If they pass the 'cricket test', how do we stop the suicide bombers?
By Niall Ferguson
Telegraph UK - (Filed: 17/07/2005)
Why did Shehzad Tanweer do it? And what - if anything - can be done to prevent other British-born Muslims from following his example?
Consider his brief life story. He was born in Yorkshire in 1983, just after Geoff Boycott retired from Test cricket. He was not poor; his father, an immigrant from Pakistan, had built up a successful takeaway food business, selling fish and chips and driving a Mercedes. He was not uneducated, assuming you regard a degree in sports science from Leeds Metropolitan University as education. Nor, I suspect, would he have failed the "cricket test" famously devised by Lord Tebbit as a test of cultural assimilation. An uncle says he was "proud to be British".
And yet ten days ago Shehzad Tanweer travelled to London, boarded a Circle Line Tube train and, in the tunnel between Aldgate and Liverpool Street stations, detonated a bomb that killed himself and six other passengers.
What makes the case of Shehzad Tanweer seem so baffling is that, right up until ten days ago, he might have been mistaken for an example of successful racial integration. Instead, he now looks like the proof that no amount of economic, educational and recreational opportunity can prevent the son of a Muslim immigrant from being converted into a religious fanatic and a terrorist.
I am afraid that many people - and not all of them supporters of the British National Party - will also see him as a proof that Enoch Powell was right when he seemed to see "the River Tiber foaming with much blood" in his notorious speech of 1968. When, as happened last year, the editor of the impeccably liberal magazine Prospect asks whether open borders pose a threat to an open society, the rehabilitation of Powellism starts to look like a real possibility.
And yet this is to misunderstand what we are up against. For the crisis we face has nothing to do with the kind of innate racial incompatibilities Powell believed in. The saloon bar response - "Send them back and the seal the borders" - is not merely impractical; it completely misses the point.
The settlement of Western Europe by Muslims is now an irreversible phenomenon; moreover, it seems bound to continue more or less inexorably, whether legally or illegally.
Consider the colossal demographic forces at work. Since the 1950s, according to UN figures, the crude birth rate in the eight Muslim countries to the south and east of the Mediterranean - Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Turkey - has been two or three times the European average. The gap between Pakistan and Britain has been even wider. Total fertility per woman in Britain today is around 1.7. The latest figure for Pakistan is 4.3.
West European societies have emancipated women, allowing them to work and to limit family size. Muslim societies have been much slower to do this, especially where fundamentalism has taken hold. At the same time, Europe has achieved much higher economic growth than most Muslim countries, attracting economic migrants in droves. And now, as European societies age, we continue to attract immigrants from the more youthful Muslim periphery because big employers, such as our Health Service, apparently cannot do without them.
That is why today around 15 million Muslims make their home in the European Union. And that is why that number is certain to rise, even if Bernard Lewis's recent prophecy - that Muslims would be a majority in Europe by the end of the 21st century - surely goes too far. (In fact, Muslim immigrants tend quite quickly to switch to European-sized families.)
Fouad Ajami is more realistic when he anticipates that Muslim "colonisation" will continue to be concentrated in certain regions of Europe, just as it was when the Moors ruled southern Spain (which they did, don't forget, from the 8th to the 15th century), or when the Ottomans ruled the Balkans (from the 14th to the 19th). It's just that this time Yorkshire may end up being part of "Eurabia".
Such demographic shifts and processes of colonisation are the tides of history; mere laws and fences can no more halt them than Canute could stop the sea coming in. Nor are they invariably a bad thing. Moorish rule was hardly a disaster for Andalucia, as anyone who visits the Alhambra can see. It was contact with the more numerate and scientific Muslim world that helped propel Western Europe out of the Dark Ages.
No, the problem today is not immigration per se; it is the fact that a pernicious ideology has been allowed to infiltrate Europe's immigrant communities. And that has happened because we have blindly allowed our country to be a haven for fanatics.
"The whole Arab world was dangerous for me," the Egyptian Islamist, Yasser El-Sirri, was recently quoted as saying. In Egypt, he has been convicted and sentenced in absentia three times over: to 25 years of hard labour for smuggling armed terrorists into the country; to 15 years for aiding Islamic dissidents; and to death for plotting to assassinate the prime minister. Where does he now reside? In London, where he is Director of the Islamic Observation Centre.
"If al-Qaeda indeed carried out this act, it is a great victory for it," declared Dr Hani al-Siba'i in an interview on the al Jazeera satellite television channel the day after the London bombings. "It rubbed the noses of the world's eight most powerful countries in the mud." He went on to say that it was legitimate for al-Qaeda to target civilians because "the term 'civilians' does not exist in Islamic religious law in the modern Western sense. People are either of Dar al-Harb [the domain of war, meaning territory ruled by non-Muslims] or not."
And where are you most likely to bump into Dr al-Siba'i? Why, in London, where he is the Director of the al-Maqreze Centre for Historical Studies.
The fact is that a campaign has for some time been underway to convert young European Muslims - and non-Muslims like the Jamaican-born Germaine Lindsay - to the ideology of extreme Islamism. And it is being conducted in euphemistically named "centres" all over Europe - like the government-funded Hamara Youth Access Point in Beeston in Leeds where, it seems, Shehzad Tanweer came under the influence of Mohammad Sidique Khan, the oldest of the London bombers.
Whatever their stated purpose, such centres are evidently being used as jihadist recruiting stations. They may also act as gateways to foreign training camps outside bilad al kufr (the lands of unbelief). It is surely no coincidence that at least two of the London bombers recently made trips to Pakistan.
The official line is that this is the work of a criminal minority, and should not be blamed on Islam or the wider Muslim community. Quite so. The trouble is that this criminal minority considers that it is acting on the basis of Islam. And it seems to be hatching its schemes right under the noses of the wider Muslim community.
Cut to the trial in Amsterdam last week of Mohammed Bouyeri, the 27-year-old Dutch-Moroccan who eight months ago murdered the film-maker Theo van Gogh. Pleading guilty, Bouyeri told the court he had "acted purely in the name of my religion".
Was that also Shehzad Tanweer's motive? We may never know for sure. What we do know is that he was a regular visitor to the Hamara Youth Access Point. And what he "accessed" there led directly to an act of mass murder.
No, the last thing we need today is a Powellite revival. That would be the wrong answer to the wrong question. But if they wish to avert such a revival, law-abiding European Muslims must now take a much closer look at what is being preached in the name of their religion at "centres" like the Hamara Access Point. For Shehzad Tanweer certainly did not get to be a suicide bomber by playing cricket. Nor by eating his Dad's fish and chips.
• Niall Ferguson is Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and the author of Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire.
© Niall Ferguson, 2005 |
