A place for Muslims in British society


The solution to defusing the radicals lies in appealing to the secular
Farrukh Dhondy points out that Britain needs Muslims if it is going to defeat fundamentalist Islam in it's own borders.

On July 7, the first anniversary of the terror attack on the Underground, a terrorist organization placed on the Web a recording of the last testament of one of the suicide bombers. He claimed that his intention to murder was a reaction to Britain's involvement in the Iraq war and retaliation for British foreign policy in Afghanistan and Palestine. A survey of the Muslim community has uncovered that a third feel that mass murder of British civilians is justified because of Britain's participation in Iraq. This alienation is the most important political phenomenon in British politics today, yet no politician has stooped to try to understand it, preferring to mouth homilies about the "majority of Muslims being peace-loving." Opponents of the war crow about Tony Blair's foreign policy generating jihadis. Liberal opinion falls back on mantras about racism breeding alienation.

They ignore the fact that 9/11 preceded Iraq, and that other unemployed communities haven't resorted to mass murder. No, something else is happening. It is significant that 22 universities have been named as epicenters of jihadist recruitment. The leader of the latest terror attempt is alleged to be a biochemistry student. These educated young men have ventured the farthest from the enclosures of their communities: The well-fed bite the hand that feeds.

Frustration and aimlessness are the seeds of alienation. British identity gives them no goals. They turn, instead, to the disciplines that were instilled in them from birth. Al Qaeda's aim to dominate the world with a universal Shariah kingdom makes them part of an elite. Their stance is fundamentally ideological, and being the ideology of religion, with 72 virgins on offer in paradise, it is fundamentally illogical. Their basic Western education makes them aware that they may be challenged in their fantasies of faith by more enlightened arguments of other Islamic persuasions. Instead, their spokesmen and suicide notes refer to British policies and lend a veneer of logic, of cause and effect, to their murder. Yet no spending plans in poor areas, multicultural reform of education or antiterrorist detention laws, or, for that matter, withdrawal of Britain's armies from Iraq, will deal conclusively with this ideology of murder.

Islam is here to stay, and nothing but an assertion by the various other traditions of Islam which have come to Britain from the Indian subcontinent--the tolerant Sufi and Barelvi strands, as opposed to Wahhabism and the Shiite-Iranian animus--will work. The Mirpuris and Bangladeshis form voting blocs because of the origins of their settlement. They have so far manipulated the MPs dependent on their vote, who, for instance, dare not express pro-Indian views on Kashmir. They have become representatives of Mirpur at Westminster. Muslims of other, non-peasant, non-fundamentalist backgrounds live scattered over Britain and don't form voting blocs. Nevertheless, they must be encouraged to assert their willingness to live in a modern, democratic, secular society. It is only by ideologically challenging the fundamentalism that has taken virulent hold of the enclosed communities and their offshoots that Islam can learn to live in the West. Muslim has to tame Muslim.

He's absolutely right. Without the other traditions of Islam actively taking part in Western society, and with the politics of victimhood, whatever the radicals say goes.

I am afraid that will lead to genocide.

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— NeoWayland

Posted: Tue - August 15, 2006 at 04:31 AM  Tag


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