A Norwegian Tragedy

6

The ‘Mother of the Nation’ Returns to Utøya

Wearing Bano Rashid's Wellies

When former Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland stepped ashore from MS Thorbjørn onto the ferry landing at about ten o'clock on Friday morning, the island had already been alerted. Although she said that she had never been there in worse weather, Gro was in high spirits.

‘Fun fact: we're the same height,’ tweeted her fellow passenger Hadia Tajik, a young member of the Storting with a background as a political adviser to the minister of justice and the prime minister.¹

Gro's bright-coloured clothes highlighted her tanned face (she has a home in France), and she had white trainers on her feet. Trainers! Perhaps the ‘Mother of the Nation’, as she is known, had forgotten the demands of a Nordic summer, but someone immediately came running down with a pair of tall wellies belonging to an AUF member from Akershus. It turned out that not only was Gro the same height as Hadia Tajik (1 m 62 cm), she also had the same shoe size as Bano Rashid. Wearing the boots and dressed in a bright-red rain jacket with the hood pulled well over her head, Gro stepped into the car that took her from the ferry landing, across the yard between the main building and the barn and up the steep gravel road beside the slope where AUF members would sit and listen to speeches or discussions, past the Norwegian Confederation of Trade Unions' barbecue huts on the crest of the hill and on to the square in front of the central complex, known as the Café Building. Eskil Pedersen and other central AUF members with and without umbrellas escorted her quickly across the yard and into the warm hub of the Café Building.

Any concerns that the young ones might let Gro down were completely unfounded. There was an excited atmosphere as soon as she came into the hallway and shook off the rain. She went through the door on the left to be welcomed by Bano and five hundred young AUF members. Gro rocked Utøya. Why?

‘Why?! Because she's Gro!’ a smiling and hoarse Bano explained afterwards. She was standing outside the tent she and her sister were sharing, her hair wet, with purple flip-flops on her otherwise bare feet. ‘I feel that she's done everything for women. If this were a festival with headline acts, Gro would be first, then Jens [Stoltenberg, the current prime minister].’

Many of the young people on Utøya identified with Gro, who had once been practically the only top female politician in Norway and one of very few in Europe. She had made a stand for equal opportunities, and that was a struggle that Hadia and the eighteen-year-old Bano could relate to. It was not only their height and shoe size they shared with Gro. Many of the girls from immigrant backgrounds had to fight a battle on two fronts in their quest to advance in Norwegian society, against the prejudice of Norwegians and against the expectations of their parents' culture.

The AUF's anti-racist profile was one of the reasons that Hadia Tajik had become a member, but this stance against discrimination and racism did not just appeal to girls from immigrant families. Many central members of the AUF were gay, including the county branch leaders from Oslo and Hordaland, Håvard Vederhus and Tore Eike­land, who were both killed that day, as well as the overall leader of the AUF, Eskil Pedersen from Telemark. People joked that there were so many gay members of the AUF that they would need to institute minimum quotas for straight members of committees. Asked why ‘homosexuality flourishes’ in the organization, Pedersen answered that ‘it is easy and safe to come out in the AUF’. The county branch leader for Oppland, Even Aleksander Hagen, said that ‘young gay and lesbian people have personal experience of discrimination and injustice, so it's quite natural that they get involved’.²

The homophobia characteristic of much of Norwegian youth culture was nowhere to be found on Utøya. People there were nice, as Anzor said. It was easy to get the impression that the AUF was made up of well-heeled school swots, the youth elite, the cream of the crop – like the former AUF leader Jens Stoltenberg – tall, dark-haired aristocrats. In reality, though, perhaps it was precisely those who were not so well heeled or fortunate who needed the AUF: young gay people from rural areas and minority youth who wanted to rise up and make headway in Norwegian society. To some of the young AUF members, Gro represented the dream of a Norway with no barriers, where everyone had equal opportunities. To other people, she represented a blast from the past, a figure from a time that seemed more serious, dramatic and black and white than the summer of 2011, when the news was dominated by naked celebrities and disease-carrying ticks.

Those in the audience picked up on different things from Gro's talk at Utøya that morning. ‘Everything is connected to everything,’ tweeted Hadia Tajik, citing one of Gro's most famous quotations. ‘Now I've heard her say it LIVE!’ Stine-Renate Håheim took note of Gro's point that it takes time to make changes. Results are not a function of good ideas but of time and passionate determination. Ida Spjelkavik was keeping warm under a blanket at the back of Storsalen [the Main Hall], listening attentively when Sam from the global group made a comment. The secretary general of the Uganda Young Democrats made the point that Gro and the Ugandan President Museveni came to power at around the same time, but that Museveni had never left power. He pointed out the contrast between Norway and Uganda to demonstrate how bad things were in his home country, but the underlying point of Sam's question was possibly that drama and history had a different place than in Norway, where things went more or less according to plan.

The class struggle, the struggle for women's liberation, the cultural struggle – on the surface it could seem as if all the struggles in Norwegian society had already been fought to a conclusion. The yellow blanket Ida had over her legs reminded her of the nineties for some reason, as she sat there interpreting the debate for members of the global group.

By the wall, a tall and smart boy stood alone, following the debate attentively. He had also put questions to Gro, and, just like the global group, he was interested in seeing the struggle for rights from an international perspective. Arshad Mubarak Ali originally came from Madla in Stavanger but was the leader of the AUF's Oslo delegation. Unlike many of the ethnically Norwegian AUF members, Arshad had not had an easy journey to Utøya. He had followed his own path, crossing desert sands and deep valleys, before arriving in this fellowship on a green island.

11 September 2001

Arshad's parents came to Norway from Sri Lanka in the eighties. His mother's relatives were from an Arab background, while his father's family were Malays from East Asia. In Sri Lanka, for the sake of simplicity, they had been characterized as Muslims, one of many minorities on the green island paradise off the tip of the Indian subcontinent. The Muslims were a small group on the island, where the Sinhalese dominated and the Tamil people formed the largest minority. The Sri Lankan civil war had brought a large number of Tamils to Norway as refugees, but Arshad's cosmopolitan family came to Rogaland county in south-western Norway as economic migrants.

Arshad's siblings all went through higher education in Norway, in business administration and economics or social pedagogy. One of his sisters had continued the family's westward migration and worked as an economist in Montreal. His brother was a trainee at the Norwegian Embassy in Riyadh, and his father often took part in missions abroad: with the UN in Iran and Aceh, with the EU in Afghanistan and Kazakhstan. Arshad was the youngest of four children, and the only one to be born in Norway.

At Hafrsfjord, near Stavanger, three enormous swords stand in the rocks by the shore to commemorate the unification of Norway as one kingdom by King Harald Fairhair. The tall, slender school pupil gazed with interest at the monument to the Battle of Hafrsfjord in 872 (or thereabouts). Arshad was good at school, when he wanted to be.

On Tuesday 11 September 2001, Arshad Mubarak Ali was thirteen years old, almost fourteen, and was in year nine at Gosen Lower Secondary School in Stavanger. Just like most other fourteen-year-olds, he had a great and burning desire not to stand out. He wanted to be like everyone else, that was all. Anonymous, left in peace. He was a little quiet at his desk but was one of the gang. When the ill-fated aircraft slammed into the twin towers that afternoon, the media shockwaves reached Stavanger too. Everyone was affected, and everyone had thoughts about the attack. Why do they hate us?

As part of processing their impressions, the pupils in Arshad's class were all asked to write what they thought about the tragedy in New York. One by one, the teenagers went up to the board. Finally it was Arshad's turn, the only Muslim in the class. The teacher sat like a kind of judge, tilting her head, waiting to hear what he had to say. Are you with us or with the terrorists?

The day before, he had just been Arshad, but now he noticed his classmates looked at him in a different light. It dawned on him that it was not clear who he was. ‘It's a terrible attack. An attack on everyone,’ Arshad told the class. ‘A massacre of innocent people. Nobody has the right to do something like that.’

Arshad said what he thought, but it was not pleasant standing there. He did not feel like himself but a representative of something else, something unfamiliar. A Muslim in Stavanger. Was he really Norwegian? Who was Arshad Mubarak Ali? Who was he really? He shuffled back to his place.

‘Thought you'd support them,’ one of the boys said. The boy did not mean any harm and stared open-eyed at Arshad. Neither had the teacher meant any offence when she said that the Taliban in Afghanistan were an example of how Muslims did not respect women. What could he say? Arshad shook his head.

Hip-hop is for everyone, but perhaps especially for those who are a little different. If you were young and from an immigrant background in Norway in the nineties or the first decade of the new millennium, it was logical to turn a little ‘ghetto’, or at least to pretend. For a few years, hip-hop became the answer to the question of who Arshad was. In New York, the jihadists had brought that question to the fore, and Arshad answered by becoming part of a youth culture that was both edgy and mainstream, black and white at the same time.

Arshad pulled on his hoodie and got a tag. ‘Son’ was his name on the walls around Madla. His crew was called KAP. They graffiti-bombed the local pump house and the walls along the main road from Sandnes. The cars rushed past while the boys nonchalantly sprayed throwies on the concrete, their own tags and ‘KAP’, ‘KAP’. One night, the lads were near the local organic farm. Someone had already painted a piece there, and Arshad felt worried. He felt as if someone was approaching in the darkness and whispered a warning to the boys as they painted. His voice was calm, but the boys took him seriously, put their cans in their bags and ran off. They were not all fast enough, and one of the crew was caught. He grassed on a couple of the other lads, but not on Arshad. It was as if Arshad had a special talent for disappearing, for blending into the walls. Arshad was not the craziest member of the crew, nor was he the one who shouted loudest, and he avoided being exposed, getting fines or having to do community service.

KAP's pieces were so-so. Their vandalism did not make a big name for them in Stavanger, nor did it bring any six-figure fines as there had been for taggers in Oslo a few years earlier. Things never became really serious for ‘Son’ or ‘Kids Against the Police’, and Arshad did not follow the path to the darker sides of Norwegian hip-hop: crime, fighting or drugs. He did not even like rap, but preferred techno and trance to start with, then Rage Against the Machine, before ending up with the eighties heroes The Cure and Joy Division. Arshad did not want fame either, but anonymity. Tagging was exciting, but Arshad did not feel he had to seek out the extremes or cross boundaries. Most of all, he wanted to be part of the crowd, someone who would not stand out.

At the same time, he followed his own path. Instead of writing a history essay about Mussolini, he wrote a poem. Instead of doing his Norwegian homework, he went to the library at Sølvberget, Stavanger's cultural centre, and read the diary of Robert Falcon Scott, the British officer who gave his life in the race to the South Pole, losing with style against the Norwegians on their skis. He read The Lord of the Rings in his bedroom, and sometimes he played games from the moment he came home until he went to bed: Hitman, Quake and Wolfenstein, in which his American avatar shot Nazis by the bucketload. Strategy games and shoot-’em-ups, just like all the other boys. Arshad did not stand out.

But pressure came to him not only from his surroundings. Migrant families like Arshad's know that, however much you travel, flee or move house, there is one thing you will never lose and that nobody can take away from you: your education. School was a main concern for the family. In addition, his father, Mubarak Ali, sat on the city council for the Labour Party and was an example of how people could find their place in the community in Norway even if they were born abroad. Arshad's big brother was in the Conservative Party. Weighing down on the teenage Arshad's shoulders were expectations that he had to do well at school, as his siblings had, and that he had to take responsibility in the community, repaying his debt to society.

‘Son’ was signed up by his father to the AUF. Now the way to Utøya was open, but would he follow it straight there? It was almost too obvious. Arshad started at St Olav Upper Secondary School in 2003 and chose to follow the International Baccalaureate curriculum from his second year. It was then that he slowly began to find the answer to who he was. One afternoon, he sat there staring at his history homework. He had a Norwegian assignment to do as well: his class had to write a role play. On impulse, he decided to solve his homework problem by writing a dialogue between King Oedipus and King Harald of Norway about democracy and dictatorship. His essay was meant as a joke, but Arshad was given top marks and suddenly realized that he had talent.

He began writing poems. Instead of tagging walls, Arshad wrote about ‘The Girl Who Vanished’. In short sentences, he described infatuation and a first-person voice in the tension between being isolated ‘behind the windows’ and journeying to ‘the Holy Land’. In his poems, large concepts could be boiled down to only a few words. His poems were a way of dealing with big questions of love, identity, faith and doubt. Problems that were too complicated or too personal to be expressed directly could be described with images. ‘Butterflies lie too’, Arshad wrote, ‘as they fly about, radiating joy.’

The pretences around him, or perhaps within him, turned into letters on a white page. Arshad studied the poet Sigbjørn Obstfelder and his famous lines: ‘I must have come to the wrong planet! / It is so strange here …’³ He read Knut Hamsun's Victoria, about the miller's son Johannes. Why could Hamsun's wanderer not be an immigrant too? During his time at upper secondary, Arshad definitively left his isolation ‘behind the windows’. In his second year, he became active in the AUF. His father's party had values he identified with: fellowship and a minimum of benefits for everybody, irrespective of who they were and where they came from. A unified Norway.

In his third year, Arshad joined the youth group at Rogaland Theatre. He played the role of the Prince in the club's production of Snow White – an elegant prince from Rogaland, dark-eyed, tall and smiling. Drama was training for politics; it had to do with presentation and timing. Drama was also a way in which Arshad could express the pressure he felt from all sides, being able to act out situations and conflicts that reminded him of the time he stood alone in front of his class and distanced himself from the attack on the World Trade Center.

Unfortunately, life does not follow a straight line, with each year marking an improvement on the last. In the spring of 2006, Arshad failed his IB exam, and the following year would be a brutal re-encounter with the question of who he was. It was like ending up in a basement with no exit. His bedroom became a prison cell. He worked for a few months at the OBS supermarket. Arshad would go from shelf to shelf in the enormous shop, making sure that all the products were there and panicking at the thought of having to stay there for a whole year, or five or ten years. He had to move on.

That was when the idea of a pilgrimage to Mecca began to take shape. Arshad had always been a believer, even though he had concealed it well as a teenager, but now the situation became urgent. He had to take a stand on the question of Islam.

Ideas That Kill

Life is tangled, and the world is dirty. People have always longed for purity, unity and order, but sometimes this yearning has taken a bad turn.

In July 1942, a number of respected Japanese academics and intellectuals gathered in the old imperial city of Kyoto. At that time, Japanese troops were advancing through the Pacific region, in China and in South-East Asia. Their German allies were on the cusp of conquering the Caucasus. The reflection of the Temple of the Golden Pavilion could still be seen in the lake as an image of timeless beauty. Hayashi Yoken had not yet been admitted to the temple monastery. The theme of the conference was ‘how to overcome the modern’, and the actual war was barely mentioned by the assembled Japanese academics, who were certain of victory. Instead, the participants defined modernity as Western influence, an illness that had infected the Japanese spirit. Capitalism, science, modern technology and democracy had all contributed to breaking down the original unity that had existed in oriental culture, and especially Japanese culture. One participant characterized the struggle as a battle between Western intellect and Japanese blood. The participants painted a picture of the decadent West as cold, mechanical and soulless, the opposite of the spiritual Japan.

In their Occidentalism: A Short History of Anti-Westernism, Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit use this conference as a starting point to study the history of antagonism towards the West, defined as liberalism, individualism, capitalism and secularism. Contrary to how it may appear, Occidentalism is not an ideology that developed outside Europe, in post-colonial contexts or in parts of the world that did not end up under Western domination, such as Japan. Hatred towards the West originated in the West. The authors trace the roots of Occidentalism to German Romanticism, showing how ideas that emerged as a reaction to the Enlightenment and French military dominance have travelled across the world, from the Slavophile reaction in Russia via Japan, China and Afghanistan and back to Europe. Buruma and Margalit show how Occidentalism had affected a wide spectrum of political thinkers, from the German cultural pessimist Oswald Spengler, who wrote about the downfall of the Abendland (the ‘evening land’, or the West), to the young Afghan jihadist who allegedly said that ‘the Americans love Pepsi-Cola, we love death’.

Buruma and Margalit stress that modernity and the West can mean different things at different times. Even though both extreme Marxists and extreme right-wingers can agree in their criticisms of the West, there are other things that divide them. Occidentalist ideas have also existed in other, earlier historical periods – for example, in Roman authors' descriptions of the contrast between Rome's purportedly noble Republican past and the decadent and corrupt Imperial Age or in the Judeans' condemnation of the Whore of Babylon. Occidentalism is permeated by images of decline and the end of days: Babylon is wallowing in sin, while Rome is heading towards ruin. Nevertheless, it was during the period of industrialization following the French Revolution that Occidentalism took on its present form. In modern times, such eschatological notions are often accompanied by conspiracy theories, hostile images, the rhetoric of victimhood and descriptions of oneself and like-minded people as the chosen few: a chosen few who kill in self-defence. The occidentalist reaction has run like a dark vein throughout the history of modernity up to the present day, acting as a starting point for some of the most dramatic conflicts in, and attacks on, the West.

Buruma and Margalit's book was written against the background of the War on Terror. One of the book's aims is to portray how Islamist extremism, as construed by people such as Osama bin Laden and Sayyid Qutb (a former leading member of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood), was rooted in fascism and other Western reactionary ideologies. Instead of defining Occidentalism by accounting for its historical context, they define it through its fundamental ideas. According to the authors, the occidentalist ‘hostility’ towards modernity can best be understood as hostility towards an image of the West made up of four interrelated elements: the city, the bourgeois, reason and the infidel.

[W]e have identified particular strands of Occidentalism that can be seen in all periods and all places where the phenomenon has occurred. These strands are linked, of course, to form a chain of hostility –hostility to the City, with its image of rootless, arrogant, greedy, decadent, frivolous cosmopolitanism; to the mind of the West, manifested in science and reason; to the settled bourgeois, whose existence is the antithesis of the self-sacrificing hero; and to the infidel, who must be crushed to make way for a world of pure faith.⁴

Occidentalists hate the city, with its soulless markets, mixture of races, feminized men and unheroic bourgeoisie with wallets instead of hearts. They hate the mechanical Western reason without depth or soul, and the secular rationality that implies parting not only with God, but also with time-honoured institutions such as the family and the nation-state. Opposed to the Western merchant is the hero whose duty it is to purge the infidel enemy in order to create a divine mystical kingdom on earth. These are not just the exotic thoughts of bitter people sitting in their cellars but effective ideas that can kill, as the nature of Occidentalism is such that it encourages and is easily translated into brutal actions.

In a speech in 2002, referring to the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden put it like this: ‘The values of this Western civilization under the leadership of America have been destroyed. Those awesome symbolic towers that speak of liberty, human rights, and humanity have been destroyed. They have gone up in smoke.’⁵ Destroying symbolic buildings, such as the Temple of the Golden Pavilion in Kyoto, the twin towers in Manhattan or the H Block in Oslo's government district, can be an expression of narcissistic jealousy of the elites and those in power. It can also be an expression of occidentalist contempt for the city. Often it might be both.

Occidentalism, Norwegian Style

The phenomenon of Occidentalism has many local versions. There are some facts that point towards an occidentalist tradition in Norway too, even though it may not be particularly strong. Norwegian National Socialism was a relatively confined phenomenon. Wilfred ‘Little Lord’ Sagen, Johan Borgen's fictional West End character, was the exception, an outsider, and not a typical representative of Oslo's West End or of Norway as a whole. Although the thirties were a difficult time, the AUF members who fought against the paramilitaries of the fascist party Nasjonal Samling were still more representative of Norwegians. Even after the German occupation, when Nasjonal Samling was installed as a puppet regime in Norway with wide-ranging powers and was the only legal party, it never achieved genuine popular support.

The leader of the movement, Vidkun Quisling, was, like the Japanese intellectuals in Kyoto, concerned about the spiritual decline he perceived at the time. ‘The most crass expression of this spiritual crisis has been in the predominant selfish materialism that is killing ideality, belief and the spirit of self-sacrifice, and is causing disquiet in society and in the human mind,’ the 1934 party programme of Nasjonal Samling stated. ‘Our country is not served well either by the class struggle and party tyranny of Marxism or the conservative parties' laissez-faire policies and concessions to Marxism. They are two sides of the same materialistic outlook on life.’⁶ According to Nasjonal Samling, the financial and social crises of the thirties were primarily expressions of spiritual weakness.

Quisling's solution, as he articulated it while plotting a coup as defence minister under Bondepartiet [the Farmers' Party], involved ‘destroying the imported and pernicious communistic revolutionary movement, which does not agree with Nordic uniqueness and which in itself is fundamentally false and evil’.⁷ That way, Quisling planned to awaken Norway and ‘get our people to understand that their life-giving foundations are their Nordic descent and character […]. The Norwegian people must get to know their significance, their duty and their responsibility as some of the leading representatives of the most esteemed race in the world, the great Nordic race, which has been and remains the most important creator and supporter of world civilization.’

As a thinker and an author, on the one hand Quisling was woolly and academic with a penchant for unrealistic philosophizing, while on the other hand he was aggressive, conspiratorial and self-centred – not entirely unlike his occidentalist successor, the writer Anders Behring Breivik. The Norwegian people would remain a disappointment to Quisling. Even though they stopped laughing at him in the end, he did not manage to awaken them. Instead he was sentenced to death and executed at Akershus Fortress in October 1945, after a trial that was followed around the world.

A group that laid the groundwork for Nasjonal Samling and Quisling was Den norske rådgivende komité for rasehygiene [the Norwegian Advisory Board for Racial Hygiene], which was founded in 1908 and developed theories about the racial composition of Norway (finding out, among other things, that the superior ‘long-skulled’ population was in some places mixed with ‘short-skulled’ people – in other words, people of inferior genetic quality). Some of the eugenics theorists warned against the hereditary material of Jewish people, which they associated with monetary power, while the Germanic race was genetically linked to the soil. The eugenicists were also interested in migration but, since at that time Norway was a country of out-migration, the problem presented was the opposite of today's. A worried Jon Alfred Mjøen, the group's central figure, wrote: ‘As the years go by, Norway is giving away its best sons and daughters to overseas countries, while at the same time accepting and even supporting foreign, often inferior elements. […] In terms of quality, if one considers the difference between the stock of people leaving and entering the country, it can be appreciated how disastrous this must be for our country.’⁸ Many of the eugenicists' ideas were generally accepted in the interwar period, but Mjøen and his supporters also encountered considerable criticism from scientific quarters. With the significant and aggressive exceptions of Quisling and sections of Nasjonal Samling, Occidentalism has remained a marginal phenomenon in Norway.

After the war, the legacy of Nasjonal Samling lived on at the periphery of Norwegian society, inspiring the neo-Nazi circles among which Jens Erik – the bomber from Ris – moved during the eighties, as well as extremist opponents of immigration in the nineties and Muslim-haters in the noughties. Occidentalism has not, however, been the exclusive domain of the political right wing.

The left's hatred of the bourgeoisie, the city and capitalism reached an ideological and rhetorical peak with the political awakening that struck the Norwegian universities together with the 1968 generation. The Maoists of the intellectually influential Arbeidernes Kommu­nistparti (marxist-leninistene) [Workers' Communist Party (Marxist-Leninists)] supported both Mao's Cultural Revolution and the Khmer Rouge's genocidal project in Cambodia, which in fact implied not only the annihilation of the bourgeoisie and ‘capitalism’ but also a war against the city as an idea and as a reality. In an attempt to create the ideal communist state, city-dwellers were deported to the countryside and subjected to forced labour, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths.

After 9/11, attention was also drawn to Islamist extremism in Norway. The best-known examples were the statements of a Kurdish refugee from Iraq, Najmuddin Faraj Ahmad, known as Mullah Krekar. In Kurdistan, Krekar had led the paramilitary group Ansar al-Islam, a group that was suspected of executing prisoners of war and that the US authorities later placed on their list of terrorist groups. Krekar supported bin Laden's struggle against the West and commended the Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was killed by the Americans in 2006. Al-Zarqawi was known for having masterminded suicide attacks and for having beheaded hostages personally. The films showing the executions were uploaded onto the Internet and were widely distributed. It was not only Islamists who watched them. Many people were fascinated by the extreme images of the powerless victims and the executioner al-Zarqawi. Al-Zarqawi was judge, jury and executioner, thereby having supreme command of life and death.

Throughout the first decade of the new millennium, Islamists were the focus of attention for the media, politicians and the intelligence community, and Krekar was not the only one in Norway to make extremist statements. In 2010, during a demonstration against the newspaper Dagbladet (which had reproduced one of the notorious Muhammad cartoons), a young Norwegian Muslim from an Iraqi background warned Norway about a potentially imminent 9/11, an Islamist terrorist attack on Norwegian soil. The man was called Mohyeldeen Mohammad, and in the newspapers he defended the death penalty for homosexuality. According to Mohyeldeen, while democracy by definition broke God's laws, the death penalty for homosexuality was in pursuance of sharia.

Among his radical supporters was Arfan Bhatti, a former criminal thug from the Young Guns gang who had found religion while in prison. At one point, Bhatti was infamous as Oslo's most dangerous enforcer, and he had been convicted of having shot at a synagogue in Oslo. Mohyeldeen Mohammad was a student at a conservative Islamic university in Medina. There were a couple of other Norwegian students at the university too. One of them was a city councillor from Stavanger by the name of Arshad Mubarak Ali.

Mecca

Instead of going to Utøya to find his place in his father's party and in Norwegian social democracy, it seemed as if Arshad was heading in the opposite direction. Over the New Year period of 2007–8, he went on the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca that, in principle, Muslims should make once in their life. Over 2006 and 2007, Arshad had reflected on his own position under the conflicting pressure of the demands and culture of his parents, Norwegian society and Islam. It had taken many years for Arshad but, as with many European Muslims, 9/11 had eventually brought him closer to his faith. It dawned on him that he was Muslim not only by belonging to an ethnic group from Sri Lanka but also in the sense that he was actually religious. He needed to explore in earnest what Islam meant, so he travelled to Mecca together with a friend from Stavanger.

They landed at Jeddah in December and went almost immediately to Mecca, two twenty-year-old Norwegian boys among hundreds of thousands of mainly older men from across the large Muslim world. In the warmth and the dust, wrapped in the prescribed white clothing, Arshad walked out onto the plain to pray. Later he was one of the enormous crowd slowly walking seven times around the Kaaba, the cuboid building incorporating the Black Stone and shrouded in a black silk cloth. This ritual is called Tawaf and reminds Muslims of the unity among believers, the community of which they are part. Approximately 3 million pilgrims performed the Hajj that year.

It was an intense experience. In Mecca, Arshad was far away from Norway and his family. The unity of faith implied by the Tawaf seemed to relieve him of a sense of deprivation he had felt, as a descendant of migrant families that constituted a minority within a minority, at least since that day at lower secondary school after 9/11. At Medina, Arshad applied to the Islamic University. He was inspired by his pilgrimage and wanted to study Arabic. Admission was also free of charge for foreigners. Over the course of the four weeks he spent there, he discovered things that surprised him. When Arshad had his admission interview at the university in Medina, the man at the desk asked him where he came from.

‘Norway,’ Arshad answered.

‘And your parents?’

‘Sri Lanka,’ he answered.

The man looked at him and wrote on his papers that Arshad was from Sri Lanka. Was he not Norwegian? All kinds of service and retail jobs in Saudi Arabia were carried out by foreigners from Asia. They were poorly paid and had no job security. It was almost slavery. The guest workers looked like Arshad, but, since he was from Europe, he was treated differently. Saudi society had a double nature. There were almost no women to be seen. It seemed as if the literal inter­pretations of the faith, as advocated by many of the Wahhabi Saudi imams, were keeping people apart rather than bringing them together. The sense of community around the Kaaba was in contrast to the walls, barriers and hierarchies he encountered elsewhere in Saudi Arabia.

Arshad travelled home to the Norwegian winter and sent his final application papers to Medina from Stavanger. His interest in Islam and desire to learn Arabic were still strong. Time passed, and he felt that some of the people he had got to know in Saudi Arabia had almost stopped thinking for themselves. Some of the other Western students apparently believed everything they heard, swallowing it hook, line and sinker. The last straw came when he argued that Norwegian imams should be brought up in Norway and should be familiar with the cultural context. Arshad singled out Saudi Arabia as a bad example. ‘This country has to change,’ said Arshad. ‘It's no example to others.’

In reply, he was told that the Saudi society was Salafi, fundamental – perfect in its faith. Saudi Arabia was following the right path and had done so from the start. ‘Uh-huh,’ thought Arshad. If he would also start to reason like that if he went there, then forget about it.

He had no contact with Mohyeldeen Mohammad, but he gathered that Mohyeldeen also stood out there. After Mohyeldeen's notorious speech in Oslo, the university in Medina had an Arabic translation sent to them. The university apparently wanted to keep him on in order to try to change his mind, but the authorities were opposed to having such a controversial student in the country. As a result, Mohyeldeen's place at the university was withdrawn, followed by his residence permit. He was deported from Saudi Arabia in September 2011. Back in Norway, Arshad criticized Mohyeldeen, not only for his aggressive statements but also for what Arshad saw as a primitive view of theology. The Koran was a text that needed interpretation, Arshad thought. Islam was a set of principles, not a collection of immutable dogmas to be used in connection with all things at all times.

Mecca was a turning point for Arshad. Back home in Norway, he thought about the pressures that had made his teenage years difficult. He saw himself at the centre of a triangle made up of his parents' Sri Lankan heritage, Norwegian society and Islam. Being pulled in every direction, it was tempting for him to concentrate on just one side, choosing just one thing – to do things by the letter. At the same time, though, to do that was just as impossible as choosing between your head and your heart. Arshad depended on all three parts of the triangle to feel whole; not just one thing, but many. Mohyeldeen Mohammad's belief in absolute purity was a dangerous illusion.

Arshad never took up the place he was offered at the university in Medina. Not everybody picked up on that piece of information, or not everybody wanted to pick up on it. The possibility that an Islamic extremist was sitting on Stavanger City Council was perhaps so shocking, or alternatively so appealing, that not everybody looked into the details more closely. The editor of the right-wing website Document.no, Hans Rustad, wrote that the father and son pair

drew notice to themselves in national political circles with their proposal to ban alcohol in the city centre of Stavanger. […] The [Medina] university's list of accepted students for 2009/2010 shows that Arshad Ali Mubarak [sic] attends there together with Mohyeldeen Mohammad. Mohyeldeen Mohammad has been portrayed by the Norwegian media as something of a freak. But he is not alone after all. Ostensibly well-integrated city councillors from the Labour Party can become so religious that they start religious studies in Saudi Arabia. The enigma is bigger and closer to us than we like to think.⁹

The cryptic final sentence may suggest that Rustad saw a connection between Islamic extremism and the Labour Party.

Instead of taking up his place at the Islamic University of Medina, Arshad began studying history. He took a specialist undergraduate module in Norwegian Viking history and started the master's degree in Nordic Viking and Medieval Culture at the University of Oslo. His dissertation dealt with the unification of Norway – in other words, the Battle of Hafrsfjord and its aftermath – as it was portrayed and utilized during the national awakening of the nineteenth century. Today the sword sculptures stand embedded in the rocks at Hafrsfjord, but was Norway ever really unified? Sometimes, the differences between people briefly gaped open like chasms. Arshad published an anthology of poetry in 2008 and became the cultural editor of the student newspaper. He became active in the Oslo branch of the AUF in addition to sitting on the city council in Stavanger. He worked as a journalist for Stavanger Aftenblad, reporting from Sri Lanka. In the summer of 2011, he decided to take action about the problem of anti-Semitism in Oslo's schools, when a report indicated that Muslim pupils were often responsible. Arshad argued in favour of increasing awareness and knowledge of the Holocaust among Muslim pupils and involving influential Norwegian Muslims in discussions about anti-Semitism.

‘If we succeed in wiping out anti-Semitism,’ Arshad wrote in Stavanger Aftenblad, ‘we can use the same means to combat prejudice towards other religious and cultural groups, including Muslims.’¹⁰ Given Arshad's own background, perhaps it was not that strange that he identified with the small Jewish minority in Norway.

Arshad Mubarak Ali (photograph by Mohammed F. Basefer)

Arshad had fought both internal and external battles to reach where he was in the summer of 2011, on Utøya as the election campaign secretary and delegation leader for the Oslo branch of the AUF. Instead of sailing with activists to Gaza, his engagement in Middle East issues involved criticizing Saudi double standards towards Muslim believers. After having put up washing rotas for his delegation, Arshad went to the Main Hall. When Gro had finished her address, it was Prableen Kaur's turn. She was the deputy leader of the Oslo AUF, Arshad's closest friend on the island, and he had helped her to formulate the question she was now putting to Gro.

‘So I was three years old when you resigned as prime minister,’ Prableen said from the speaker's platform. ‘I've tried hard to think back to when I was that small, but it's not easy to remember much. All the same, I do remember well what my parents used to tell me about you: that you were an incredibly capable woman who, among other things, made it possible for my dad to be at home with me and my little sister too. He was very pleased about that.’

She then referred to the fact that women were central figures in the Arab Spring, for example in Yemen, and that the struggle for women's liberation in many countries concerned quite fundamental rights: paid work, education and political influence. ‘What do you think about these similar yet also quite different struggles for equal rights?’ Prableen asked in conclusion.

Times change, and new generations were entering the social-democratic family. Arshad and Prableen could have been Gro's grandchildren, as could Bano and Hadia, but the struggle for equality and recognition continued in many ways as it had done before. When Gro left the island and headed back towards land, Arshad and Prableen went to Arshad's room in the downstairs back wing of the large Café Building. Together they took a short break before the afternoon's programme. It was still raining.

Notes

All translated quotations from non-English-language texts are the translator's own, unless indicated otherwise. Quotations from Breivik's compendium are reproduced as in the original English text, although some minor changes have been made to punctuation and capitalization.

1 Hadia Tajik, ‘Snart på Utøya for å høre på Gro Harlem Brundtland. Funfact: Vi er like høye :)’ [Heading to Utøya to listen to Gro Harlem Brundtland. Fun fact: We're the same height :)], Twitter.com, 22 July 2011, https://twitter.com/HadiaTajik/status/94314303951351808.

2 Einar Lie Slangsvold, ‘Røde homoer’ [Red and gay], Gaysir.no, 5 March 2008, www.gaysir.no/artikkel.cfm?CID=12799.

3 Sigbjørn Obstfelder, ‘Jeg ser’ [I see], in Digte (Bergen: John Grieg, 1893), pp. 15–16.

4 Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit, Occidentalism: A Short History of Anti-Westernism (London: Atlantic Books, 2004), p. 11.

5 Cited ibid., p. 13.

6 Nasjonal Samling, ‘Orden, rettferd og fred: Program for Nasjonal Samling’ [Order, justice and peace: Nasjonal Samling programme], 1934, www.nsd.uib.no/polsys/data/filer/parti/10279.rtf.

7 Cited in Oddvar K. Hoidal, Quisling: A Study in Treason (Oslo: Norwegian University Press, 1989), p. 72.

8 Jon Alfred Mjøen, Rasehygiene [Racial hygiene], 2nd edn (Oslo: Jacob Dybwad, 1938), pp. 235–8.

9 Hans Rustad, ‘Ap-representant går ved Medina-universitetet’ [Labour Party representative attends university in Medina], Document.no, 17 February 2010, www.document.no/2010/02/ogsa_ap-representant_ved_medin/.

10 Arshad Mubarak Ali, ‘Jødehets er ikke et særskilt muslimsk problem’ [Anti-Semitism is not a uniquely Muslim problem], Stavanger Aftenblad, 27 June 2011: www.aftenbladet.no/meninger/kommentar/Jdehets-er-ikke-et-srskilt-muslimsk-problem-2829275.html.