Staying Mute
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On Thursday the 7 July 2005, a few weeks before the school holidays, at 8.50am, a bomb went off on a Circle Line train travelling from Liverpool Street to Aldgate; within a minute a second explosion took place on another Circle Line train travelling from Edgware Road to Paddington. Two minutes later a third explosion took place on a Piccadilly Line train from Kings Cross to Russell Square – the most deadly and subterranean – and a fourth and final bomb detonated at 9.47am on the top deck of the number 30 bus at Tavistock Square. Fifty-two people died, not including the four men who carried out the attacks. Mohammed Siddique Khan, the ring-leader, trumpeted his motivations from the grave in a tape broadcast by Al Jazeera a few months later: ‘Your democratically elected governments continuously perpetuate atrocities against my people all over the world. And your support of them makes you directly responsible… Now you too will taste the reality of this situation.’
Last year I worked on a documentary about the bombings, one of many to be broadcast in 2025 to commemorate the 20th anniversary. My job was to find survivors and families of victims who could provide testimony about that day and their days since. Many of them described similar things – an orange fireball, silver streaks of glass, a sensation of being twisted and thrown to the ground, darkness, confusion, dead bodies. The National Archives have very beautifully preserved many of the testimonies (given at the coroner’s inquest into the attacks in 2011), which you can read online on a somewhat chaotically formatted archived website. This archive became the criterion with which we decided the ‘worthiness’ of 7/7 testimony – had they been called forward by the coroner to give witness? Were they in the same carriage as the bomb or not more than ten feet away from it? Twelve feet away from it? How injured were they, physically or psychologically? It became part of a wider question about what constituted a ‘survivor’, who should have a voice and whose testimony we trusted.
I was interested in his story as a Muslim victim. Would it be different in any meaningful way from the stories of the other survivors?
Among the dozens of people I spoke to was a man named Mubashir who found himself in the same carriage as one of the bombers as he commuted to work. I was interested in his story as a Muslim victim. Would it be different in any meaningful way from the stories of the other survivors? He took several weeks to respond to my initial message and approached our correspondence with general caution. Over some months of snatched conversation, I understood that no-one outside of his immediate family knew about his ‘status’ as a survivor, a label that he viewed with some shame. In his words, he had ‘put a lid on the whole thing’. I have used a pseudonym to refer to him in this piece.
Mubashir’s account of the day was not so unusual: he had left his home at 8am but missed his routine train by a few seconds, slowed down by the crush of people on the platform. Making it onto the next train, he chose not to sit down but instead stand by the doors, until a few moments later a blast keeled him to the ground and his hands pressed against the floor. Getting up, he realised his palms were burnt, and in the dim light he could make out dead bodies to the left of him. He began reciting the kalma quietly, not sure whether he too was dead. When he finally made it above ground, emerging with other passengers covered in soot, he was taken to a hospital where he was admitted for severe burn treatments and remained there for a month. He was unable to see his injuries, as mirrors are not allowed in burn units. When he returned home, the first thing he did was lock himself up in the bathroom to stare at his face and pick at the scars, something the doctors had expressly told him not to do. He wanted to take the bandages off, scrape away whatever debris had made its way into his skin.
The Metropolitan Police had undertaken a huge and urgent operation to identify all victims and survivors of the attacks, setting up a casualty bureau as well as a temporary mortuary in vast white tents in the gardens of the Honourable Artillery Company. For days many families searched for relatives in hospital beds across the city or waited in agony for the police to collect and identify body parts. There was also the job of identifying the bombers, made more complicated by the fact that in the impact of the blast their bodies became shrapnel, bones embedding in the bodies of other passengers. Overall, families of victims and survivors reported feeling supported and listened to by the police: there was ‘universally positive feedback on police family liaison officers, who fulfilled wide-ranging roles, often going well beyond the call of duty to provide practical assistance and advice to those in their care.’
But when the police got in touch with Mubashir, the conversation was unsettling. They had a series of questions for him – was he missing a bank card, by any chance? What were his exact movements the week before the 7 July? Had he ever been to Pakistan? It was later revealed that a bank card belonging to one of the bombers had been found at the scene and Mubashir shared his initials. His presence in the carriage was a point of suspicion for the police and they wanted an explanation, one that wasn’t simply that he was on his way to work and got ‘caught up’ in the attacks like hundreds of other commuters that day. Mubashir went on to describe months of harassment and intimidation from the police – ‘interviews’ that felt like interrogations, a feeling of being watched. The onus was on him to prove his victimhood.
With my encouragement, Mubashir warmed to the idea of being filmed, but as the weeks progressed, any attempts to confirm a date were kiboshed – an illness, a family holiday, a stressful period at work. I gave him the opportunity to once and for all tell me to stop contacting him, and I got it in the form of a flippant text message asking for an outrageous ‘fee’ for an interview, along with any free advertising we could provide on the programme for his new business. That put an end to all communication between us.
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In the years that followed the bombings, Mubashir’s life was not so different from other survivors. He threw himself into family life and his career, only erupting in strange moments of hysteria: an unexplained explosion of anger at a colleague at work, a panic attack in Hyde Park when he accidentally came across the 7/7 memorial. Years of never speaking about what happened to him, fearing a collapse of language, or something worse.
In the course of my research, I spoke to a woman who had been caught up in the attacks at the age of 14 on her way to a work experience gig in the City, the youngest survivor on record. She and her parents were determined she resume her life with aggressive normality as a teenager, but when she went to university, she found that she began to lose her voice. A stuttering, a breaking and eventually a muteness.
At the Eichmann trial in 1961, a concentration camp survivor named Yehiel Du-Nur (who had previously written about his experiences under the pseudonym K. Tzetnik) gave compelling testimony about ‘planet Auschwitz’: ‘I was there for about two years. The time there is not the same as it is here, on Earth…And the inhabitants of this planet had no names. They had no parents and no children…They did not live according to the laws of the world here and did not die. Their name was the number K. Tzetnik.’ When the prosecutor interrupted him with some direct questions, Du-Nur dramatically fainted on the stand; he was taken to a hospital where he remained in a coma for several weeks.
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Writing about her experience of Auschwitz, Charlotte Delbo described living ‘within a twofold being’, one which speaks of ‘common memory’, and one that is unable to speak of ‘deep memory’: ‘Auschwitz is there, unalterable, precise, but enveloped in the skin of memory…impermeable skin that isolates it from my present self.’ She describes leaving Auschwitz as a process of shedding skin, forced to relearn ordinary practices – brushing her teeth, using a knife and fork, smiling. She leaves behind the self of deep memory in Auschwitz, but fears its resurgence in normal life, or while telling a story. Yehiel Du-Nur also lived in this ‘twofold being’ – the K. Tzetnik who could write about his experiences and the Du-Nur who fainted in court. Auschwitz is another planet.
How thin is the membrane separating victim and terrorist?
I felt that Mubashir was split into these two beings – one the smiling, trepidatious man I met only once for coffee, and the other the flaky, cryptic man who sent me a quasi-insulting text. I saw – and perhaps very much wanted to see – something true in his volatility and erratic communication. Since Mubashir stopped speaking to me, I was unable to take his story forward and did not verify his account of persecution from the police. Despite that, the feeling of it, at least parts of it, felt truthful. In the immediate period after 7/7, London was a cauldron of suspicion and paranoia. On the 22 July, two weeks after the bombings, a Brazilian man named Jean Charles de Menezes was shot dead by Metropolitan Police officers at Stockwell station. Through a series of blunders and misidentifications from surveillance officers – led by future Commissioner Dame Cressida Dick, in Scotland Yard – de Menezes, an electrician on his way to work from the flat in Tulse Hill he shared with his cousins, was shot eight times in a tube carriage in front of shocked passengers. What followed was an array of lies from the Met Police (that de Menezes jumped over the ticket barriers fleeing from officers, that he was carrying a large backpack and wearing a winter coat) and inaccurate eyewitness accounts that described him as an ‘Asian guy’ carrying a ‘bomb belt with wires coming out.’
If a Brazilian electrician, pursued by the police as a result of a series of blunders (surveillance officers were working with a poor black-and-white photocopy of the real suspect and one officer missed a crucial identifying opportunity while he was urinating into a bottle) can be shot in cold blood in front of the British public – how thin is the membrane separating victim and terrorist? The Met were accused of doctoring a photo of de Menezes after the event to force a physical resemblance between him and the suspect they were really after, Ethiopian-born Hussain Osman, stretching and contorting his face to plead an honest mistake. An eyewitness told a later inquest that as the officer jumped on the train and pointed a pistol towards his head, de Menezes did not look frightened, but as if he was expecting someone to say something.
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How do we consume trauma today and for what purpose? Naomi Klein has written about how October 7th has been constantly memorialised from the moment it occurred, from off-Broadway verbatim plays to ‘solidarity missions’ to the site of the Nova Festival and immersive VR installations. When witnesses communicate via gesture over speech, we project our own meanings onto a screen – military meanings, nation-building meanings, reasons to bomb.
Mohammed Siddique Khan desired to have this last word. In his screed from the grave broadcast by Al Jazeera, he describes his victimhood. That the West has been bombing, gassing, imprisoning and torturing his Muslim brothers and sisters and it is only through a real act of violence – ‘a language that you understand’ – that people will finally appreciate his grievances. He takes the imperative to bear witness and give testimony to its most perverse extreme, a performance so jarring that his colleagues at the primary school he worked at struggled to believe it was the same person. Collective trauma – Bosnia, Palestine, Iraq – becomes a show, grotesque and weaponised, shrill and violent. He is a showman, and entirely unconvincing.
In the concentration camps, the most pathetic figure was the ‘musselman’. Primo Levi describes them as the ‘drowned who form the backbone of the camp’, the ‘non men who march and labour in silence, the divine spark dead within them, already too empty to suffer.’ Inept and doomed to selection, other prisoners would avoid them, their gloomy sense of defeat in the face of death unbearable. The mystery of the origin of the word persists – Levi proffered but was unconvinced by two theories: Islamic fatalism (an image of the musselman cowering and shivering like that of a Muslim prostrating in prayer) and, slightly more cartoonishly, head bandages that could resemble a turban. Because of their silence, the musselmen became the ‘complete witnesses’ – those who faced the Gorgon, who touched bottom, were privileged with an unspeakable but significant knowledge. Since they could not return, survivors like Levi and Charlotte Delbo speak in their proxy: ‘today, I am not sure that what I wrote is true. I am certain it is truthful.’ Perhaps muteness is the closest you can get to the thing.
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Sara Ahmad has been working as a freelance television producer for over a decade, making documentaries for the BBC, Channel 4 and Sky. She would like to write more.
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