A threat to the world

With the foiling of the alleged conspiracy by radical Islamists to devastate transatlantic air travel — at the height of the US–UK tourist season — Britain has emerged, a little more than a year after the London Tube bombings, as the apparent main target for jihadist terror in Europe.

This has little to do with British policies, poverty, discrimination or Islamophobia. Simply put, a million or more Sunnis of Pakistani background, who comprise the main element among British Asian Muslims, also include the largest contingent of radical Muslims in Europe. Their jihadist sympathies embody an imported ideology, organised through mosques and other religious institutions, rather than a ‘homegrown’ phenomenon, as the cliché would have it. They are symbolised by individuals like Rashid Rauf, the British-born Birmingham Muslim who was arrested on the Pakistan–Afghanistan border two weeks ago and who is now the chief suspect in the terror enterprise, and his brother Tayib, who is in custody in the UK.

Dr Irfan Ahmed Al-Alawi, head of the UK Islamic Heritage Foundation and an outstanding British Muslim adversary of the extremists, put it well at a Washington conference on Euro-Islam in June. He declared, ‘Students who graduate from the Muslim schools in England and those who become extremists have the same brainwashing done to them as the Taleban. There is extremist Islam within the United Kingdom — yes, there is — and we should clean out our own house.’

I learnt about the problem of British Islam — which is unique when compared with Muslim community life in France, Germany and the rest of Western Europe — while pursuing my commitment to moderate Islam worldwide. I became Muslim in 1997 in Bosnia–Hercegovina, following a decade of reporting and writing about the end of Yugoslavia. In the Balkans I learnt about the Saudi cult of Wahabism, which aims to control all Sunni Muslims around the globe and inspires al-Qa’eda.