Blood and Rage_ A Cultural History of Terrorism - Michael Burleigh [351]
While not denying that trained theologians issue fatwas licensing violence, most European jihadis come from technical educational backgrounds (rather than the arts), while the leaders of the global jihad include an engineer and a surgeon, both remote from such centres of Islamic learning as Cairo’s Al-Azhar university.35 Indeed the backgrounds of some prominent inciters of jihad in Europe are instructive because they suggest that some sort of compensatory born-again mechanism for a life of dissolution is at work. Abu Hamza worked as a bouncer (doorman) at a London strip joint. Over in Paris, the Algerian Omar Saiki:
went to bars and frequented prostitutes more often than he attended the mosque or went to listen to Abu Qatada’s sermons … Saiki was typical of those who have landed up in the Islamist movement by ‘accident’ and whose zeal redoubles when they find themselves in terrorist cells which provide them with a remedy for the frustrations felt by a whole group of North African men. Having learned to repeat some half-baked theological ideas, Saiki styled himself Professor of Theology and began to contaminate other young people similarly.36
In Europe, many terrorists are products of a greatly expanded tertiary-education sector—engineering and IT particularly—who are then disappointed when their low-level attainments at institutions whose qualifications employers regard with some scepticism do not translate into rewarding careers, let alone the capacity to dictate foreign policy. Major delusions and pretensions are at work in such circles, perhaps compounded by the ‘little prince’ syndrome operative in many Asian households. There are also fashionista jihadis like twenty-three-year-old Samina Malik, a shop assistant working airside at London’s Heathrow Airport, who described herself as a ‘lyrical terrorist’ because of her penchant for writing poems praising martyrs on the back of till receipts.
The footsoldiers are also recruited from the expanding underclass with its subculture of absent fathers and prolific mothers. A remarkable number of European prison inmates are Muslims compared with their percentage of the general population. In Belgium 15 per cent of prisoners are Muslims, but only 2 per cent of Belgians in general. In the Netherlands they are 20 per cent of prison inmates, and less than 6 per cent of the Dutch population. In France, 60-70 per cent of prisoners are Muslim, in a country where Muslims are 5-10 per cent of the population. Finally in Britain they are 11 per cent of the prison population and only 3 per cent of the total population. Many prisoners convert to Islam, for two main reasons: either because their lives are self-evidently such a mess that Islam brings order and meaning, or because of the ‘don’t mess with the Muslims’ syndrome. Jailed Muslims form powerful gangs within prisons, affording the new recruit a significant degree of protection—in US terms rather like joining the Aryan Nation, Hell’s Angels, the Bloods or the Crips. The career of Richard Reid, the Afro-Caribbean shoe bomber currently residing in Florence, Colorado, is symptomatic of the type: he converted to Islam while serving one of many sentences for petty offences. The Brotherhood—in his case around north London’s radical Finsbury Park Mosque—provided the warmth and purpose his life had not known, the entry stage for a trajectory that finished when he was prevented from exploding the bomb concealed in his shoes. (In the latest twist, as reported by Channel 4, jihadist preachers are licensing south London Muslim gang members to rob the