Only Islam is the Cure

In the wake of the detention of British Muslims for suspected terrorist activities, Mo Khan talks to some of his fellow British Pakistanis:

This week the police mounted the biggest raids against British Muslims suspected of terrorist involvement since 9/11. They rounded up eight men and found half a ton of ammonium nitrate: fertiliser to some, explosive to others. It’s been two and a half years since 9/11. The British jihadis have regrouped and the chatter on the streets seems to be that they are back and starting to make plans. Jihad seems to have crept back into Britain after a quiet period. But why? The journey from schoolboy to the Mujahidin seems an odd one until you consider the tale of British Pakistanis.

I grew up in an ordinary first-generation Pakistani household in Cambridgeshire. Britain had been good to us. My parents both worked, my father in public service as a bus driver, my mother at a local school. We lived in a state of blissful ignorance of wider society. My father would watch the news transfixed for anything about the homeland, my mother would sing Bollywood songs while cooking food that I still haven’t bettered anywhere on my travels.

Religion had a fixed place: after school mother would teach me the Koran, on Fridays we would dress up in pressed salwar kameez and white skullcaps and go to the mosque for prayer. The mullah would be an old man with horrible breath who would ramble for hours in a barely intelligible Urdu dialect, confusing all us children.

Religion was just a part of what we did; it had nothing to do with politics, more with the practical day-to-day business of being a child. Why couldn’t I eat sausages? Why did I have to wear funny clothes on a Friday? Why did I get a slap from my older cousin when I couldn’t read the Koran? As we got older, religion was replaced with cricket and cricket became music and then girls and then, at some point in my late teens, all three.

Kash was my schoolmate. Through mosque and school we had been thick as thieves. He cut quite a dash, £1,000 of clothing on his back, the keys to his Merc swinging in his hand and a wallet full of money. Kash epitomised the late-Eighties entrepreneurial spirit. Weekends were spent partying in a friend’s club. In 1990 it was crunch time — a decision about college. For Kash it was easy: he was heading to the bright lights and the big city: “London . . . man! ” he would scream at the top of his voice.

The next time I saw Kash was 11 years later, just after 9/11. His beard was raggedy, he wore the salwar kameez of our childhood and he had rejected everything we ever shared. “You’re lost, bro,” he told me. “You need to open your eyes. Look at the filth around you. It’s a sick society and only Islam is the cure.” I asked him what he meant by sick. “There is a cancer, Christianity is a cancer, Judaism is a cancer, materialism is a cancer, all destroying us, the Muslims.”

Yes, Kash had been listening to Abu Hamza, of Finsbury Park mosque.

One of the other people Khan talks to is Sayful Islam:

Sayful Islam is a spokesman in Luton for the radical Muslim group al-Muhajiroun. The town’s central mosque banned his organisation for being too extreme. When I asked him about Tuesday’s raids his answer gave me a chill: “At the moment we live under a covenant of security in this country, we are well treated and therefore should not do operations in this country, terror or otherwise. But if the police and the establishment keep treating Muslims in this way, arresting them and harassing them, then we cannot guarantee the security of this country.”

Chilling indeed: but this is how Khan finishes the article:

The impetus for peace on Britain’s streets is now firmly in the hands of the Government. Sayful Islam is under no illusions. “They have started a crusade against Muslims and that road, unfortunately, can only lead to violence.” In order to stop the small fringe element who think like Sayful gaining a foothold and allowing the jihad to enter Britain, the Government faces a real challenge: to make its priority not letters to mosques, but to understand people such as Sayful.

The problem is not for the government to understand people such as Sayul. That's not hard to do. Sayul is threatening violence if the government acts to protect us from terrorist attacks. What should the government have done? Clearly for Sayul they should have ignored the information they were getting about groups of Muslims acquiring large amounts of explosive materials, and then subsequent to the bombing have invited Muslim leaders around to Downing Street to assure them that of course they fully accepted that ordinary decent Muslims had nothing to do with the hundreds (thousands?) of deaths. They should then have issued a statement condemning Islamophobia. And this is an argument which sections of liberal opinion seem to agree with: as though the occasional mass murder is a small price to pay for being multicultural.

The problem and its solution lies within the Muslim community, but, as here, their record is not encouraging. It's always up to the government to do something, or its because Muslims are discriminated against.

The truth is that things are becoming difficult here. It is becoming increasingly difficult for Muslims outwardly to express their faith and this is leading to anger. My wife was in a kitchen store when the shop assistant bombarded her with questions about Islam. The shop assistant was convinced that terror was just around the corner because of her new Muslim neighbour. The Government’s anti-terror laws are now contributing to an unprecedented climate of fear among Muslims.

The government is not toughening up on terrorism for the fun of it, or because they're in the grip of Islamophobia. They're doing what they're doing because of a clear threat from Muslim extremists to kill large numbers of British citizens. If Muslims don't like it, the answer's in their hands: denounce the extremists, throw them out of the mosques, clean up their act. The message may be getting through to some, but clearly not all.

Comments

[Eve Garrard]

A terrific post, Mick. But oughtn't we also to bear in mind that it may require a quite serious amount of courage for individual Moslems to denounce Islamic extremism? The difficulty of doing that shouldn't be underestimated.

[J.Cassian]

I must admit I really don't have any time at all for people like Kash and their "anger". He's yet more proof that poverty doesn't necessarily breed terrorism (cf. Osama bin Laden/AQ leadership). Wealth is just as likely a culprit. There's an interesting comparison to be made here. Ex-Christians with more money than sense looking for "spirituality" tend to join whacky pseudo-oriental cults of varying degrees of dubiousness but these are rarely involved in terrorism. Their Muslim counterparts, when bored of their own affluent lifestyles, become jihadis.

[Mick H]

Eve - I suppose you're right, but surely we're entitled to expect a bit more on the denunciation front than we've had so far.