July 2 2007
When I was still a member of what is probably best termed the British Jihadi Network - a series of British Muslim terrorist groups linked by a single ideology - I remember how we used to laugh in celebration whenever people on TV proclaimed that the sole cause for Islamic acts of terror like 9/11, the Madrid bombings and 7/7 was Western foreign policy.
By blaming the Government for our actions, those who pushed this "Blair's bombs" line did our propaganda work for us.
More important, they also helped to draw away any critical examination from the real engine of our violence: Islamic theology.
The attempts to cause mass destruction in
And as with previous terror attacks, people are again saying that violence carried out by Muslims is all to do with foreign policy.
For example, on Saturday on Radio 4's Today programme,
the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, said: "What all our intelligence
shows about the opinions of disaffected young Muslims is the main driving force
is not
I left the British Jihadi Network in February 2006 because I realised that its members had simply become mindless killers. But if I were still fighting for their cause, I'd be laughing once again.
Mohammad Sidique Khan, the leader of the July 7 bombings, and I were both part of the network - I met him on two occasions.
And though many British extremists are angered by the deaths of fellow
Muslim across the world, what drove me and many
others to plot acts of extreme terror within
If we were interested in justice, you may ask, how did this continuing violence come to be the means of promoting such a (flawed) Utopian goal?
How do Islamic radicals justify such terror in the name of their religion?
There isn't enough room to outline everything here, but the foundation of extremist reasoning rests upon a model of the world in which you are either a believer or an infidel.
Formal Islamic theology, unlike Christian theology, does not allow for the separation of state and religion: they are considered to be one and the same.
For centuries, the reasoning of Islamic jurists has set down rules of
interaction between Dar ul-Islam (the
But what radicals and extremists do is to take this
two steps further. Their first step has been to argue that, since there is no
pure Islamic state, the whole world must be Dar ul-Kufr
-- The
Step two: since
Islam must declare war on unbelief, they have declared war upon the whole
world.
Along with many of my former peers, I was taught by Pakistani and British
radical preachers that this reclassification of the globe as a
In Dar ul-Harb, anything goes, including the treachery and
cowardice of attacking civilians. (This is them
exactly mimicking the cowardice and treachery of Mohammed)
The notion of a global battlefield has been a source of friction for Muslims
living in
For decades, radicals have been exploiting the tensions between Islamic theology and the modern secular state - typically by starting debate with the question: "Are you British or Muslim?"
But the main reason why radicals have managed to increase their following is
because most Muslim institutions in
They refuse to broach the difficult and often complex truth that Islam can be interpreted as condoning violence (Against anything that is perceived as) the unbeliever - and instead repeat the mantra that Islam is peace and hope that all of this debate will go away.
This has left the territory open for radicals to claim as their own. I should know because, as a former extremist recruiter, I repeatedly came across those who had tried to raise these issues with mosque authorities only to be banned from their grounds.
Every time this happened it felt like a moral and religious victory for us because it served as a recruiting sergeant for extremism.
Outside
A handful of scholars from the Middle East have tried to put radicalism back in the box by saying that the rules of war devised so long ago by Islamic jurists were always conceived with the existence of an Islamic state in mind, a state which would supposedly regulate jihad in a responsible Islamic fashion.
In other words, individual Muslims don't have the authority to go around declaring global war in the name of Islam.
But there is a more fundamental reasoning that has struck me as a far more
potent argument because it involves recognising the
reality of the world: Muslims don't actually live in the bipolar world of the Middle Ages any more.
The fact is that Muslims in
For my generation, we were born here, raised here, schooled here, we work here and we'll stay here.
But more than that, on a historically unprecedented scale, Muslims in
However, it isn't enough for responsible Muslims to say that, because they
feel at home in
Because so many in the Muslim community refuse to challenge centuries-old theological arguments, the tensions between Islamic theology and the modern world grow larger every day.
I believe that the issue of terrorism can be easily demystified if Muslims and non-Muslims start openly to discuss the ideas that fuel terrorism.
Crucially, the Muslim community in
If our country is going to take on radicals and violent extremists, Muslim
scholars must go back to the books and come forward with a refashioned set of
rules and a revised understanding of the rights and responsibilities of Muslims
whose homes and souls are firmly planted in what I'd like to term the
And when this new theological territory is opened up, Western Muslims will be able to liberate themselves from defunct models of the world, rewrite the rules of interaction and perhaps we will discover that the concept of killing in the name of Islam is no more than an anachronism.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=465570&in_page_id=1770