For more than twenty years, therefore, the Islamic Foundation, a prestigious and influential institution in the Muslim community, has been effectively teaching sedition to British Muslims. In line with prevailing Islamic religious and political authority, it has preached the message that they have a religious duty to change Britain into an Islamic society. While not everyone who passed through its portals will have been thus influenced, a considerable number will have been, along with graduates of many other similarly radicalized Islamic institutions—profoundly altering the way British Muslims see themselves in relation to the wider community.
Dr. Taj Hargey, chairman of the Muslim Education Centre in Oxford, which promotes what he calls “progressive inclusive Islam,” has said there is a virtual apartheid in parts of Britain, self-imposed by those Muslims who regard non-Muslims as kuffar, or inferior—although they would never say so in public. “We see it from the time you’re a child, you’re given this idea that those people they are kuffar, they’re unbelievers. They are not equal to you, they are different to you. You are superior to them because you have the truth, they don’t have the truth. You will go to heaven, they will go to hell. So we have this from a very young age.”20
This deeply alienating message has been amplified by the widespread perception of Western decadence. British Muslims are overwhelmingly horrified and disgusted by the louche and dissolute behavior of a Britain that has torn up the notion of respectability. They observe the alcoholism, drug abuse and pornography, the breakdown of family life and the encouragement of promiscuity, and find themselves therefore in opposition to their host society’s guiding values. What they are recoiling from, of course, is the breakdown of Western values. After a visit to the United States in 1948, Sayed Qutb wrote: “Humanity today is living in a large brothel!”21 Similarly, British Muslims have concluded that the society that expects them to identify with it is a moral cesspit. Is it any wonder, therefore, that they reject it?
But for young Muslim men, who are so numerous—more than half of British Muslims are under age twenty-five, compared with only one-third in the rest of the population22—Britain’s secular corruption has had a very much more ambiguous and often lethal impact. While they despise it—and as a result of the multicultural scorched-earth policy in the schools, they will never have been taught what authentic British values are, let alone been invited to share them—the West’s seductive doctrine of personal liberty has nevertheless entered their souls.
As the British prison doctor Theodore Dalrymple has written, many of these young men are not pious and barely set foot inside a mosque. Deeply secularized, they have little religious faith and adopt the habits of other slum-dwellers, including soccer and pop music, drugs, alcohol and casual sex. But rather than integrating, their lives run in parallel with the young white men whose habits they share. In particular, says Dalrymple, they want to exercise dominance over women—who are of course highly emancipated and sexually available. In this fragile and disconnected state of mind, any perceived insult can turn them into terrorists overnight, particularly since British society constantly reinforces their sense of grievance by telling them that discrimination is to blame. The only way some of them can resolve such terrible tensions, Dalrymple concludes, is to become a human bomb, since to die for the faith is the one thing that can expunge the West from their psyche.23
Such young men, stranded between the mores of Mirpur village life on the one hand and the degraded nihilism of British “liberal” society on the other, are thus easy prey for the puppet-masters of terror. What makes these fragile egos yet more vulnerable still, moreover, is the pathological inferiority complex that afflicts Muslim society, the exaggerated notions of shame and honor which mean that every slight turns into a major grievance, disadvantage morphs into paranoia, and Islam itself is perceived to be under siege everywhere. This is then held to be a justification for attack, to “defend” Islam against those who are waging this imagined war against it. And so every act of defense against this Islamic aggression is therefore reconceptualized as an attack on Islam. This inversion is a pathological distortion running through the Islamic world from Dohar to Dewsbury.
For instance, in October 2005, the British home secretary Charles Clarke declared that:[T]here can be no negotiation about the re-creation of the Caliphate; there can be no negotiation about the imposition of Shariah law; there can be no negotiation about the suppression of equality between the sexes; there can be no negotiation about the ending of free speech. These values are fundamental to our civilisation and are simply not up for negotiation.24
This defense of British society against attack was promptly inverted to represent an assault on Islam. Dr. Imran Waheed of Hizb ut-Tahrir Britain said: “These latest comments from Clarke have clearly exposed the reality of this so-called war on terror. . . . These offensive comments about the Shariah and the Caliphate will leave no doubt in the Muslim world that this is a war against Islam and not about individuals or groups committing acts of violence.”
It is impossible to overstate the importance, not just to Britain but to the worldwide struggle against Islamist extremism, of properly understanding and publicly challenging this moral, intellectual and philosophical inversion, which translates aggressor into victim and vice versa. For it has unbalanced debate by allowing Muslims to argue—and to a large extent, by accepting their logic—that British foreign policy is unfair, and thus aggressive, towards the Muslim world. In an internal briefing note, government officials wrote:It seems that a particularly strong cause of disillusionment amongst Muslims, including young Muslims, is a perceived “double standard” in the foreign policy of Western governments (and often those of Muslim governments), in particular Britain and the US. . . . This seems to have gained a significant prominence in how some Muslims view HMG’s [the British government’s] policies towards Muslim countries. Perceived Western bias in Israel’s favour over the Israel/Palestinian conflict is a key long-term grievance of the international Muslim community which probably influences British Muslims. This perception seems to have become more acute post-9/11. The perception is that passive “oppression”, as demonstrated in British foreign policy, eg non-action on Kashmir and Chechnya, has given way to “active oppression”—the war on terror and in Iraq and Afghanistan are all seen by a section of British Muslims as having been acts against Islam.25
This incendiary confusion is being further inflamed by propaganda from Pakistan and the Arab world, beamed into British Muslims’ living rooms on satellite TV, about how Hindus are out to massacre them or how Israel is the enemy of the world. And it is further whipped up by religious leaders, even those who are considered utterly mainstream. For example, the imam of the Leeds Grand Mosque—where one of the London bombers, Abdullah Jamal, used to pray—has delivered sermons proclaiming the supremacy of Islam and a conviction that Christians and Jews are plotting to undermine it. “We know the reason behind the United States attack on the Muslim World. . .,” he declared; “we have come to see only their plotting to decrease the faith.”26
After the London bombings, this mosque said that it “unequivocally condemned” the killing of innocent people, and that “such acts of terrorism have no place in Islam.”27 But in March 2004, Sheikh Taher preached a sermon at the mosque that was published on its website, in which he said that preserving the deen, or laws of Islam, could justify the taking of life:If the forces of evil stop and intervene between the people and them entering this deen as Allah, exalted is He, loves for them, it is legislated for those who call, when they face these oppressive forces, to fight jihad in the path of Allah, and it is legislated for them to sacrifice themselves for the sake of this deen and for the sake of making the da’wah of Islam reach every heart. . . .
The preservation of the deen comes before the preservation of life. . . .
He went on to justify the killing of Israelis because Israel had killed the Hamas “spiritual” leader Sheikh Yassin, and then descended into open, theologi
cal anti-Jewish hatred:The assassination of Sheikh Ahmad Yassin reminds you of the treachery of the Jews; their plotting and their scheming. Who tried to kill your Prophet by throwing a rock from the top of the house which the Prophet (sallalahu ’alaihi wa sallam) was sitting in, and who is the one who put poison into the lambs’ meat which was given to the Prophet (sallalahu ’alaihi wa sallam)?28
This message preached by such religious leaders, that Britain and America are engaged in a war on Islam rather than a defense of their society against attack, is a potent incitement to terror by whipping up a hysteria that Muslims are under attack from the West. So any attempt by the West to defend itself against terror becomes a recruiting sergeant for that terror. The more atrocities committed against the West, the more the West tries to defend itself; and the more it does so, the more hysteria rises among Muslims that they are under attack, and the more they are thus incited to hatred and to terrorism. The circle is completed by British fellow travelers who promulgate the same morally inverted thinking, and thus help further incite both Muslim extremism and Western defeatism.
The mosques have been widely blamed for preaching this radicalism, particularly through imams brought over from India and Pakistan who are supporters of Saudi Arabian Wahhabism or other similar ideologies. True as this may be, however, they are by no means the only or even the most important conduit for hatred and incitement. Even worse damage is being done over the internet, and within Britain in addition by a silent army of highly influential community interlocutors including youth workers, peripatetic teachers, prison counselors and a host of voluntary organizations moving below the official radar.
Moreover, British universities have been exceptionally important breeding grounds for Islamist radicalism—and almost wholly overlooked. The list of terrorists who have been through the British university system is striking. Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, who masterminded the kidnap and murder of the U.S. journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, attended a British public school before dropping out of the London School of Economics.29 Among the London bombers, Mohammed Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer had studied at Leeds Metropolitan University. Zacarias Moussaoui, one of the Hamburg cell responsible for 9/11, had completed a master’s degree at South Bank University, London. Afzal Munir, who was killed fighting in Afghanistan, had studied at Luton University. And there are many more.
In an internal paper, government officials noted that al-Qaeda was secretly recruiting affluent, middle-class Muslims in British universities and colleges to carry out terrorist attacks in Britain. A network of “extremist recruiters” was circulating on campuses, targeting people with technical and professional qualifications, particularly degrees in engineering and information technology. Most of the al-Qaeda recruits tended to be loners “attracted to university clubs based on ethnicity or religion” because of “disillusionment with their current existence.” The officials added: “Students and young professionals from better off backgrounds have also become involved in extremist politics and even terrorism. They provide better recruits, as they may have the capability for wider and more complex proselytising.”30
In other words, it was not that Islamist radicals happened to be going to British universities. It was that British universities were being used to create Islamist radicals. In an important report published in 2005, the terrorism expert Professor Anthony Glees and Chris Pope documented the extensive jihadist activity on campus and suggested that the time young British Muslims spent at British universities was a “thin red line” that linked them to terrorism. They identified a number of Islamist groups that, although officially banned from campus, were still operating under the mask of cover names and front groups. Hizb ut-Tahrir, for example, which has been banned in many countries and preaches the reincarnation of the caliphate, the extension of Sharia law to Britain and hatred of Jews, was deeply embedded on campus under such camouflage. A BBC TV Newsnight program reported that Kingston University’s Islamic Society had been criticized for not reporting the presence of Hizb ut-Tahrir on campus. A former president of the society replied: “What could we have done, tell me? You’re telling us to go to the kuffar against a Muslim, is that what you are saying we should have done?”31
Glees and Pope reported that the police had always been resistant to proactive surveillance of extremists on campus, not least because since the early 1990s the security community had no longer targeted subversion, insisting that it had been superseded by terrorism. But as Glees and Pope argued, subversion was the production of the ideas that led to terrorism—and so it was hardly a surprise that the universities, as the laboratories of ideas, therefore provided a crucible for the ideology of jihad.32
The universities had failed to put into place elementary safeguards to prevent such recruitment into terrorism. However, when this report was published they did not jump to do so, nor did they even express any concern about its findings. Instead, they attempted to blacken Professor Glees’s name and get him sacked from his own university job.33 Having unwittingly fueled the flames of jihad in Britain, the universities—with one or two honorable exceptions—resolutely refused to face up to what was happening. As with the rest of the British establishment, denial was the name of the game.
One of the problems that bedevils this issue, however, is just what is considered to be either “moderate” or acceptable within mainstream debate. A view seems to have taken hold that “moderate” means anyone who does not actually advocate violence. Thus many Islamic groups, institutions and publications are deemed to be moderate even though the views they express carry messages of hostility or hatred towards the West.
For example, The Muslim magazine, which describes itself as the “voice of Muslim students,” routinely features articles endorsing Sayed Qutb and other founding fathers of Islamism, talking about the mission of Islam to end the division of the world into Muslims and non-Muslims because “the key to the revival of a degenerate Muslim society and the emancipation of the non-Muslim society is one and the same.”34 In one issue, Sheikh Qaradawi wrote that “Islam will inherit all these civilizations” [the West] and would work to this end among laborers and women as well as students in a battle that was “religious, political, economic, intellectual and ideological.”35 Elsewhere in its pages, the wife of Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, who was said to have been Osama bin Laden’s mentor, called on Muslim women to “awake for the jihad” and to “urge Muslim men to make jihad in the cause of Allah, for you will get all that you long for in this life only under the auspices of strong men who hold weapon [sic] and fight the enemies to protect their faith, their land and their honours, who spread fear and respect in the hearth of their enemies and who are prepared to offer one ‘shaheed ’ [martyr] after another.”36
An even greater problem is presented by Muslim representative institutions. These are considered to be mainstream and therefore moderate, but the views expressed both collectively and by the individuals running them exhibit an alarming degree of support for Islamist extremism and, in particular, an obsessive demonization of Israel and the Jews.
The Muslim Council of Britain, for example, is regarded by the British establishment as the most reliable mainstream voice of the Muslim community, and is constantly used as the principal interlocutor with the community. Yet the MCB boycotted the ceremony commemorating the liberation of Auschwitz in 2005, saying it “excluded ongoing genocide and human rights abuses around the world and in the occupied territories of Palestine.”37 The council offered condolences to the family of the leading Hamas terrorist Abdul Aziz al-Rantissi after he was killed by the Israelis.38 It has consistently supported Sheikh Qaradawi—the Islamic scholar who has said that suicide bomb attacks in Israel and Iraq are a religious duty for Muslims—as being deeply respected by millions of Muslims around the world.39
The MCB’s secretary general, Sir Iqbal Sacranie, has branded Israel a “Nazi state” and accused it of “murderous leadership,” “Zionist brutality” and the “ethnic cleansing of Palestine.”40 He
has compared Hamas suicide bombers to Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Ghandi, saying: “Those who fight oppression, those who fight occupation, cannot be termed as terrorist, they are freedom fighters”; and he has referred to the founder and spiritual leader of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, as “the renowned Islamic scholar.”41 He brands as an “Islamophobe” anyone who even uses the term “Islamic terrorism” and says they should be prosecuted for incitement to religious hatred.42
It is not surprising that the MCB should be so extreme since it is influenced by Sayed Maududi, who created Jamaat al-Islami and preached the need for jihad to bring about the “universal revolution” of Islamic state rule. In August 2005, BBC TV’s Panorama current affairs show revealed the close connections between the MCB, the Islamic Foundation in Leicester and the Maududi ideology behind them. It also revealed the brazen extremism of many of the MCB’s affiliates, which were nevertheless defended by Sir Iqbal Sacranie. The show made a great impact, since it was virtually the first time the facts had been made known about so-called moderate Muslim representative institutions—and much of the damning evidence was provided by other British Muslims, who condemned this extremism and said it did not represent them.
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