Anyone who believes British Muslim hostility to the war in Iraq is the big motivator of terrorism should read the fascinating cover piece by Shiv Malik in the latest edition of Prospect. Investigating the background of the 7 July London bombings for a television drama (which the BBC, of course, eventually rejected as ‘anti-Muslim’), Malik found how Wahhabist Islamism did its work. Ten years ago, it took hold of the young Mohammad Sidique Khan. It was he who eventually led the suicide plot. What emerges from Malik’s inquiry is that Islamism, far from being a ‘mediaeval’ doctrine, as it is often described in the West, can be seen by its adherents as enticingly modern. One of the great issues among Pakistani immigrants here is whom they may marry. Their families usually uphold marriages arranged in the interests of tribal kinship. Islamism told Sidique Khan, who wanted to marry an Indian Muslim from a different tradition for love, that it was Islamic to do so. It was on this issue, in 2001, that he broke irretrievably with his father, and spent the rest of his life almost solely in the company of fellow jihadists. And I gather from other sources that, just as we are all deploring imams who cannot speak English because they will be anti-British (probably a broadly true proposition in itself), the Islamists are generally the ones quickest to publish their material here in English, conscious that potential recruits may well have forgotten Urdu, or never learnt it. To young men trying to shake off traditional family restraints, but with little loyalty to their surrounding white culture, Islamism can seem like a sort of liberation theology. The problem runs too deep to be caused or cured by foreign policy.
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Belatedly, there is much discussion about how the authority of Parliament could be restored.
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