Bus driver’s son became London’s first Muslim mayor

Sadiq Khan, a proud Pakistani-born bus driver’s son became London’s first Muslim mayor. He is so liberal that, he backed gay marriage and even launched his campaign in a pub. The Labor Party MP also put tackling terrorism and ‘rooting out its cancer’ at the heart of his election manifesto and pledged to put the capital on a ‘war-footing from day one’.

Mayor Khan was helped into City Hall by Tory rival Zac Goldsmith’s campaign, which was even branded ‘racist’ by his own party after he claimed Labor ‘thinks terrorists are its friends’. But his political career has been dogged by incidents where he has ended up sharing the platform with extremists.

The former human rights lawyer has also been forced into a recent humbling apology to Londoners for giving the impression that he shared their views. The politician has apparently made nine appearances alongside Sulaiman Ghani, a radical cleric who said was a supporter of ISIS and believes homosexuality is ‘unnatural’.

This week he apologized for calling moderates Muslim groups ‘Uncle Toms’ on Iranian-backed Press TV, also in 2009, a slur used for black people to suggest that members of their community are subservient to whites.

Despite this the father-of-two has himself suffered death threats from Islamists who hate him for being too liberal, especially because he voted for same-sex marriage.

Mr. Khan admitted a Fatwa on his head made him consider getting bodyguards for his solicitor wife Saadiya, and their two children Anisah and Ammarah because he feared their lives were also in danger. Officers in his Tooting constituency in London have been put on high alert, and will respond ‘extra-quick’ should an incident be reported at his home.

Sadiq Khan is the son of a bus driver who grew up in London, and represents the Tooting constituency he was born in. He is Labor’s first mayor since Ken Livingstone, who he used to help advice, but has fought to distance himself from Red Ken’s politics and also from Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn.

London contains 40 per cent of Britain’s Muslims and he has spoken widely about the importance of his faith. It is their backing that have helped him to 44 per cent of first preferences, compared, his family always observe Ramadan, including fasting, and he was the first British minister to make the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca.

He said, “I attended mosques and madrasas in Tooting and Balham, adding to the knowledge of Islam taught me by my family. From a young age we learned the importance of the five pillars of Islam; faith, prayer, charity, fasting — and Hajj, a pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia, a journey every Muslim must try to make in their lifetime”. Mr. Khan says that, he has spent his whole adult life fighting against extremism.

“I know that Muslims have a responsibility to speak up, address this problem head on and to show that it will not be tolerated and I’ve paid a high price for doing exactly that”, he added.

He admitted recently that almost every Muslim has met one and said, “It’s affected my personal life, my friendships, and my career. People I knew as a boy have gone on to act on them in terrible ways”.

But only this week he was branded unfit to be mayor after it emerged that he had described moderate Muslim groups as ‘Uncle Toms’. The claim emerged in a 2009 interview with Iranian-backed Press TV when he was ‘minister for community cohesion’, in charge of efforts to stamp out extremism.

Mr. Khan has already faced claims about his dealings with extremists during the campaign to succeed Boris Johnson as mayor. He has dismissed Tory attacks as claiming ‘smears’ and insisted that he was a moderate Muslim.

Mr. Khan arrives at City Hall with a CV including two ministerial jobs under Gordon Brown after he served as junior minister first at the Department for Communities and Local Government and then at the Department for Transport.

He has been an MP for more than a decade, representing the south London constituency of Tooting, and entered politics after a first career as a human rights lawyer work which drew aggressive attacks from Zac Goldsmith throughout the campaign.

On the eve of the election, Mr. Khan returned to the council estate where he grew up and tweeted, ‘I’ll be the council estate boy who fixes the Tory housing crisis.’

And explaining what he would offer London and what it had given him, Mr. Khan said before the election that, “The Khan story is a London story”.

“My grandparents left India to go to Pakistan. My parents left Pakistan to come to London,” he said in an interview with The Economist. He continued, “I will be in the first generation of Khans not to be an immigrant”.

“London gave me and my family a chance to fulfill our potential; I went from a council estate to helping running a business to a transport minister attending cabinet,” he added.

Now it is time for the citizens of London to experience his charisma and it is not important if he is a Muslim or not rather most important is how he can make the lives of London people easier and comfortable. The city will look forward to that.