Islamist Ideology in the UK: Doing Fine
Three years after “7/7,” the British version of 9/11, when four suicide bombers immolated themselves and fifty-two other innocents—British people, foreign residents, or visitors to the UK, including Muslims and an Israeli woman who feared to return to Israel because of the danger of suicide bombings—any belief that the Islamist rage fueling the murderous rampage grew out of economic resentment has surely been laid to rest.
At least two new two pieces of information back up this view. First, poll after poll has revealed that British-born Muslims at British universities share a view of Islam dangerously sympathetic to Islamism, the preferred technical term for radical Islamic ideology. Second, two former British Islamists, Ed Husain and Maarjid Nawaz, have founded a counter-extremist Islamic think-tank in the UK that exposes the domestic roots of British Islamic extremism and is attempting to counter extremist ideas freely current in the British Muslim community.
The latest opinion poll, conducted on behalf of Britain’s Center for Social Cohesion, targeted 600 Muslims and 800 non-Muslims at twelve British universities. The results were both illuminating and alarming. Sample findings:
- Forty per cent of British Muslims support the introduction of sharia for Muslims into British law.
- One-third back the idea of a worldwide Islamic caliphate based on sharia law;
- Twenty-four percent do not think men and women are equal in the eyes of Allah;
- Thirty-two percent believe killing in the name of religion is sometimes justified, compared with 94 percent of non-Muslims who believe it never is.
“Significant numbers [of British Muslims] appear to hold beliefs which contravene democratic values,” Hannah Stuart, one of the report’s authors, told The Times of London. “These results are deeply embarrassing for those who have said there is no extremism in British universities.” The polling also confirmed that there is a “ghettoized mentality” at several British universities because many Muslim students have been exposed to extremist speakers and do not want to associate with non-Muslim fellow students.
Predictably, left-of-center political activists in Britain denounced the findings as “right-wing” (though unable to demonstrate any bias in the polling methodology) because it doesn’t fit with the tired cliché that terrorist ideology is always based on political and economic grievances and never on religious motivation.
Even more convincing on this topic, however, is the testimony of Ed Husain and Maajid Nawaz that the British extremist Islamism evinced by the 7/7 bombers is the expression of a political ideology, which is essentially an Islam-centered protest against modernity. Husain and Nawaz were both senior activists in the radical organization Hizb ut-Tahrir. Although this group is not itself a terrorist organization, its goals include infiltrating power centers in both Muslim and non-Muslim countries with the objective of bringing to power throughout the world a global Islamic caliphate.
Maajid attributes his own counter-conversion from extremism to a pluralist, tolerant Islam to his experiences of conversations with a variety of prisoners in an Egyptian prison. The Quilliam Foundation, founded this year in the UK, is attempting to educate British and other Muslims, as well as law-enforcement officials in the UK and the U.S., into effective ways of countering the Islamist ideology and to reconstruct an older version of Islam in the West that was indeed pluralistic and tolerant. But the foundation has an uphill battle. According to Nawaz, Islamists in the UK are far more numerous now than before 9/11 or 7/7.
Dr. Aikman, a Senior Fellow of the Trinity Forum, was for many years senior correspondent for Time.
Provocations, Faiths and Worldviews, Global Culture, David Aikman, Sun 10 Aug 2008
