EXPRESS The amount of muslim women wearing burkas in Blackburn is on the rise

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The findings came as a shock to everyone except the people of Blackburn. Some areas of the town are 95 percent Asian and some shopkeepers have never served a white person. Many locals feel that over a handful of decades Blackburn, and many nearby northern towns, has been sleepwalking to ghettoization, separation and nothing short of a neo-apartheid.

The ‘system’, social, political, religious and judicial has seemingly failed this town on every level. Fear of offending the Muslim minority and political correctness, which values multiculturalism over integration, is cited by many Blackburners as the twin poisons which created this ill-at-ease, two-tier town. Express.co.uk Head of News Paul Baldwin was born and bred in Blackburn and recently went back to investigate.

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“WHAT the f**k are you doing?” asks a Muslim youth at the wheel of a shiny black BMW. And right there, in one agressive, and obviously threatening question, three days of good work by well-meaning Islamic and non-Islamic authorities to promote a picture of decency and harmonious integration in this struggling northern town is fatally, for me at least, undermined.

If you want world class Islam, you come to Blackburn

What the f**k I am doing in fact is taking an iPhone snap of a Muslim clothes shop. I have just interviewed the charming, helpful female owner and the snap is to serve as an aide memoir. But, I am in Whalley Range, Blackburn, Lancashire - the ‘Asian’ epicentre of a town with a population which is around 30 percent Muslim and I am a lone white face. It seems too much for the 22-year-old behind the wheel of 20 grand's worth of flash car. He feels the need to confront. And after three days walking the streets, meeting community leaders, educational specialists, and indeed many genuine and good people I feel this is the first time I’m talking to someone not selling me a thoroughly decent, but very fragile-feeling, integration agenda in my home town. There’s a white stranger in this young Muslim's community and he f***ing well wants to know why. I explain that I'm researching a piece on the burka and niqab, attempting to verify the anecdotal claims that the wearing of the ultra-conservative Islamic garments is on the rise in northern towns (it is).

EXPRESS Muhammad believes that the current generation of Muslims is much more religious than their parents

He is initially defensive saying “our f***ing women can wear what they want”, before adding: “Look, it's like if you had a load of diamonds and walked about with them in your hand... you're going to get attacked. But if you cover up those precious stones, put them in your pocket, you'll be safe.” I ask if he thinks the wearing of the veil and the burka is increasing on the streets of Blackburn and he says yes. And there's a reason. Naseem (not his real name – almost none of the young Muslim males I spoke to over three days would give me their names, usually citing 'mistrust of the media' as their reason) said the Islam practised in Blackburn is a “purer” form of Islam than that of the mother countries. He added: “Those places are weak and corrupted. They are westernised. Here we have a much purer form of Islam.” It feels like something a member of the Hitler Youth might have blithely trotted out about the Aryan race in 1939 and I ask if I should be worried. He laughs and assures me Islam is the religion of peace and that he hates “the Caliphate”. This feels like progress until he immediately proceeds to tell me how last week he threatened two white men with a bottle in a Preston restaurant because they seemed to look disparagingly on the Islamic clothing he was wearing. He said: “I had just come from Mosque and I was wearing my robe. I thought nothing of it and went to a restaurant in Preston with my friends. “There was a party of white people in there and these two guys kept looking at me.

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“I went over and said ‘is there a problem?’ And they didn’t even have the decency to answer. “Well, they kept on looking and I lost it and picked up a bottle and said ‘I’m going to f***ing smash this bottle in your face if you don’t stop looking at me.’” Although Naseem concedes he does have personal “anger issues” the juxtaposition of the “religion of peace” with a threatened violent assault on a non-believer did seem to perfectly sum up the essential problem many non-Muslims in this town have with Islam – namely that the religion of peace seems irrevocably wedded to violence. As we part he reminds me: “Islam is the fastest growing religion in the world mate, there's no stopping us.” The claim is delivered with the cocky terrace braggadocio of a football fan who's club has just got a super-wealthy new backer and suddenly feels the Premiership is there for the taking. A little later I approach another youngish man, wearing Islamic dress, on his way to mosque. I ask him the same question about the burka. He is initially hostile but warms slightly when I tell him I'm just interested in learning about Islam. Muhammad turns out to be 32-years-old and confesses to having previously been a “bad-boy”, drinking heavily, smoking cannabis, and being involved in petty crime. Suddenly in his early 20s he turned to Islam. He said: “The life I was living wasn't for me and I decided to shut myself off from my friends and fully embrace Islam.”

EXPRESS Paul talks of how Irish Catholics have been replaced by an Asian community since he lived there

Muhammad also agrees that there are more burkas and niqabs on Blackburn's streets than in previous years and adds that the current generation of Muslims is significantly more religious than their parents. He said: “The previous generation from India and Pakistan came here to earn a living and give their children a better life. They had less time for religion. But that's different now. Now scholars and religious men from all over the world come to Blackburn to study.” He's talking about Jamiatul-Ilm Wal-huda, a sprawling College of Islamic Knowledge and Guidance, which has helped put Blackburn on the global Islamic map. As his friend who would not give me his name said: “If you want world class food you go to Paris, if you want world class Islam you come to Blackburn.” I ask Muhammad the worried westerner's prime question about the Koran – why are there so many passages and verses which seem to want to kill me? He initially disputes the claim so I quote Koran 8:12 which is basically about striking terror into the hearts of disbelievers before removing their heads from their body – a practice which, unless you've really not been paying attention to the recent murderous geo-politics of the Middle East, will seem depressingly familiar. The 8:12 verse is one of many of the Koran's darker passages which are used by ISIS and their literal cohorts to justify ever more inhuman levels of barbarity. I ask whether the nasty passages couldn't be simply erased from the Koran just leaving the good bits but my scholarly interviewee laughs. He says: “See, you're already calling them nasty passages.

EXPRESS Mariya says that the burka is supposed to deter men as it's the woman's fault if a man falls in love

“It's the Koran, it's more than 1400 years old, you have to see it in the context of the time to understand it.” This is not the first time I get a less than satisfactory answer to this question and it won't be the last. He adds: “You're just a hypocrite, your Bible is also full of 'nasty bits'” I tell him I'm an atheist and it's not my Bible, though I take his point, but I add that no-one in the West uses the 2000-year-old Bible as a working guide to modern life the way the Koran seems to be used as, or at least deferred to, in some Muslim circles. We part friends and I actually think he's enjoyed the intellectual jousting. But the question of how a person can make a book which champions so much violence against non-Muslims the mainstay of their Islamic life in the 21st century remains unanswered. A little disclosure. I was born and brought-up in Blackburn, in a working class enclave rammed with Irish Catholics. Over the years this body of cheap Irish labour (for the now long-dead textile mills) was replaced by even cheaper Asian labour from the Indian subcontinent. Irish ghettos became Asian ghettos and the cheap labour-fuelled engine of capitalism – the real Northern powerhouse - continued to tick over. But while the Irish integrated and assimilated within a generation or two (as did the Polish immigrants) the newer diaspora didn't.

Burkini in pictures Mon, February 13, 2017 Photographs have emerged of armed French police confronting a woman on a beach and making her remove some of her clothing as part of a controversial ban on the burkini. We take a look at the burkini through news pictures Play slideshow Ken McKay/ITV/REX/Shutterstock 1 of 12 A model wearing a 'burkini' on ITV 'This Morning'. Images of French armed police officers ordering a Muslim woman to remove her 'burkini' on a packed Nice beach has further fuelled a debate over the banning of the full-body Islamic swimsuit

Which could not be further from the truth as when it comes to effective and equal community integration – of the kind being called for by the new report published by Open Democracy - Muslim women, open-minded and smart and engaging, almost certainly hold the key. Unfortunately for the Muslim women of Blackburn, if anything women's rights in the community are more at risk than ever. Fatima Shah is one of the bosses of Star Immigration Services on Preston New Road and also serves as a magistrate on the Blackburn bench. She said: “If anything it is worse. I am very worried about burkas on increasingly young girls, schoolgirls and teenagers. That cannot be an informed choice.” The openess and willingness to compromise and integrate shown by many of the young Muslim women I interviewed is, conversely, matched at the opposite end of the scale by the older men of the community who also seem level-headed, informed, and keen on proper integration. Which leaves the younger men. The younger men I spoke to were different. They were, to a man, suspicious or brimming with barely-contained aggression.

PH Paul speaks at Sacred Heart school in Whalley Range to pupil