The social ties that bind a city together do not easily snap. The 9/11 atrocity made New Yorkers shudder, but they did not go under.The very model of a modern city was Manchester. The moment it sprang up as an industrial phenomenon - leaving far behind its origins as a modest market town - it was widely recognised as something completely new. The Aztec capital Tenochtitlan is buried beneath the clamorous roads of today's Mexico City. "It is unlikely that those who planned these coordinated attacks will consider their efforts in vain. Every incident led to increases in negative sentiments against Islam, desecration of mosques and attacks on Muslims. Dr Abdul Bari, chairman of the East London Mosque, spoke of seeing fear on the faces of 800 worshippers at his mosque.
The Muslim community has lived in heightened fear since 9/11, says the Muslim Council of Britain. We now wait to find out what kind of shrapnel the bombs in London will produce But British Muslims have come a long way since 9/11 Community relations are not what they used to be Muslims are now much more proactive. By contrast, the city of the east, he argued, was a sprawling conglomerate of special interests, with no real coherence. The new anti-urban attackers are inspired by leaders to whom the modern city is either an unknown quantity, or something they abhor as the devil's work.
A city in panic it wasn't.The great German sociologist Max Weber asserted that, in the fullest urban sense, the city "appears as a general phenomenon only in the west". They are not going to throw their hand in.Under threat, the people of London and other modern cities hang together without vociferousness, but united in a refusal to be beaten. They are not going to have the life they have chosen snatched away from them This is their coherence, their spirit of community. In London's parks yesterday, in the afternoon sunshine, children rolled on the grass, picnics were eaten, grandparents sat on benches feeding the ducks This was their answer to terror.
