the Internet, satellite dishes, microwaves and fridges. One of the strongest Mirpuri traditions is that you marry your first cousin, so there is a constant exchange with the UK to renew the Mirpuri influence for the next generation. Mirpur has been an example – and there are others the world over — of the painful disruption in deeply traditional communities of a sudden influx of wealth and interface with modernity.
The narrative of dispossession gained new force in the 80s amid the collapse of the industries in which the first generation had come to work. Men who had worked long hours in the textiles and steel industry — and had been, arguably, more integrated into white workforces than their taxi-driver and curry-house sons — found themselves redundant. The more recent oppression and humiliation of Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan would have resonated powerfully with these collective memories of Yorkshire Muslims, passed from grandfather and father to son.
A second critical issue that needs to be plotted on to this map is that the vast majority of Mirpuris adhere to a tradition of Sufi Islam called Barelvi. One of the Indian Islamic revival movements of the late 19th century, Barelvi life revolves around holy elders known as pirs; their graves become shrines and places of pilgrimage
