Blood and Rage_ A Cultural History of Terrorism - Michael Burleigh [277]
They also knew just which aspects of the local culture to adopt, so that, for example, sheikh Omar Bakri managed to combine the belligerence of his native Syria with a comedic touch worthy of Bernard Manning, an unlamented British racist comedian of a vulgar disposition. Any attempt by moderates to say ‘yes, but’ could be slammed down with citations from the holy book by ‘sheikhs’ and ‘imams’ with no theological grounding whatsoever, but with a feel for life as young Muslims live it. Masters of vituperation, these figures had angry young men eating out of their hands, especially if they bore the physical stigmata of some foreign jihad. Battles for control were fought over moderate mosques, sometimes leading to the bizarre spectacle of a moderate preaching upstairs and a maniac in the basement, or, as in the case of Abu Hamza, out in a London street under the gaze of bored policemen. As in Milan, radicals set up ad-hoc mosques in a former garage or similar premises, or, as in the case of Stepney’s East London mosque, gravitated to an alternative venue that they totally controlled. This is what the French call ‘Islam des caves’, of the basements and cellars in huge public housing projects. Muslim student societies, for this was the generation that enjoyed mass tertiary education, were quickly dominated by bodies like the Young Muslim Organisation, one of the routes into more radically subversive groups such as Hizb ut-Tahir. British academics refused to ‘spy’ on their students, although they still monitor signs of drug abuse or mental instability. At enormous cost, some European governments, notably the Netherlands, have belatedly commissioned university-based licensing programmes for imams, the goal being to combine Islamic learning with a plural, rationalistic Western education. That 70 per cent of the students are female is not encouraging for the scheme seems doomed to failure in such a male-dominated culture.72
The ayatollah Khomeini’s parting gift to the world before his death in June 1989 was the issuance of a fatwa calling upon the world’s Muslims to murder the novelist Salman Rushdie for insulting the Prophet. This outrage was a bid to reassert Iran’s hegemony in the Muslim world—now defined to mean everywhere Muslims lived—after the conclusion of the Saudi-sponsored victory over the Soviets in Afghanistan. It also stymied the efforts of Iranian moderates to reopen doors to the West. After a significant lapse of time, Muslims in India and Pakistan succeeded in whipping up a fury among their co-religionists in Britain. A country that had blithely ignored the religious implications of mass migration, assuming that all immigrants would happily melt into the prevailing secular hedonism, was shocked by scenes of angry people burning books and effigies in northern British cities. This anger has not gone away; it has been regularly re-incited over the last twenty years, to the decreasing amusement of natives who are wearying of the fist-waving and finger-jabbing, the flames and the insatiable anger.
For many European Muslims, their last vision of a functioning multicultural society ends when they leave the false dawn of multi-ethnic, multi-faith primary schools for an increasingly segregated secondary school system. There is something deeply tragic about the way this has happened, and it is difficult to see how things can be rectified. These divisions are an inevitable consequence of the formation