Ike,
time for the west to rethink !
An Islamic Fifth Column
Muslim Americans and Englishmen join the jihad.
BY FARRUKH DHONDY
Wednesday, December 26, 2001 12:01 a.m. EST
LONDON--John Walker Lindh, the California Talib, captured the public
imagination with his odyssey from Marin County to Mazar-e-Sharif. Yet his
tale, arguably, is an exotic one, a sui generis conceit. More disconcerting
was Mohammad Junaid, the New York-born Pakistani-American who, after Sept.
11, ditched his $70,000-a-year job as a computer techie and joined the
Taliban to "kill Americans." He did so to the cheers of his mother, who,
astonishingly, had been rescued from the World Trade Center.
We may not have many John Walkers, but how many Junaids does the U.S. harbor?
Britain's experience with its Muslims suggests that the number may be high.
The Muslim migration to Britain, chiefly from Pakistan, began more than 30
years ago. The immigrants, most from peasant backgrounds, took it for granted
that they would have the right to work and live within the cultural and
religious freedom that Britain's liberal civilization guaranteed. Many found
work in the old textile mills of the north. They settled around the mosque
and the stores that sold the food that made these towns feel like home. The
first generation that arrived imagined making money quickly and then
returning home. That future never arrived. Their children and grandchildren
have grown up as Lancastrians and Yorkshiremen--Muslim Lancastrians and
Yorkshiremen.
The mills closed in the 1980s. The general depression of the mill-and-mosque
towns that resulted was reflected in rundown, restless schools, without
ambition or excellence. The ambulance-chasers of the left called for more
multiculturalism in these schools, which gave cover to the ex-peasant
community's demands for Islamization. They demanded that girls and boys be
taught separately, that girls cover their heads and limbs, that schools serve
halal meat, that Arabic and the Koran be taught, that history classes depict
Britain primarily as an exploitative nation. Principals who resisted were
branded racists.
It was around this time that identification with a militant Islam emerged as
a politically distinct force in Britain. While the earlier generation of
Muslim immigrants had gone their way without bothering to adopt Western
dress, their children grew up wearing Air Jordan sneakers in imitation of
American blacks. The great cliché of their generation is that they were
caught between cultures. Some resolved this tension by adopting the politics,
philosophy, and culture of fundamentalist Islam.
On college campuses, some students began to dress in an Islamic way. They
reformed their speech and friendships. They began to characterize the gains
of feminism as immorality. Their puritan disgust for the West's popular
culture and sexual license, their support for laws that decree the stoning to
death of adulteresses, became the profession of an allegiance alienated from
the Britain that allows them the freedom to express these views.
These new zealots had been brought up in a traditional way by parents whose
religious views were generally orthodox but not extremist. But in the 1980s,
a new Muslim leadership of mullahs, financed by various Islamic powers around
the world, was setting up mosques and schools in Britain, thanks to an
immigration-law loophole that allows clergymen open-ended permission to stay.
Muslim adolescents attracted to this radical preaching came under the
domination of the new mullahs, who offered a luminously simple explanation of
the cosmos and promised membership in an organization that would dominate the
world. "We carry Islam as a political belief, a complete system," says
Muhammad Omar Bakri, a poisonous cleric who runs a London Muslim
organization. "We don't carry Islam as a religion. It's an ideology."
All this came to light in the most significant divide in Britain's
multicultural history: the Rushdie affair, which uncovered a fifth column
whose literary criticism entailed book burning and death threats. The British
Muslim community echoed the call of Ayatollah Khomeini to kill the writer.
There were denunciations of Salman Rushdie in every mosque. Not one
mullah--not one--raised a voice in support of freedom of creativity; no
mullah ventured the opinion that the fatwa was wrong. Though the supposedly
liberal Muslim commentators whom the British press retains were not in favor
of the death sentence, none would extend himself to defend the book. One ugly
book burning was led by a Muslim who was forced to admit that Iran had
financed him.
Before the fatwa, the politically correct position was that, with a few
concessions, and with some welcome additions to British cuisine, the new
immigrant communities would be assimilated into British life with hiccups but
not convulsions. The fatwa affair--when the entire Islamic community united
behind the condemnation--should have put an end to the idea. After all, if
you prostrate yourself to an all-powerful being five times a day, if you are
constantly told that you live in the world of Satan, if those around you are
impervious to literature, art, historical debate and the values of Western
civilization, your mind becomes susceptible to fanaticism. Your mind rots.
Worse, it can become the instrument of others who send you on suicidal
missions.
Three years ago, the Yemeni police caught eight men with plans and equipment
to bomb British targets in that country. Six of these young Muslims, all of
Pakistani origin, held British passports. The Yemeni courts tried and
convicted them of conspiracy to commit terrorism. Journalists traced the
roots of their mission back to a London mosque and to a preacher called Abu
Hamza, a one-eyed mullah with a claw, like Captain Hook's, for a right hand.
He boasted that he had sent young men to training camps. His general
contention was that, as Muslims, they must fight for the conversion of the
world to Islam. He seemed proud that his own stepson was one of the six
convicted.
The incident should have alerted Britain to the rise of a phenomenon that
couldn't be explained by theories of race relations. It didn't. Liberal
opinion, while not admitting that the Yemeni Six were out to kill Britons,
called for an examination of the racism that had alienated them.
Then, this summer, riots broke out in several mill-and-mosque towns. A few
hundred masked "Asian" (which in Britain refers to Indians, Pakistanis and
Bangladeshis) youths torched shops and cars. They fought the police with
staves and stones. The pundits and officials in charge of race relations were
bewildered. They attributed these riots to the "failure of years of race
relations," to resentment of poverty and unemployment, and to rumors that
neo-fascist anti-immigrant organizations were invading these towns.
What they failed to mention was that the rioters weren't "Asian" but Muslim.
The difficulties Muslim culture places in the way of assimilation have
produced a generation of disaffected youth, highly susceptible to the
incitements of militants.
After Sept. 11, Mr. Hamza was wheeled out, together with Mr. Bakri, who had
been expelled from his native Syria and is funded by Saudi money. They both
said that they supported the jihad, that the laws of men did not matter, and
that only the Koran, as interpreted by them, of course, could govern the
thinking of the Muslim. Upscale Muslim organizations expressed regret at the
atrocity and denounced Messrs. Hamza and Bakri.
Yet outside Britain's mosques, young men of jihadi persuasion bellowed
slogans supporting the terrorist attack, exhorting worshipers to "join the
war" against America. A poll by the Sunday Times found that 40% of British
Muslims think Osama bin Laden is "justified" in his war and that the British
citizens who joined the Taliban were right to do so. One can't shelter in
one's home those who would kill you. Yet Britain has given permission to stay
to the likes of Messrs. Hamza and Bakri. The very liberalism against which
they preach has nursed this Fifth Column.
When liberal Muslims declare that Sept. 11 was an atrocity contrary to the
Koran, the majority of Muslims around the world don't believe them. They
accept the interpretation of fundamentalists, whom liberal Muslims have
allowed to remain unchallenged.
What Islam needs is a reformation, and if this very concept is forbidden in
the unchangeable word of the Koran, there is enough Islamic history to
support a reforming interpretation of the law of living with others. The
Muslims in Britain and the U.S. who are educated in Western disciplines and
culture must spark this reformation. As for the officials of the U.S. and
Britain, they need to redirect the energy that they have poured into race
relations and multiculturalism into a defense of the values of freedom and
democracy. Their future depends on it. |
