Ziauddin Sardar finds the bigotry of the respectable worse than a bomb in Brick Lane

I know where I stand with Combat 18, the ultra-right terrorist group responsible for the bomb in Brick Lane. As far as I am concerned, bombing people for being different is explicit, honest and straightforward. Their bombs don't really worry me. The bombs that worry me are the ones that don't explode.

When my parents moved, in the early 1960s, from Karachi in Pakistan to Clapton Pond in Hackney, they burdened me with a special responsibility. As the eldest child in the family, it was my task to furnish the entire household with halal meat. In those days, the only halal meat shops in London were in the East End. So, for over two decades, I made weekly halal meat expeditions to Brick Lane. I also had regular encounters with members of the "British Movement" and other "skinheads", the forerunners of Combat 18.

I soon learnt that the games I used to play in Pakistan had acquired a new meaning. Where I come from, gulli dunda was a child's game with a stick (the "dunda") and a lozenge-shaped ball (the "gulli"). In Brick Lane I was the gulli, beaten to any shape it pleased the racist dundas. They called their game "Paki-bashing" and made your nose - mine in any case - more nearly the shape of Pakistan. But the racists in Brick Lane were bashing my body only to build up my resistance. Each encounter made me more determined to fight back.

The bomb in Brick Lane, and the earlier one in Brixton, will have exactly the same effect on the Asian and black communities. It will strengthen their resolve to fight the evil of racism with all their strength.

But the bombs and the ultra-right-wing groups only represent the visible tip of the iceberg of racism. As most of us know from personal experience, racism in Britain tends to be sly and covered with the veneer of respectability.

Insidious racism is more common than physical violence, and much more violating. It's in the way they look at you at passport control and examine and re-examine your little red European Union passport. It's in the withering politeness that you meet in official and bureaucratic gatherings, a politeness that declares you have some untold social disease. It's in the condescending and paternalistic attitudes you meet in journalistic circles that say "What? The wog can write?"

The insidious forms of racism lead a respectable life. They dwell in academia, the media, the professions. They decorate art and culture and would never dream of beating anyone up on a street corner. Yet while insidious racism would never soil its hands, it provides all the justification and attitudes of those who are too frightened to do anything but bash and bomb.

My most notable encounter with insidious racism occurred at the height of a pandemic called "Islamic revolution". "Mozzie phobia", which is what we Muslims call the fear of Islam in the west, is a hardy perennial. Any event anywhere involving Muslims always brings it to the surface. During the Iranian revolution, many noble pundits were venting their misinformation about the complex events in Iran. I persuaded the BBC to let me write and present a television documentary with the aim of bringing a degree of clarity to the general confusion. I wanted to separate the loonies from the people with peaceful and constructive ideas.

The documentary was commissioned. After 18 months of patient work, just when we were about to go to Iran and begin filming, the old enemy surfaced. The editor who commissioned the documentary was elevated to a higher post in Scotland and a new commissioning editor arrived. He looked at the pre-film script, sniffed the air and pronounced: "I can't really see anyone being interested in Islamic revolutions or the like. Anyway, I simply couldn't allow that Sardar person on the screen, he really is unbroadcastable." End of project.

There are two major elements to the close encounter. First, despite acres of media space being given to "the Mozzies are coming", the official verdict is that ignorance is much more entertaining and acceptable than giving airspace to attempts to understand. This is the enshrined method by which insidious racism lives and thrives. Second, I, by virtue of who I am, am not a fit person to represent my own people. I do not bring illumination to the subject from the perspective of the dominant order. What is more, I do not utter my opinions in Auntie-ish tones and complexion.

When you meet such brick walls of British distaste, it is much worse than being physically beaten. Why? Because this ignorance dignifies itself with the certainty that it alone is capable of understanding and determining what is relevant and important, that it knows me and what makes me tick better than I know myself. I have been fighting such racism for decades. It is harder to wrestle than any madmen who plant bombs.

The purpose of racism is to make you compliant, compliant to somebody else's definition of who you should become, how you should behave, what you should think of yourself. The only way to oppose racism, in my opinion, is never, ever to become that thing that British society conceives you to be.

Racist violence is frightening. From the streets of Hackney to the bomb explosions in Brixton and Brick Lane, there is reason to know the dangers inherent in racism. But British society has little appreciation of the strengths of character rampant racism is building in its minority communities. To exist in the face of danger and insecurity, in the teeth of distaste and incipient racism, and still apply yourself to building a community is a formidable collective act of courage and will. You haven't seen what the Asian and black minorities are truly capable of yet.

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