Deepak Lal: British Muslim youth - Why disaffected?

The first thing to be done is to destroy the Islamist infrastructure that has been created in Britain.

A recent survey of attitudes of Muslims in Europe by the Pew Foundation found that British Muslims held more negative views about the West than their co-religionists on the Continent. Particularly startling was the finding that 69 per cent of British Muslims held negative views of Jews, as compared with 29 per cent of French Muslims. Yet researchers have found that British Muslims are envied in the rest of Europe for being better integrated into the national life of their adopted country, with more successful role models in a variety of national roles including the media. Yet on 7/7 last year a group of home-bred Muslim youth blew themselves up and a large number of their fellow citizens (including other Muslims) on the London tube. As I write this my children have just arrived on 10/8 in the south of France for our annual holiday from London after a horrendous wait at Gatwick airport because of the chaos caused by the foiled plot to blow up 10 transatlantic airliners by as many as 24 British Muslim youth. How does one explain this paradox of the rage of Muslim youth in a country which has been the most successful example of multicultural integration of its various religious and ethnic minorities?

Two incidents cited by Lord Lamont (the former Chancellor of the Exchequer) at an Institute of Economic Affairs lunch both show up this paradox and its causes. He said he was walking in central London last month when England were playing in the World Cup, and saw a car festooned with St. George's flags and from which the usual shouts of England supporters were issuing. When he looked inside the car to his surprise the loudest were from two obviously Muslim girls clad in burqas. They had obviously passed the well-known test for the integration of Britain's ethnic minorities by Norman Tebitt, who wanted to see if they would cheer for England in a popular sport. Yet to all appearances they seemed the epitome of the traditional Muslim girls mendaciously pilloried by Islamophobes.

The other incident was even more telling. As Lord Lamont was walking through St. James' Park, he saw a girl and a boy in a clinch, which some years back would have led the police to caution them for indecent behaviour. Given their general state of dishabille""not an uncommon sight in London""the only surprise was that the girl was wearing a Muslim headscarf, and as it kept slipping off her head, she kept pushing it back!

These two incidents point to the cultural confusion of a certain section of the British Muslim youth, as well as the sources of the success of Britain's unforced multicultural assimilation. To understand this it is important to note the different streams of Muslim immigration into Britain. As a cultivated Muslim academic put it to me, imagine you are a child not of an educated middle class Muslim immigrant from the sub-continent, but of uneducated parents who have moved from their village in the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan to the British Midlands, and your parents (especially the older women in the household) do not even speak the native language. Then as a child you go to the local primary and secondary schools, where you adopt the culture of your peers. Some of those who are bright (like non-Muslims in their cohort) eventually go to university and get respectable, even white collar, jobs. But everyday when they go home they move from the culture of their British school to that of their Pakistani village.

Moreover, the culture of their schools reflects the general class structure of British society. This reflects the secret of Britain's success in integrating its minorities. Rather than putting its immigrants into ethnic boxes, as the US has done, or in ethnic ghettoes, like the French, Britain allowed the various ethnic groups to sort themselves into the traditional British class structure. Thus the peasantry from Pakistan, which has fathered the British-born-and-bred Muslim fanatics, was naturally fitted into the working class slot. Their children adopted all the attitudes and habits of their peers in the working class. But most of these habits and attitudes""particularly in the domestic domain of sex and marriage""clash with those of their peasant parents, who, desperately trying to keep a traditional hold on their British progeny, would naturally turn to the traditional upholders of their customs and rites in their homeland, the religious leaders""the imams""for help in this effort.

Enter the final element in the unholy brew which has led to the British Muslim terrorist. Partly to counter the threat from theocratic Iran, the Saudi government sought to counter its theological influence by paying for and establishing Wahabi preachers in most Western countries. At the same time Britain, with its traditional tolerance of political refugees and supporters, from anarchists to Marxists, became a haven for all the Islamist preachers and activists who had fled their own countries when sentenced to death or imprisonment for inciting rebellion in their homelands. Most of them found a home as exiles in London, which came to be known as Londonistan.

But this British tolerance of foreign agitators and political refugees had always been based on the implicit contract with the British authorities that they would not foul their new-found nest, whilst being free to agitate for political causes in their homelands. This implicit contract was broken by Abu Hamza, the Islamist veteran of the Mujahidden's war against the Russians in Afghanistan. He and others of his ilk including Wahabi imams then found among some of the culturally confused Muslim youth, suffering from the usual angst of adolescence, ready converts to their jihadist ideology. The brilliant use of the Internet by Osama bin Laden and other Islamists, aided and abetted by a generally anti-American British media, particularly the BBC, then fuelled the new-found religious rage of these culturally-torn youngsters.

All the elements of a heady brew were in place to lead to 7/7 and 10/8. Whether the ostensible spark which lit the fuse was Kosovo, Chechnya, Afghanistan, Iraq or now Lebanon is immaterial. Given the commitment to jihad inculcated in these youngsters, to right perceived or imagined wrongs, the bombs would inevitably have gone off. Now, the first thing to be done is to destroy the Islamist infrastructure that has been created in Britain and hope, in time, that the next generation of disaffected British Muslim working class youth, like their peers, stick to mugging old ladies in shopping malls instead of blowing themselves up on means of public transport.