Diagnosing and Misdiagnosing the Causes of Islamist Terrorism

Civitas, 17 November 2006

Clearly, with every passing day, the Islamist terror threat grows ever more grave. It is also becoming ever more widely recognised, as increasing numbers awake up from their previous comforting dream that all such talk was merely ‘Islamophobia’ or else a guise by which the authorities here seek to justify grabbing ever more power to intrude into our private lives and to curb our time-honoured civil liberties.
In a recent posting in her web-diary, the redoubtable Melanie Phillips draws her readers’ attention to a very perceptive analysis of the causes of the threat made by the Conservative MP for High Wycombe, Mr Paul Goodman, in his comment in Parliament on the Queen’s Speech.

Mr Goodman began by noting that the terrorist threat had been a central theme of that speech, before he observing that, as MP for the constituency in which four arrests were made last August in connection with the alleged terrorist plot to hijack and blow up several aeroplanes over the Atlantic, he had been given more recent cause than most to reflect on what the possible causes of jihadism could be.
His diagnosis of the cause makes interesting reading. The MP identified five different factors as having been widely postulated as responsible for the alienation of young British-born Muslims from mainstream society that renders them susceptible to Islamist indoctrination and thereby to becoming prepared to commit acts of terror.
These are: (1) racism and Islamophobia; (2) poverty and disadvantage; (3) deracination arising from their being unable to identify with either the traditional way of life of their parents’ generation or the modern way of life of their non-Muslim contemporaries; (4) the failure of multiculturalism to deliver social cohesion; and (5) British foreign policy – ie. support for Israel and the war in Iraq.
Admitting each such factor to form part of any full explanation, Mr Goodman goes on to cast doubt on them being sufficient either severally or collectively to account for the phenomenon of Islamist terrorism. Dhiren Barot, the terrorist sentenced last week in connection with an lslamist plot to bomb New York, was a Hindu before converting to a radical form of Islam that legitimised and encouraged terrorism. Mohammed Sidique Khan, the leader of the July 7th London suicide bombers, had a University degree and had a decent job before he got sucked into such terror, so could not have been driven by poverty. Jermaine Lindsay, a fellow member of that group, could not himself having been a victim of inter-generational conflict, as he was Afro-Caribbean not east Asian origin.
Mr Goodman does not rebut in similar detailed fashion the claim of either the fourth or fifth factors to be sufficient to account for Islamist terrorism before he identifies an additional sixth factor that, for him clearly, is the crucial one This is Islamism, an ideology Mr Goodman is at pains to distinguish from Islam, as have been so many others who like him have sought to draw attention to the dangers of it.
Islam, explains Mr Goodman, is a great ancient religion, one as complex and multifaceted and as potentially capable of bearing a great civilisation as Christianity. Islamism, by contrast, is a comparatively recent ideology. Its principal distinguishing features are said to be three: first, a religious division of the world into two antagonistic groups: one comprised of fellow-believing Muslim ‘friends’, the house of Islam, the other of non-believing enemies, the house of war; second, allegiance only to the Ummah, the world-wide community of Muslims, none to any non-Muslim states in which Islamists may happen to reside; third, an aspiration to place the house of Islam under the sharia law.
Two other recent web-based articles bear out the validity of Mr Goodman’s analysis. They have the great virtue of confirming it by way of testimony of a middle aged Egyptian born medical doctor who got drawn into the Islamist web in the early nineties when a university student in Egypt. His name is Dr Tawfik Hamid who now lives in hiding, travelling the world to warn of the dangers of Islamism.
One of these articles quotes him as offering the following timely analysis and warning:
‘Muslim terrorists kill and slaughter not because of what they experience but because of what they believe… It has nothing, absolutely nothing to do with poverty or lack of education. I was from a middle-class family and my parents were not religious… If it were about poverty, ask yourself why it s middle-class Muslims – and never poor Christians – who become suicide bombers in Palestine… Stop asking what you have done wrong. Stop it! They’re slaughtering you like sheep and you still look within. You criticise your history, your institutions, your churches. Why can’t you realise that it has nothing to with what you have done but with what they want.’
I was gratified to read in the other article that Dr Hamid shares an opinion I expressed in a posting on this web-site last week that moderate Muslims are not doing enough to oppose Islamism in their own communities. ‘Because of them, reformation is not happening’ it quotes him as saying.
Britain has deep cause for concern on this matter given how radicalised its Muslim inhabitants appear to have become in recent times. As an article posted in an American web-journal, The Philadephia Trumpet, reminds us, recent polls of British Muslims have found one third would rather live in the UK under Islamic law than under British law, believing Western society to be decadent and immoral. Most worryingly of all, it reminds us, a quarter of them – and a far higher proportion of their under 24 year olds, believe that the July 7th bombings were justified.
It is against the background of all this that the government’s plans to fight on-campus radicalisation of Muslims are to be welcomed. In the final analysis, however, moderate British Muslims will have to do much more than to date they have shown sign of being willing to do to combat this pernicious and perverted version of their creed and all those who espouse it.