Iraq didn’t start Islamist violence
September 11, 2006
It is now widely accepted that Britain has become the epicentre of Islamic terrorism in the West. Why is that? To many people the answer is obvious. It’s about Iraq.
That case was made most recently by British Muslim leaders, who wrote to Tony Blair two days after last month’s arrests of 23 Britons – 21 of Pakistani background – accused of plotting to blow up trans-Atlantic flights. British foreign policy, the leaders argued, risked “putting civilians at increased risk in the UK and abroad”.
Blair, on the other hand, is just as adamant Iraq has nothing to do with it. “I am amazed at how many people will say there is increased terrorism today because we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq,” he said last month.
Unquestionably, Blair is losing the public argument. Even intelligence service reports say Iraq is radicalising young Muslims. It just seems to make sense. Iraq made many people angry. Therefore it must make a potential fanatic angry enough to commit mass murder.
But anger is one thing, a willingness to slaughter another. Can we know what goes on in the mind of a young man willing to blow up thousands of people and himself?
French political scientist Olivier Roy is an expert on political Islam: his book, Globalised Islam, is a must-read for anyone wanting to understand the changes shaking the Muslim world. He thinks the Iraq war “shows how silly it is to attempt to build democracy from scratch and from the outside.” But even so, he doesn’t think Iraq has much to do with Islamist terrorism in the West.
Yes, he says, Iraq makes things worse but it is not the cause of the anger, though it gives extremists a way to express their anger in political terms.
Roy doesn’t even believe that if its troops left Iraq, radicalism in Britain would significantly decrease.
For one, the timing is wrong, he says. Not just September 11, but a whole series of terrorist acts happened before the war began. Extremist groups were busy on British campuses from the 1990s.
Blair and others have made that point. But Roy adds that if you look at who the British extremists are, you find they are almost all of Pakistani background (a community that makes up slightly less than half of the country’s 1.6 million Muslims). If it was all about Iraq, he asks, why has Britain’s Iraqi population not radicalised? Britan’s 250,000 Bangladeshis are angry about Iraq: why have they produced no terrorists?
The answer lies in the nature of Pakistani identity, Roy believes. Pakistan is the only modern state created for religious reasons. Pakistanis have always identified with the ummah, or world community of religious believers. “To be Pakistani is to be a global Muslim.”
What’s more, since the Afghan war, Pakistan has become a centre of Islamic extremism. Huge numbers of Pakistani Britons travel there every year. The vast majority go to see family, but a few get radicalised by their journeys “home”.
Roy’s analysis may help to explain why two Pakistani Britons became suicide bombers in Israel in 2003; why another conspired to be a shoebomber in 2002, and another allegedly murdered American journalist Daniel Pearl in the same year. It may also shed light on why Pew Research figures show that 56 per cent of British Muslims do not believe Arab Muslims carried out the terror attacks against the United States (17 per cent do). In another survey, 13 per cent say the July 7 bombers should be seen as martyrs, according to another survey.
What’s more, 81 per cent of British Muslims see themselves as Muslim first then British – a higher figure than in Jordan or Egypt. The only country in which more people see themselves as Muslim first is Pakistan.
Roy also points to the poor and marginalised position of many Pakistani Britons. This is complex, since a striking number of terrorists are middle class. But what Roy finds is that the poorer a Muslim community in the West is, the more likely it is to have radicals within it – even though the radicals themselves are usually not among the poorest.
This might explain why the more assimilated Pakistani Americans show little sign of radicalisation. Or, Roy says, why Australian Lebanese, who tend to be marginalised, show signs of radicalisation but the typically wealthier French Lebanese do not.
This does not mean that more than a few Pakistani-Britons want to be suicide bombers. In fact, polls show British Muslims to be more worried about extremism than Muslims in Europe and more than Britons in general. “An ideology is taking hold of our youngsters,” Harris Rafique of the Sufi Muslim Council has said. It is a community in crisis.
Signs of it were there in the Rushdie book burnings in Bradford in 1989. In The Guardian last year, writer Hanif Kureishi, a Pakistani Briton, recalled visiting London mosques in the 1990s and hearing preachers rant “against the West, Jews and . . . homosexuals”.
Similarly, Saudi historian Dr Hatoon Ajwad al-Fassi wrote recently of her life as a student in Manchester in the 1990s. “I don’t remember a single week in which I didn’t sense provocation rising from the Friday sermons . . . sermons that dripped with the smell of racism, separatism, extremism and discrimination against women.”
The Iraq war may well have been a catastrophic mistake. But its part in fomenting extremism in Britain remains unclear. The wave had been building for a long time. Yet the West is so powerful that many who live there have assumed – narcissistically and wrongly – that the fault only lies with us.
James Button is Europe correspondent for The Age
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