A threat to the world

19 August 2006

Stephen Schwartz, who has travelled the world studying the faith to which he converted, says that Britain has allowed doctrinal poison imported from Pakistan to flourish here as nowhere else. We must act, or face terrible consequences

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. Before and after 11 September 2001 I worked to expose Wahabism. I then co-founded a public charity, the Center for Islamic Pluralism, as a network of moderate Muslims in the US and Canada, Western Europe, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Israel, the Balkans, Turkey, Pakistan and India, and Central and Southeast Asia. But as I travelled back and forth, to Britain among other places, and spoke to British Muslim representatives in international forums, it became clear that the UK faces the most serious jihad danger of any country in Western Europe.

Imported Muslim clerics are the basis of the threat. Islam in the UK is overwhelmingly influenced by imams and other religious officials born in Pakistan and trained in that country or in Saudi Arabia. Pakistani Sunni mosques in Britain are major centres for jihadist preaching, finance, incitement and recruitment. The Islamic picture in the UK is much darker than that in Germany, where most Muslims are Turkish and, when they turn to radicalism, follow either a Marxist or a nationalist inspiration — or even that in France, where social dislocation and violent outbursts by the discontented young have produced, perhaps surprisingly, efforts by leading clerics to calm the community.