by A. N. Wilson
The very qualities which made Islamism so repellent to the rest of the world must be those which recommended it to its followers. Fourteen years before Gillian Gibbons imported the standard British primary school cliché of Teddy’s Diary idea to the Unity High School, Khartoum, Auberon Waugh was noting, in his Way of the World column in the Daily Telegraph, ‘In Pakistan, hundreds of religious enthusiasts have surrounded the district court of Gujranwale demanding that a 12-year-old Christian boy, Sulamet Masih, should be hanged for blasphemy. Never mind that the poor youth, accused of writing anti-Islamic slogans, was illiterate and unable, in fact, to write his own name.
‘Much of the same problem arises for poor Bill Clinton, who has been called the most hated man in Islam since he received Salman Rushdie in the White House.
‘I am sure that Clinton, like most of us, has never read a word of Rushdie’s novels and probably thought he was a carpet salesman. That won’t save either of them from the fundamentalists. In Egypt, the fundamentalists have taken to murdering anyone they suspect of being lukewarm towards the Mohammedan religion. Once again, they claim that under Islamic law, Muslims have the right to kill any apostate.’2 Waugh knew whereof he spoke. Writing in The Times in the early 1970s, he jestingly referred to the baggy trousers worn by Turkish men in the days of the Caliphate. British soldiers used to call them ‘Allah-catchers’. There were emonstrations by Muslims outside The Times building in Printing House Square. In Rawalpindi an angry mob, many of whom, it is safe to guess, were not readers of The Times, stormed the British Council building and burned the library to the ground. Far from being supportive of Waugh, The Times sacked him, and this was the usual pattern of behaviour, from employers and governments in our times, when faced with an angry Muslim mob.
One of the most ludicrous examples of the phenomenon occurred in September 2005 when a Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, published some cartoons which depicted the Prophet. Strangely enough, in this instance, an Egyptian newspaper, Al-Fagr, reproduced the offending cartoons a month later without incident. But then some Danish imams began to circulate the cartoons on the Internet and to stir up the idea that these cartoons, not especially funny or skilful, were wounding the consciences of Muslims throughout the globe. There followed the usual grotesque and disproportionate reactions from radicalised Islam. Mass protests as far away as Nigeria, Libya and Afghanistan in which people were crushed to death. Barbaric cries for the cartoonist, or his editor, or both, to be beheaded, death threats issued, and loud shouts about blasphemy and the evils of the West. Terrified of the same thing happening to them, English newspaper proprietors and editors refused to reproduce the cartoons, so it was impossible for British readers to know what all the fuss had been about.
Thus intimidated by the blackmailing mobs, as was the blackmailers’ intention, Western liberals tended to react in one of two ways. One reaction, perhaps the optimistic one, was to suppose that there was some grievance being suffered by the Islamists. Only remove this, it was supposed, and the mobs who called for the death of cartoonists or the flagellation of primary school teachers would fade away. This school of thought usually had no difficulty in identifying the ‘causes’ of the Islamists’ outrage: they were American foreign policy, and the existence of the State of Israel.
Other liberals, perhaps the pessimists, tended to believe that it was pointless to apply the principles of John Locke and sweet reason to people who would be prepared to stir up mobs and murder on such manifestly trumped-up charges. This school of Western thought pointed to the deplorable ideas being peddled by the Islamists–hatred of homosexuals, subjugation of women, violent anti-Judaism–and asked by what right the Islamists dared to attempt to impose their perverted values upon the West while milking the Western democracies for benefits of all kinds. It was one thing to suppose that the West represented the Great Satan. It was another to choose to reside within the Great Satan’s jurisdiction deriving free schooling and higher education, free or subsidised housing, and employment while choosing to denounce the countries which supplied these benefits. Certainly for Christians residing in countries which observed Sharia law, things were less rosy. For much of the loudest and most violent Islamism appeared to come, not from those who had the advantage of living under Sharia law, and watching their shoplifting neighbours having their hands cut off, and their blasphemous schoolmarms given the lash, but rather those who deliberately opted to live in the fag end of Christian democracies–Denmark, France, the United States.
Britain was the epicentre for much of the actual plotting of terrorism and violence by these people.
As the traveller of the twenty-first century stood in airports in long lines awaiting checkout and baggage searches, as such hitherto harmless items of luggage as toothpaste and shoes were X-rayed or actually confiscated, it was hard to work up much sympathy for the cause of Islamic fundamentalism. The times had changed. So much as one casualty was deemed by the touchy political classes to be a failure on their part. During the Second World War, diners at the Dorchester Hotel sawed their way through four-course dinners while outside the windows in Hyde Park the ack-ack guns fired at the aerial bombers of the Luftwaffe. Death by explosion on the streets of London claimed thousands of lives, but citizens continued to wait at bus stops, get on trains and crawl over the rubble, carrying their briefcases, with the admirable belief that one way of defeating the enemy was to maintain business as usual.
Half a century later, the Islamist terrorists had done terrible damage in many parts of the world. It was no longer possible for any one country to go it alone and simply to say that they would continue to travel about regardless of the bullies. International air travel was now so widespread, and so integral a part of the way the world chose to live, that the gung-ho bravery of the British during the Second World War, even if it had survived as part of the national character (which is questionable), would not have been allowed in the twenty-first century. If the airports in London had allowed passengers to get on and off aircraft without the tedium of searching and palaver, no other airport in the world would receive planes from Britain. So the Islamist blackmailers won that particular round of the game, having the satisfaction of seeing thousands of holidaymakers and innocent business travellers trudging through the security gates at the speed of snails. Because of political correctness, it was not allowable to wave through the majority of Caucasians, who clearly had no links with Islamic terrorism. Old ladies from Miami, well-scrubbed schoolgirls from Dusseldorf, Norwegian architects and retired civil servants from Hemel Hempstead were all treated as if their nail scissors and indigestion mixture were prime weapons in Al Qa’eda’s arsenal.
As they stood there, asking themselves the old Second World War question, Is Your Journey Really Necessary?, these travellers must also have asked themselves, as everyone in the West has asked since the phenomenon began, why the Islamists were behaving in this odious manner, and what they hoped to gain by it. When Basque separatists blew innocent fellow mortals to pieces in Madrid, it was always clear what they wanted. Give them an independent Basque country and the bombings would stop. Though the IRA were far from being representative of the Irish, or of Republicans, still less of Roman Catholics, it was broadly speaking clear what they wanted. Few shared their desire for a Marxist Irish state, but there were enough in the United States and on the British mainland to share their wish to have a United Ireland for their activities to have a brutal plausibility. In these cases, terrorism was seen to be the only way that a small or impoverished group could hope to impose its will on the larger group. Terrorism was a word used when the poor were brave enough to wage war upon the rich. Or so it could be made to appear.
Islamism, or a belief in some world-wide Islamic nation or ‘ummah’, a revival of the Caliphate, these were hardly political ends which could ever be granted to the freedom fighters. The IRA had support among the working-class Roman Catholics of Northern Ireland because it was believed (wrongly) that they would eventually deliver a United
Ireland. In fact they delivered a quasi-independent Ulster presided over by their arch-enemy Ian Paisley, with a couple of their token stooges as his quisling deputies. It isn’t true that terrorism always works, even when it has quite specific aims. Without the IRA, it is quite possible that there would have been a United Ireland by negotiation.
But what would the Islamists have achieved, by bombing or by negotiating? Who would restore their Caliphate for them? Certainly not the Turks, who were anxious to join the European Union and escape from the religious maniacs. Nor would the Saudis, whose royal family enjoyed the benefits of unbounded wealth, based on the craven dependency of the Western powers upon oil. Nor would any other group, or head of state in the Arab world, or in the wider Islamic world, ever have been able to head such a Caliphate.
Standing in the airport, and trying to avoid illiberal suspicions about the more obviously Islamic of the fellow customers, the twenty-first-century traveller might stumble upon at least one plausible explanation for the horrific and ugly phenomenon of the Islamist threat. That explanation is the airport itself, the phenomenon of mobility. Our time was an era of migrations.
Britain, with its colonial past, was one of the first European countries to receive mass immigration from Islamic nations. Cheap labour was imported into the ailing British textile industry in such northern towns as Bradford, Burnley, Oldham and Rotherham. The mills could not compete with cheaper fabrics being manufactured in the Third World, and eventually this first generation of immigrants from Bangladesh and Pakistan found themselves unemployed.
As we have observed, the generation of old men who had grown up with a British Empire, and who were still occupying senior office until the 1970s, saw the question of immigration entirely in terms of colour. Even the learned J. Enoch Powell, who reckoned upon knowing the languages of the Asian immigrants whose arrival so dismayed him, was not on record as having worried about what was passing through the immigrants’ minds. He made no mention, in all his talk of black men holding a whip hand over white men, of the possibility that Britain was importing tens of thousands of potential Muslim Guy Fawkeses. Melanie Phillips made a good point when she wrote, ‘Virtually all concerns about this wave of immigration focussed upon the alleged racism or discrimination with which the host community in Britain was treating these newcomers. What went almost totally unnoticed was the enormous dislocation between the Muslim immigrants and the host society. These new arrivals came overwhelmingly from desperately poor, rural villages in places like Mirpur in Pakistan and Sylhet in Bangladesh. Many never thought they would stay permanently but expected to make some money and then return after a few years (not that this happened). So they remained umbilically connected to the culture of southern Asia. And what no one had realised was that religious life in Pakistan was in the process of becoming deeply and dangerously radicalised.’3
If it were simply a question of radicalised Islamists being imported from the more impoverished areas of Pakistan and Bangladesh, then an optimist could surely have hoped that within a generation or two in secularised, prosperous Northern Europe, all that religious extremism would surely have been educated out of them?
Sadly, such an optimist would have been proved wrong by events. You only had to listen to the recording of Mohammad Sidique Khan to realise that. He was apparently the ringleader in the 2005 London bomb plot. ‘Our words are dead until we give them life with our blood. Therefore we are going to talk to you in a language you understand… We are at war and I am a soldier. Your democratically elected governments continuously perpetrate atrocities against my people and your support of them makes you directly responsible, just as I am directly responsible for protecting and avenging my Muslim brothers and sisters. Until we feel security, you will be our target. Until you stop the bombing, gassing, imprisonment and torture of my people, we will not stop this fight.’ Though these words came from a young man wearing an Arab keffiyeh, they were spoken in a broad Yorkshire accent. This was the county of Alan Bennett, David Hockney, John Braine, J. B. Priestley! Mohammad Sidique Khan grew up in Dewsbury in the West Riding of Yorkshire.
In this same Dewsbury eighteen years earlier, the parents of twenty-six indigenous Yorkshire children were demonised by the chattering classes for their decision to withdraw their children from the local primary school, because the primary school had become largely Muslim.
What can be seen in the little town of Dewsbury is the enormous fissure which exists between the kind of people who might go out and bomb a train and the kind of people who want England, and Christianity, to continue as they existed before the immigrations began.
Mohammad Sidique Khan, aged thirty, blew himself up at 8.50 a.m. on 7 July 2005 at Edgware Road Station. Shehzad Tanweer (aged twenty-two and from Leeds) simultaneously blew himself up at Aldgate. Jamaican-born Jermaine Lindsay (nineteen, from Aylesbury) committed suicide at the same time on the underground train between King’s Cross and Aldgate. Hasib Mir Hussain, eighteen, and from Leeds, was unable to detonate his bomb on the train, and so boarded a Number 30 bus and exploded it, and himself, in Tavistock Square just opposite the British Medical Association. Fifty-two people were killed in the explosions, not counting the four bombers; more than seven hundred were injured.4 For a day, the transport systems were disrupted and it was impossible to get a signal on a mobile phone in the middle of London. On 8 July, Placido Domingo was singing Siegfried at the Royal Opera House. The organisers considered cancelling. Central London was still in a state of shock, and the public transport system was only just returning to normal. They decided to go ahead, even though it seemed unlikely that everyone who had bought a ticket would be able to attend. As things transpired, every seat was taken. No one allowed the bombers to spoil their evening of a stupendous performance of Wagner.5
If the bombers thought that they were cowing the public they were certainly wrong. But of all the strange social phenomena in Britain during our times, the existence of Muslim terrorists served most poignantly to highlight the fact that the British were by now living in parallel universes, failing to meet. British Intelligence suggested at the time that 16,000 British Muslims were engaged in, or supported (an important difference), terrorist activity. Three thousand Britons were believed to have passed through Al Qa’eda training camps, and several hundred had been primed to attack targets in Britain itself. Before she retired as Director of MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller, daughter of ‘Bullying-Manner’, or Widmerpool (see p. 114), delivered a speech, on 10 November 2006, in which she said that the security service was monitoring 200 terror groupings or networks in Britain, 1,600 identified terrorists and 30 known terror plots. ‘What we see at the extreme end of the spectrum are resilient networks, some directed from al Qaeda in Pakistan, some loosely inspired by it, planning attacks including mass casualty suicide attacks in the UK. Today we see the use of homemade improvised explosive devices; tomorrow’s threat may include the use of chemicals, bacteriological agents, radioactive materials and even nuclear technology. More and more people are moving from passive sympathy towards active terrorism through being radicalised or indoctrinated by friends, families, in organised training events here and overseas, by images on television, through chat rooms and websites on the Internet. If the opinion polls conducted in the UK since July 2005 are only broadly accurate, over 100,000 of our citizens consider that the July 2005 attacks in London were justified.’6
This is a work of history, not of prophecy. It is beyond our scope to foretell how many of these potentially active terrorist cells resident in Britain at the time of writing will succeed in causing more major explosions, or launching a chemical attack on the population of British cities. Nor should one doubt Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller’s words, even though they came from the Head of Intelligence. It was American intelligence agents who convinced diplomats and politicians in the West that Saddam had been hiding an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, and so precipitated the disastrous Iraq War. Throughout the period of the Cold War, it was the int
elligence agencies which persuaded both sides that the other intended imminent invasion, or nuclear war, though this never in fact took place. It is the business of intelligence agencies to make our flesh creep.
Compared with the Roman Catholic threats to national security in the seventeenth century, the Islamic ones in the twenty-first seemed comparatively slight. Though modern explosives could kill more people than those amassed by Guy Fawkes and friends, there was no figure in the Islamic world comparable to the Pope, or even to the King of Spain or the King of France, who might have gone so far as to conquer England had the religious terrorists at the start of James I’s reign been successful. Compared with the Irish threats of the late twentieth century, the Islamic attacks were more vicious, in so far as they occurred without warning. It would have been rash, at that juncture of history, to suppose they would never be repeated. And the plague of their existence could not be solved by any obvious political means. Once the politicians had settled the Northern Irish problem to the semi-satisfaction of both sides, there was no reason why the IRA should keep up its bombings, even if Irish America had been prepared to pay Colonel Gaddafi any more dollars, and even if he could have laid his hands on any more Russian weaponry. The situation with the bombers of Leeds, Dewsbury and elsewhere was that their aims seemed so much more nebulous, and the sources of their weaponry more various. Besides, anyone prepared to be a suicide bomber did not need anything too sophisticated if they were prepared to die on a crowded underground train. Their bombs were home-made, not imported from Libya.
Pessimists would find little hope in a situation where so many British citizens–100,000 or more–approved of the idea of such acts of mass slaughter. On the other hand, it is perfectly possible that ‘extreme’ Islamists, living as they did cut off from the rest of society, had a different way of answering opinion polls. It was a well-attested fact among pollsters that most British respondents give the answer which they believe is expected of them–always telling a researcher that they believed in God, for example, and claiming that such issues as Third World debt matter more to them than going on summer holidays, or saving for their old age. In private, sitting in front of their television sets, many indigenous Britons would express xenophobic and perhaps even murderous sentiments, which they would never have acted upon, and which they would not have revealed to an opinion poll. Maybe those of Muslim origin were more honest, and admitted to feelings of irrational and destructive hate which were often felt but seldom in the polite world expressed. In which case, they would be only marginally more likely than, say, angry old white pensioners, to have used themselves as suicide bombers on public transport.