The city of London, England, has elected Sadiq Khan, 45, as their new mayor. He is the first Muslin mayor of one of the largest, and most important, Western cities in the world. He defeated his conservative rival who is entrenched in old school, old family, conservative England.
The fact that Khan is a Muslim was a huge sticking point in the campaign as the conservatives tried to point to his possible connections to radical Islam. But Khan, and others, saw it as a victory for tolerance and to show the world that Muslims can make it in a Western country and be trusted by a non- Muslim population.
Khan is of Pakistani decent. His parents migrated to England during a great Pakistani migration to that country during the 1950’s and 1960’s. Khan’s father took a job as a rickshaw driver and moved his family into the British middle class. Khan went on to study law at college and became a practicing human rights lawyer before being elected to the House of Commons in the British parliament.
As the mayor of Europe’s largest city and the head of, perhaps the most important and influential city in the entire world, Khan has an opportunity to show England, and the world, the kind of England he envisions. He will have a hard go of it since most of the West has become extremely anti-Muslim and remains suspicious of Islam in general. Khan, and many others, hope that he will be able to diffuse some of the radical forms his religion has taken and to demonstrate that there are peaceful and moderate thinking Muslims and that they are, indeed, the majority.
It is considered an astonishing achievement, Khan being elected mayor of London, because he had to overcome centuries of the old boy network of Britain’s elite. This seems to say much about London and England at this time. Are the people of London, and throughout the country, ready for something different? Have the gaps between the rich and the struggling just become too wide to be ignored any longer?
This may be the platform where Khan will excel and where the people of London reach out to him in an effort to make things better for a struggling working class.
PHOTO CREDIT: Facebook