First Muslim mayor of London

As the new mayor has recently been elected in London, the political circle in Pakistan, a country thousands of miles away, was in upbeat mood. Political leaders raced to send congratulatory messages to Sadiq Khan, a second generation immigrant from Pakistan. As the Labor Party candidate, he became the first Muslim mayor of the British capital, by garnering 57 percent of the vote. Khan was born as the fifth of eight children to a bus driver father and tailor mother. Living in public rental housing, he studied at public schools. He served as human rights activist before entering politics in 2005 as a member of the House of Commons.

London is a place where Muslims are most heavily concentrated in England. About one in eight Londoners is Muslim, while Pakistani descents constituting an overwhelming majority. England had received massive numbers of immigrants from Pakistan in the 1950s and the 1960s after the Second World War. Back then, immigrants from Commonwealth States including Pakistan could easily get a British citizenship. After Pakistan was separated and became independent from India in 1947, low-income people moved to England en masse in search of a better life, while England welcomed immigrants from Pakistan amid shortage of manpower.

Early immigrants, who landed jobs in the steelmaking and textile industries, invited their families as soon as their life stabilized. The Pakistani community thus took root in England through "chain immigration." The community did not necessarily produce only exemplary role models such as Sadiq. Critics say that the community has become a hotbed of terrorists due to sense of isolation and resistance against the mainstream British people. Four Pakistani-born people staged orchestrated suicidal terror attacks simultaneously the London underground in July 2005. It was also revealed that lying behind three teenage girls who went to Syria to join ISIS last year were an ethnic Pakistani woman.

Khan is drawing keen attention not just because he has been elected major of the capital in a Western country of Christianity. His words and deeds that are flexible to expedite communications and solidarity, which go beyond religions and ideologies, have earned him broad-based support. He does not hesitate to criticize Muslim extremists, and distances himself from Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn. In his inaugural ceremony on Saturday, Khan vowed that he would become the major of all Londoners. It is his credo that the Labour Party will have no future unless it expands its supporter base by being overly obsessed with its long-term supporters. Khan’s "Big tent" theory aimed at embracing different political forces has made him the mayor of London.