For the Islamist doctor, terror is healing

7 July 2007

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Stephen Schwartz and Irfan Al-Alawi say that radical Islam is less the product of extreme deprivation than of the thwarted aspirations of the Muslim middle classes and professionals

The car bombs in London and Glasgow show that a global counter-offensive against the war on terror is well underway. Although Iraq is the main zone of conflict, Saudi-financed Wahhabi radicals — known to polite Western journalists as ‘Sunni insurgents’ — seek to export ‘al-Qa’eda in Iraq’ everywhere throughout the world.

But with the British car-bomb campaign a new element has emerged. For the first time in Europe doctors are among the suspects. One of them, Mohammed Asha, is described as a ‘brilliant’ neurosurgeon from Jordan; another, Bilal Abdullah, is an Iraqi doctor. The phenomenon of the radicalised professional broadens a hitherto limited field of inquiry for terror investigators. Our organisation, the Centre for Islamic Pluralism, has recently completed a study, ‘Scientific Training and Radical Islam’, in which we analyse how the professionals in a number of scientific disciplines are transformed into bloodthirsty extremists.

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