There is no more deliriously frenetic airport in all of Europe than Heathrow. Its five broad terminals stretch across miles of low-lying greenbelt in West London and take in more international traffic than any other airport in the world. If there were an axis around which all air travel spun, Heathrow would be it. Indeed, Heathrow is less an airport than a cosmopolitan village: a Babel of exotic faces and unfamiliar tongues; a blaring, boisterous jumble of people elbowing their way from one end of the world to the other.
I arrive at Heathrow at the crack of dawn, the fog in my mind as thick and turbid as the fog that unfurls on the tarmac as we hit the runway There is no immigration officer to pull me aside as I disembark, so I am free to catch a ride with the other passengers pushing their way through the dips and bends of Terminal 3—a few of us branching off every now and then to other, unseen terminals—until we are all, at last, deposited at passport control.
It is hard not to notice how the more globalization has eroded our borders, the more ostentatious the policing of those borders has become: the labyrinthine queues, the firm-faced officers, the eager dogs, the color-coded signs, the stalls that trap and herd passengers along like cattle. This is all a matter of security, of course. But it is also a matter of control—or rather, the illusion of control. In a world in which national boundaries are becoming increasingly irrelevant, there is some comfort in knowing that here, at the edge of our fast-fading territorial frontiers, the state still maintains a measure of control, not over identity, perhaps, but at least over to whom it does or does not grant entry.
There is a difference between Heathrow and some other airports, however. Look up and you see it: two distinct paths for travelers to take. The first is marked for visitors like myself; we wait patiently in a long line that snakes around a metal maze to be properly identified and registered as “Guests of the United Kingdom.” The second path, marked with a ring of golden stars on a shiny blue square, is not just for British citizens, as one might expect, but for “Citizens of the European Union.” Those who take this route—whether French or Spanish or German or Dutch or Latvian or Swedish or Romanian or Maltese or any one of twenty-seven separate nationalities—need barely slow down as they flash their matching passports at the sleepy immigration officer slumping in his cell. For the citizens of these nation-states, passing from one country in Europe to another is a bit like strolling from neighborhood to neighborhood.
Freedom of movement among the citizens of Europe is not a new phenomenon. Europeans have trod on one another’s lands, spoken one another’s languages, eaten one another’s cuisine, and shared one another’s cultures for centuries. But the creation of the European Union (EU) has transformed this gaggle of sovereign states, which a mere sixty years ago nearly brought the continent to ruin, into what Winston Churchill liked to call “the United States of Europe.”
The European Union is an unprecedented geopolitical realignment the likes of which has not been seen since the end of the Roman Empire. How remarkable that a group of independent states, united by nothing more substantive than geography, would agree to band together under a single constitution and a common court, a single currency and a common market: one parliament, one passport, one birth certificate, one citizenship, one community made up of twenty-seven sovereign states (and counting), with twenty-three languages and half a billion members. A continent without borders.
For enthusiasts of globalization, the European Union offers a thrilling glimpse into a future of transnational interdependency. Its creation signals a rejection of the politics of exclusion that dominated so much of the previous century and an embrace of a singular global civilization. In the eyes of a new, borderless generation of Europeans, whom the writer T. R. Reid calls “Generation E” and who “consider themselves not as Spaniards or Czechs but rather as Europeans who happen to be living in Toledo or Prague,” the EU serves as the beau ideal of the global peace and prosperity that may be possible if nation-states join together in friendship and cooperation to promote their common interests.
For critics of globalization, the European Union is a nightmare of unfettered capitalism, cultural dilution, and, ultimately, the loss of national identity. Over the last decade, as it has forged ahead with a slew of treaties and referenda to bind member states together more fully under a federal system (and to bring ever more members on board), a wave of xenophobia and ultranationalism has swept through Europe. Hence the sudden success of a host of unabashedly racist right-wing political parties such as the French National Front, the British National Party, and the Freedom Party of Austria, or the mainstream appeal of neofascist politicians such as France’s Jean-Marie Le Pen, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, or the late Austrian agitator Jörg Haider.
The appeal of these parties and politicians derives from their ability to tap into the widespread fear among many Europeans of globalization and its consequences: the curbs on national sovereignty, the new configurations of power, the unfamiliar bureaucracies, and, most of all, the alien and exotic faces that have suddenly become part of the cultural fabric of their once homogeneous landscapes. All of this has made Euro-skepticism a much more common phenomenon throughout Europe, even among Generation E. In 2005, both France and the Netherlands, two of the European Union’s founding states, rejected an EU draft constitution by wide margins. Not coincidentally, that same year, bloody riots tore through France’s immigrant ghettos, engulfing Clichy-sous-Bois and several other Paris suburbs. A year earlier, a Moroccan immigrant named Muhammad Bouyeri butchered the controversial filmmaker and professional provocateur Theo van Gogh on the streets of Amsterdam, a city in which nearly half of the population is of foreign origin. These two events, followed by fiery protests over the Danish newspaper Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten’s publication of the Muhammad cartoons, which were almost immediately reprinted in newspapers and magazines across Europe in a show of “solidarity,” further inflamed a continentwide debate over what it means to be French or Dutch or Danish in an increasingly heterogeneous, increasingly borderless Europe. All of this has provided cover for ultranationalists to present themselves as the defenders of ethnic and cultural unity—nationalism’s bone and marrow—against the barbarian hordes washing up on Europe’s shores with the rising tide of globalization.
Of course, in today’s Europe, the barbarian hordes happen to be mostly Muslims. In fact, the massive surge of Muslim migration into Europe over the last fifty years has created a situation in which Europe’s identity crisis being experienced almost wholly through the lens of Islam. It seems that the Muslim has replaced the Jew as Europe’s new “negative pole.”
To be sure, Islam has always played a pivotal role as Europe’s quintessential Other. The borders of what we know today as Europe were established in large part through the continent’s encounter with Islam—from the shifting battle lines of the Crusades to the defense of the Hapsburg Empire against the Turks. But the deterritorialization of Europe has altered the equation, making it impossible to separate Europe’s turbulent relationship with Islam from the larger questions of sovereignty and national identity that have arisen as a direct result of globalization. So, for instance, in France, the refusal to serve halal meat to Muslim kids in school cafeterias has become what Olivier Roy has called a matter of “territorial reconquest” for French nationalists, a means of exerting “national cohesion by asserting a purely political identity that confines to the private sphere any specific religious or cultural identities.” In Germany, the construction of new mosques has been halted by political and civic leaders who argue that the buildings are not places of worship but “symbols of a parallel world.” The Netherlands has introduced legislation to ban the Qur’an, which some politicians claim conflicts with “Dutch values.” In the United Kingdom, the Muslim veil has been denounced as “a mark of separation” by former prime minister Tony Blair and veiled women condemned as “a walking rejection of all our freedoms.” No matter that less than 3 percent of Muslim women in the U.K. wear the veil. The point is that the veil and the mosque and Muslim dietary requirements have all become unmistakable signs of Islam’s otherness, the most obvious and most convenient foil for an aggressive and suddenly revived European national identity. Visit any of the dozen or so large, ethnically isolated enclaves one finds throughout Europe—say, the British working-class town of Beeston in southern Leeds, two hundred miles north of Heathrow—and one thing becomes perfectly clear: fear of Islam in Europe goes hand in hand with fear of globalization.
Beeston was once a thriving factory and mill town, but the factories and mills are now mostly closed. Their burnt-out stacks loom over the city like warped minarets. The city is divided into two areas—Beeston Village, a bucolic, mostly white working-class neighborhood of charming Victorian homes and new shopping centers, and Beeston Hill, the run-down neighborhood to the east of the Village, which is now home to the majority of Beeston’s Muslim population.
In Beeston Hill, at almost any hour of the day, one can find groups of unemployed teenage boys, mostly first- and second-generation Pakistanis, loitering in back alleys smoking cigarettes. There are jobs in Beeston: as one resident told me with a bitter smile, “The call centers are always hiring.” But most of the kids work in family shops, where they can at least earn enough money for cigarettes and chips, until one day they’re in their twenties and realize that all they have is cigarettes and chips. And so they turn to drugs or Islam.
The families in Beeston Hill are close-knit. There is no choice. This is a dense residential area. Some of the dilapidated redbrick housing units are shaped like a horseshoe, with a fenced-in weed garden in the middle. Satellite dishes perch on every balcony. Two, maybe three families—usually from a single village in Pakistan—may share a house: the white sheets hanging on the line in the front yard could be anyone’s sheets; the old, bearded men entering and leaving the houses in their slippers and shalvar kameez could be anyone’s uncles. Community is the rule here.
By the British government’s own admission, the standard of living in Beeston Hill is among the worst in Britain. There is poverty, drugs, gangs—everything one finds in any forgotten, depressed neighborhood. There is also stark, in-your-face, matter-of-fact racism.
ISLAM OUT OF BRITAIN!
The words, scrawled on the wall of a local pub, are like a punch in the stomach. I do not know what to make of them until a friend informs me that this was the slogan of a popular leaflet campaign launched by the right-wing British National Party (BNP). For years, the BNP had been bellowing about the creeping “Islamification” of Britain. But after 9/11, its xenophobic platform, which, among other things, calls for a ban on all Muslims flying into or out of the United Kingdom, as well as a boycott of all Muslim-owned businesses (“Not those owned by Chinese or Hindus,” a BNP publication helpfully clarifies, “only [those owned by] Muslims as it’s their community we need to pressure”), suddenly found a receptive audience in the United Kingdom. (A YouGov/Sky News Poll in 2006 showed that nearly 60 percent of British citizens believed that all further immigration into the United Kingdom should be halted.) The party that in 1990 was described by the European Parliament as “openly Nazi” has today become a legitimate force in British politics, managing in 2006 to more than double its number of council seats, from twenty to forty-six. By 2008, that number had risen to one hundred.
The rise of the British National Party coincides with a rise in anti-EU sentiment throughout the United Kingdom. The BNP has become a receptacle for Euro-skepticism of all stripes, the party that has most obviously benefited from Britons’ fears of globalization (on the BNP website, the EU flag is represented with a golden swastika in the middle of the ring of stars). At the same time, the BNP’s success in the most recent elections is a direct result of the party’s sudden and single-minded focus on what it terms the “Muslim problem.”
Standing with my friend in the drizzle, reading those angry and determined words on the wall of the pub, it dawns on me that this is not the first time I have encountered BNP propaganda. On July 12, 2005, five days after the Jihadist attacks on the London Underground and bus system, a BNP flier was distributed around the country depicting the mangled, burned-out husk of bus number 30, which was destroyed in a suicidal blaze by Hasib Hussain, the youngest of the 7/7 bombers. At the bottom of the flier was a brusque yet pointed message: “Maybe it’s time to start listening to the BNP.”
Hasib Hussain, like his fellow 7/7 bombers, Mohammed Siddique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer, was born in West Yorkshire and grew up right here, among Beeston’s large Muslim community (the fourth bomber, Jermaine Lindsay, was a convert and recent immigrant from Jamaica). The youngest of four children, Hasib came from a tight-knit, though not unusually devout, family. His father and mother (both British citizens), his brother, and his sister-in-law shared a comfortable four-bedroom home in the district of Holbeck. Several more members of his extended family lived nearby.
The Hussains were not poor, not by Beeston standards. Hasib’s father had a steady job working in a factory. His brother was a successful administrator in Leeds. Hasib was not a particularly bright kid. He was not particularly zealous or particularly idealistic. He was unremarkable in almost every way, which is why his friends and family, and even the British authorities, were so baffled by his sudden murderous turn. Yet as it turns out, this unexceptional and unassuming second-generation Pakistani-Briton from West Yorkshire was the prototypical Jihadist. In fact, the path that young Hasib Hussain took from shy teenager to the bomber of bus number 30 is so well trod that his life provides the perfect template for understanding the phenomenon of Global Jihadism as a social movement.
First a few words about social movements and the role that religion so often plays in shaping and nurturing them. Social movements arise when relatively powerless people band together under the banner of a collective identity in order to challenge the existing social order. Such movements are, almost by definition, utopian in character, in that they are fervently engaged in reimagining society. This is particularly true of so-called transformative social movements, such as Global Jihadism, which seek a complete upending of the old social order through violent revolution, often in anticipation of cataclysmic global change.
Social movements are by no means a modern phenomenon, as demonstrated by the Zealots. Nor are they strictly secular, as evidenced by the evangelical movement. However, it was the advent of modernity that empowered social movement members to so radically reimagine the nature of human society. Modernity, of course, is a tricky term to define. The concept tends to be associated with issues such as mass urbanization and rapid industrialization as societies transitioned from feudalism to capitalism. But one can argue that the hallmark of the modern age is the sudden shift in human consciousness that occurred when people began to realize that the accepted norms and values of society were not fixed or absolute, let alone divinely mandated, but rather man-made and malleable. In other words, with modernity came the recognition that society was merely a human construct, one that could be rapidly and profoundly altered by individuals working in solidarity with one another.
Just as modernity altered the way individuals understood their relationship to society at large, so did it fundamentally change the way individuals understood themselves. It used to be that a person’s identity was defined by the society to which he or she belonged. But as society was increasingly deemed to be nothing more than the product of human imagination, so too were social identities cast aside as mere human constructions. After all, if there are numerous alternatives to the present social order, there must also be numerous alternatives to the identities that society ascribes to us. Thus, with the rise of modernity, new collective identities began to arise, constructed not through societal mandates but through conscious self-reflection—not “Who do you say I am?” but “Who do I say I am?” In short, the modern age has ushered a transition from a world in which identities were bestowed to a world in which identities can be gained or lost through deliberate action—from a world of ascribed identities to a world of self-identification.
This shift in consciousness is usually traced to the beginning of the nineteenth century, an era that witnessed the first organized challenges to the accepted social order. The French Revolution (1789–1799) in particular, with its rallying cry “Liberté, égalité, fraternité,” permanently upended the time-honored orthodoxies of human society, not just in France but throughout Europe, as large groups of individuals began mobilizing, first loosely and defensively, then more organized and offensively, in response to the massive social changes taking place throughout the industrialized world. These individuals were not just challenging the accepted social order; they were questioning its very foundation. Why should the world be as it is? Why should it not be different? Why not dramatically so?
Such utopian ideals have led more than a few social scientists to dismiss social movements as the refuge of the malcontent. To this day, some social movements—the black power and feminist movements of the 1950s and ’60s, for example, or the radical environmental or antiglobalization movements of today—are viewed as nothing more than short-lived, unstructured, and extreme reactions to societal stress, spurred by individuals unmoored by the natural changes of society: a herd of cattle in a state of alarm.
The problem with this perception is that it ignores the very real grievances at the heart of social movements. The environment really is deteriorating. Globalization truly does destroy indigenous economies. Blacks, women, the marginalized and dispossessed do often suffer at the hands of the powerful and elite. That some social movements seek to address these grievances, not through the long slog of political participation or legal reform but through sweeping societal change (or in the case of a transnational social movement such as Jihadism, global change), does not necessarily make them irrational or deviant, no matter how disruptive their actions may be to a society’s accepted social norms. As the sociologist Michael Schwartz wryly noted, participants in social movements are just as rational as those who study them.
The perception of social movements changed in the 1960s, primarily in response to the legitimate countercultural challenges posed by racial and ethnic groups, student groups, environmental groups, and others, all of which sought to create broad cultural, social, and political shifts in society through organized, collective action. These days, social movements are more or less universally viewed as “normal, rational, institutionally rooted political challenges by aggrieved groups.” Yet there is still enormous reluctance among some sociologists to expand the definition of such movements to include groups that, while functioning exactly like a social movement, choose to define themselves in explicitly religious terms. Perhaps this is because scholars are used to thinking of religion as an isolated field of study, one too often brushed aside by the secularization theories that dominated sociological studies throughout much of the twentieth century. But in this new, emerging century, as the boundaries between religion and politics are, in all parts of the world, becoming increasingly blurred, we can no longer afford to view religious movements as inherently different from any other group of individuals who have linked their individual identities together with the purpose of challenging society.
The truth is that religion has certain qualities that make it a particularly useful tool for promoting social movement activism. Religion can tap into a person’s deeper sense of self—the existential self—giving members a profoundly personal and emotional stake in the success of the movement. At the same time, religion brings to a social movement the hierarchal structures, financial resources, communication channels, and manpower that are so vital in getting the movement off the ground. A huge part of the success of the civil rights movement in the United States came from its ability to use black churches as venues for disseminating information from the pulpit to the streets.
Social movements must provide participants with certain “selective incentives” to convince them that they have something to gain from joining. When religion is involved, these incentives become easier, since people of faith are usually willing to sacrifice earthly rewards for the promise of a heavenly one. And one must not forget that those who claim the mantle of religious leadership, even if they are not officially recognized by their religious institutions (indeed, especially if they are not recognized by their religious institutions), tend to enjoy an automatic sense of authority and legitimacy that would otherwise take years for social movement leaders to develop on their own. Think of the leftist priests who led Latin America’s Liberation Theology movement, many of whom were excommunicated by the Vatican for doing so (Pope John Paul II referred to them as the “internal enemy” of the Church). It was the collars they wore around their necks, not the guns they carried in their belts, that drew to these priests an army of the poor and dispossessed.
Or consider bin Laden, a man with no religious credentials who has never studied in any Islamic seminary and who has only the most rudimentary knowledge of Islamic law and theology, but who has nevertheless managed to seize for himself the powers traditionally ascribed to Islam’s clerical class by, for example, repeatedly issuing his own fatwas (which, according to Islamic law, can be issued only by a qualified member of the clergy). It is his conscious appropriation of religious authority that has made bin Laden so appealing to those Muslims—particularly young European Muslims like Hasib Hussain and his fellow 7/7 bombers, who are themselves mostly ignorant of Islamic law and theology—whose sense of alienation from their own religious communities makes them yearn for alternative sources of spiritual leadership. In his speeches and writings, bin Laden warns these young Muslims not to listen to their clerics, whom he considers incapable of addressing their needs. “No official scholar’s juridical decrees have any value as far as I’m concerned,” he has declared. In fact, bin Laden makes the astonishing claim that following the leadership of these “hypocrite imams” (by whom he means any member of the clergy that disagrees with his interpretation of Islam) is “tantamount to worshiping [them] rather than God.” He then audaciously takes upon himself the duty, traditionally reserved for Islam’s clerical class, of “enjoining what is right and forbidding what is wrong.” It is a clever manipulative trick: convince young Muslims to stop obeying their religious leaders while assuming for yourself those leaders’ religious authority.
We have already seen how a social movement relies on the use of symbols to create solidarity among members across ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and national boundaries. For such symbols to be effective, they must be familiar enough to be recognized and easily absorbed by the movement’s members, yet new enough to arouse excitement and interest; they must reflect societal values while also challenging them. Religion, with its familiar yet infinitely malleable supply of symbols, provides a reservoir of ready-made symbols—words, phrases, and images—that can be interpreted and reinterpreted as often and as innovatively as one likes to invest a movement’s message with meaning and significance. So, for example, zeal can be a symbol of personal piety or pious revolt. The cross of Christ can be employed as both an emblem of peace and a banner of war. Jihad can simultaneously be an internal struggle against sin and an external struggle for liberation. These symbols can be appropriated from traditional religious authorities and recast in such a way as to draw a sharp distinction between the old, outmoded, arcane, and apolitical posture of the temple, the church, or the mosque and the new, innovative, populist position represented by the social movement.
Finally, and most significantly, religion’s ability to sanction violence, to declare it permissible and just, to place it within a cosmic framework of order versus chaos, good versus evil, is indispensable to the success of a social movement. As the sociologist Sidney Tarrow writes, there can sometimes be no more effective means to simultaneously “weld supporters together, dehumanize opponents, and demonstrate a movement’s prowess” than through an act of organized collective violence.
Violence can be as essential an element in religion as love, charity, or any other aspect of the human condition. Unless a religion aspires to nothing more than metaphysical contemplation, it has no choice but to contend with society’s other “group-forming mechanisms”—ethnicity, culture, politics, nationalism—all of which (like religion) create boundaries between in-groups and out-groups, and all of which (like religion) regularly employ violence in doing so. The intersection of religion and violence over time and across cultures has less to do with the logic or substance of religion itself than with the fact that both religion and violence function as durable markers of collective identity: the simplest, most effective means of saying who is us and who is them.
Religion, of course, can be just as effective in promoting nonviolence and civil disobedience, as was the case with America’s civil rights movement or India’s movement for independence from Britain. But for movements that operate in societies where democratic institutions are either wholly absent or brutally repressed by the ruling regime, countries where legitimate opposition is simply not allowed, collective violence may be the sole means for a social movement to pursue its goals of radical social transformation, as Latin America’s Liberation Theology movement discovered.
Developed by a handful of politically active priests throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Liberation Theology relied on familiar Christian symbols and metaphors (the Eucharist, the suffering of Christ, the coming of the Kingdom of God) to unite the impoverished and downtrodden of Latin America under a single collective identity and encourage them to rise up and challenge the accepted social order. By casting Jesus as a poor, illiterate revolutionary who fought the ruling powers of his time on behalf of the oppressed and marginalized, Liberation Theology sought to redefine the Gospel story in purely sociopolitical terms, as a means of fighting back against the ruthless, U.S.-backed regimes in countries such as Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala.
Yet when these regimes responded to the Liberation Theology movement with indiscriminate and unrestrained state-sanctioned violence, when soldiers began raping and murdering nuns with impunity and executing priests during Mass, when it became clear that the international community would do nothing to curb the brutality (Ronald Reagan actively supported the actions of these regimes, calling Liberation Theology “a threat to U.S. national security”), the Christian revolutionaries felt they had no choice but to turn to violence themselves. As Father Ernesto Cardenal, who joined the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, bluntly declared, “[Christ] says we must love the enemy, but he doesn’t say we can’t fight them…. Christ forbade the sword but not the machine gun.”
These were shocking words for many Christians, particularly those living comfortable, middle-class lives in the peaceful suburbs of North America and Western Europe. But as Archbishop Oscar Romero, perhaps the most famous of the countless martyrs of Latin America’s Liberation Theology movement, argued, if there can be no peace without justice, and if justice must sometimes be fought for, the Church “cannot simplistically say it condemns any kind of violence.”
“We know,” Romero wrote in an epistle to the Church, “how the great number of peasants, workers, slum dwellers, and so forth, who have organized themselves to defend their rights and promote legitimate structural changes, are simply judged to be ‘terrorists’ and ‘subversives’ and so are arrested, tortured, made to disappear, or are murdered, with no law or judicial institution to protect them or to give them a chance to defend themselves and prove their innocence. Faced with these uneven and unjust odds, they have often felt forced to defend themselves, even with violence.”
It is important to recognize that the kind of violence Romero refers to is organized, ritualized violence: sacred violence. As Mark Juergensmeyer notes, the Christian revolutionaries in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala did not perceive their struggle for freedom from oppression as merely a political conflict but rather as a cosmic contest between the absolute forces of good and evil, a conflict in which God was actively engaged on behalf of the poor and dispossessed against the wealthy and powerful, a conflict in which everyone must pick a side. “Either you are with the slaughtered or you’re with the slaughterers,” cried Father Cardenal.
But though violence can be an integral part of a social movement, if taken too far, it can become a liability, as we have seen with Jihadism. On the one hand, violence can create the perception that change is possible, thus convincing people with similar grievances to align themselves with the movement one way or another. And as certain tactics, such as suicide bombing, begin to show success, they are picked up by other members of the movement. On the other hand, violence can lead to even greater repression by the state, which in turn can further radicalize the movement and thus frighten away sympathizers and invalidate the movement’s grievances. This is the great paradox of social movements, whether religiously inclined or not: the more violent the reaction to the movement, the more violent the movement may become. What ultimately led to the deradicalization of the Liberation Theology movement—or, for that matter, the environmental movement, the antiglobalization movement, the feminist movement, the black power movement, and so on—was the gradual co-option of their members’ grievances into mainstream society. Indeed, when it comes to dealing with a social movement, society has only two options: either it can address the members’ grievances, thereby making the movement irrelevant, or it can deflect those grievances and further radicalize the movement. Or as Sidney Tarrow puts it, “actions that begin in the streets [can be] resolved in the halls of government or by the bayonets of the army.” The challenge facing many European governments when it comes to dealing with Global Jihadism is whether to pursue greater force or greater accommodation. Which approach they choose will dictate whether Jihadism in Europe gradually becomes insignificant or instead festers within Europe’s immigrant communities long enough to explode into full-scale revolution.
There are more than twenty million Muslims in Europe, the majority of whom are immigrants from former European colonies. Indeed, immigration throughout much of Europe is, for a host of reasons, inextricably linked to the unsettling process of decolonization. Hence, the majority of immigrants in the United Kingdom—including Hasib Hussain, Mohammed Siddique Khan, and Shehzad Tanweer—are from South Asia (India, Pakistan, Kashmir), while in France most immigrants hail from former French colonies like Morocco and Algeria.
Starting in the 1950s, a wave of migrant workers from the Middle East and North Africa swept into Europe, mostly to clean up the devastation of World War II. Many of these workers had little contact with government entities, as they were for the most part recruited and employed by private firms and housed in ethnically segregated hostels and guesthouses. These were poor, mostly young men, isolated from the rest of European society, who created their own insular communities based on the languages, religions, or cultures they had in common. They maintained deep ties with their home countries and regularly sent their paychecks back to their wives and children. Few had any intention of making a permanent home in Europe.
After the oil embargo in 1973 caused a crisis in the global economy, leading to massive job losses throughout Europe, immigration laws were tightened. Many countries now required “proof of personal connection” to be allowed legal entry. Yet far from curbing immigration, the new laws launched a second wave of migration into Europe, as the wives and children of migrant workers, worried that they would forever be separated by the new legal restrictions, began flooding into the continent to join their husbands and fathers.
The reunification of immigrant families, particularly in urban areas such as Leeds, Berlin, and Rotterdam, fostered a far greater sense of conservatism and a deeper emphasis on religious observance among Europe’s Muslims. Islam became a means of maintaining family cohesion in a foreign and unfamiliar land. Little by little, large ethnic enclaves began popping up throughout Europe: in Beeston Hill; in Berlin’s Kottbusser Tor, dubbed “Little Istanbul,” whose garbage-choked streets are lined with row upon row of dilapidated housing complexes, nondescript kebab shacks, Turkish newsstands, Arab markets, and the occasional sex shop; in the heart of Rotterdam, where a quarter of the population is from either Turkey or Morocco.
From Britain to Brussels, one often hears dire warnings about the impending takeover of Europe by these Muslim immigrants. It is a widespread fear fueled by a barrage of bestselling books with histrionic titles such as Londonistan, While Europe Slept, and The West’s Last Chance—the last written by the right-wing journalist Tony Blankley, who warns that “the threat of the radical Islamists taking over Europe [today] is every bit as great … as was the threat of Nazis taking over Europe in the 1940s.” It is difficult to take such hysterical comments seriously, considering that Muslims make up 2 to 4 percent of Europe’s total population and demographers do not expect that number to rise far beyond 6 percent. Yet research done by sociologist Marc Sageman shows that over the past few years 84 percent of those who have actively participated in the Global Jihadist movement were first- or second-generation immigrants, living mostly in Europe. That is a startling statistic, and it has led some to conclude that the rise of radical Islam in Europe is due primarily to a lack of integration. Muslims, it is argued, must be made to assimilate fully into European society in order to keep them from falling into the trap of Jihadism. They must become secularized and Westernized. They must learn Europe’s languages and fully adopt Europe’s customs. They must align their mores and values with those of their new home. Otherwise, they must return to their old ones.
The problem with this argument is that most Muslims living in Europe are already fairly well integrated into European society. European Muslims, especially second- and third-generation immigrants, speak European languages, take European university degrees, and live by and large as Europeans. Islam in Europe has so thoroughly absorbed European ideals of religious and cultural pluralism, of individualism and human rights, of liberalism and modernity that scholars often speak of a wholly new and culturally distinct form of European Islam, which Bassam Tibi calls “Euro-Islam.”
Even a fundamentalist, antidemocratic organization such as Europe’s arm of the Hizb ut-Tahrir—a Salafist organization that, despite its rejection of violence, nevertheless seeks to re-create the global Caliphate—is, ironically, supremely European in its posture and perspective: it employs the language of European civil rights, demands the political freedoms and privileges afforded to it by the European Constitution, speaks almost exclusively in European tongues, and relies on the fundamental principles of European civil society to freely preach a message that would lead to prison and torture of its members were they to try the same in their fathers’ countries. The members of Hizb ut-Tahrir who rally against British foreign and domestic policy in universities throughout the United Kingdom, who march and hold seminars propagating their religio-political beliefs, are doing so, whether they recognize it or not, as children of the Enlightenment. It is Europe that most clearly informs their political ideology, not Islam. In fact, the world they seek—a world without borders—is the world in which they already live. The European Union is the model of the global Caliphate.
In any case, lack of integration is hardly an issue for Europe’s Jihadists. Hasib Hussain was, by all accounts, well integrated into British society, as was the leader of the 7/7 attacks, Mohammed Siddique Khan, a beloved schoolteacher known to his non-Muslim friends as “Sid.” Jamal Zougam, the man thought to be responsible for placing the explosions on a Spanish commuter train that killed 191 people on March 11, 2004, was a fairly successful businessman in Madrid. Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, the murderer of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, was a highly educated British-born Pakistani from a well-adjusted middle-class family.
These men are doctors, lawyers, and engineers, the best and brightest of their communities, the pride of their immigrant families. They are precisely the kind of well-educated, socially conscious people who tend to flock to social movements: people who have the material and mental resources to mount collective challenges to the accepted social order. Jihadism attracts the same kind of person who, in other circumstances and with different challenges, would have joined an antiglobalization or civil rights movement. That Jihadists like Hasib Hussain are extreme in their views and violent in their tactics does not take away Jihadism’s legitimacy as a social movement. As Tarrow writes, “Extremism is an exaggerated form of the frames of meaning that are found in all social movements … [just as] violence is an exacerbation of collective challenges.”
Hasib was an average student, more interested in sports than in his studies, but he did finish high school and go on to earn a degree in an advanced business program. Neither he nor any other 7/7 bomber was a product of a madrassa—one of the Islamic schools that, in Europe and North America, are often viewed as terrorist factories where young Muslim children are trained to hate “the infidel.” Worldwide, only about 13 percent of Jihadists have had any kind of religious education (not a single 9/11 hijacker attended a madrassa), which makes sense, considering that madrassas tend to be the reserve of the poor, who cannot afford any other kind of education. And if there is one thing that Jihadists—whether in Europe or in the Middle East—have in common is that they tend not to be poor.
True, Muslim immigrants in Europe live at economic levels far below those of most of their fellow Europeans. Poverty breeds resentment. It breeds hopelessness. And both of these can be used as effective recruitment tools for Jihadist leaders. Still, it is a well-documented fact that the majority of those who turn to Global Jihadism are, like Hasib and his mates, from middle-class families.
Hasib Hussain, Mohammed Siddique Khan, and Shehzad Tanweer all worshiped at the Stratford Street Mosque in Beeston. But as the official British report on the attacks of 7/7 makes clear, Hasib’s indoctrination into Jihadism occurred away from the mosque, away from all places with any known links to extremism. It is ironic that the bulk of European governments’ antiradicalization efforts has been focused, almost myopically, on mosque surveillance—since 2002, the German police have raided more than three hundred mosques, with little to show for their efforts than the resentment and distrust of Germany’s Muslim population—because Jihadists do not gather in mosques. Hasib actually met Khan and Tanweer not at the Stratford Street Mosque but at the Hamara Healthy Living Centre, a popular youth club in Beeston where Khan ran an outreach program. Not even the infamous Finsbury Park Mosque in North London, where the Jihadists Richard Reid and Zacarias Moussaoui worshiped and where for a brief time the takfiri enthusiast Abu Hamza al-Masri served as imam (al-Masri was publicly sacked by the mosque’s board and is currently in prison for inciting racial violence), turned out to be the Jihadist breeding ground it was made out to be in the press. Neither the 3/11 cell in Madrid nor the 9/11 cell in Hamburg had any connection to a mosque.
The modern Jihadist network can be likened to a self-organized, sometimes spontaneous, informal group of close friends who tend to come together away from their own religious communities (“bunches of guys,” Marc Sageman calls them). This is what the official British investigation of 7/7 meant when it concluded that, “group identities, formerly rooted in nationalist causes, became less important whilst loose networks of individuals, often centered on a leading figure, became more commonplace.” At most, the mosque serves as a place where certain disaffected kids, those who may feel marginalized and out of place in their communities and who may therefore be susceptible to the message of jihad, can be identified.
Hasib’s sudden turn to radical Islam came not through contact with his mosque but after a trip to Saudi Arabia in 2003. He began praying more often and wearing traditional Pakistani clothes. He talked about becoming an imam. Yet his newfound piety was underdeveloped and unsophisticated, which made him the perfect target for a proudly anti-intellectual, anti-institutional movement such as Jihadism. Part of the appeal of Osama bin Laden as a spiritual leader is that he is seen as untainted by the traditional clerical establishment, the ulama. Bin Laden, you will recall, is not a cleric and has no religious training. In his speeches and declarations he routinely refers to the traditional Muslim clergy as “imams of infidelity,” “defeatist imams,” or “hypocrite imams” (“Our so-called scholars,” in the words of Mohammed Siddique Khan). When bin Laden declared that the 9/11 hijackers had rejected all conventional schools of law in favor of the law of the Prophet Muhammad, he was not suggesting that they were simply good and faithful Muslims, followers in the path trailed by the Messenger of God. He was in fact mocking the privileged status of the ulama as the exclusive interpreters of the law. “Don’t you dare associate with those [ulama] who follow their own whims and desires, who are a burden on the earth,” bin Laden warns his followers, “or those who have bowed before the oppressors, spreading lies about you, and holding you back from this blessed jihad.”
Because Jihadism cannot compete intellectually with the traditional ulama, it is compelled to deny the very authority upon which the law and practice of Islam are founded. This subversive rejection of Islamic law and clerical precedent in favor of a direct, unmediated experience of faith, in which every believer is an imam, is incredibly attractive, especially in Europe, where young Muslims are already distanced from the traditional institutional centers of their religion and where “vernacular” forms of Islam dominate the religious landscape.
And make no mistake, it is kids that Jihadism seeks. Sageman’s research indicates that the average age of Jihadists detained by the European and Canadian governments is twenty. Hussain was just eighteen years old when he died, which in bin Laden’s eyes made him the perfect candidate. “We find that the only age group capable of giving and waging jihad is the fifteen to twenty-five age bracket,” he has stated. “I instruct the young people to exert every effort in jihad, for it is they upon whom this duty primarily devolves.”
These youths tend to show little interest in the arcane and often painfully out-of-touch sermonizing of their imams. They find traditional, conservative interpretations of Islam unsatisfying. They are hungry for a more intimate spirituality that cannot be contained by the walls of the mosque, and, as with most religiously inclined social movements, they form their collective identities in direct opposition to the formal religious authorities of their community. When it comes to religious instruction, they are mostly self-taught. They rarely understand Arabic, are not educated in Islamic law, and tend to be suspicious of those who do have Islamic credentials. They consider too much intellectualism as spoiling the emotional immediacy of their simple and unconditional faith. And because in Europe they generally have greater access to education and mass communication technologies, because they have been saturated with European ideals of individualism, they are far more likely than their coreligionists in Arab and Muslim majority states to prefer self-styled spiritual gurus to traditional imams and to abandon clerical precedent for “self-actualization.” They are, in a word, European.
Only they are rarely made to feel so, either by their fellow citizens or by their governments. Although far more integrated into Europe than their parents, first- and second-generation Muslim youths tend to feel even more excluded from European society, precisely because their expectations and their sense of entitlement are greater. The historically restrictive citizenship laws of many European countries—often based on the law of jus sanguinis (right of blood), whose purpose is to maintain a measure of ethnic homogeneity by linking nationality to ethnicity—have made it difficult for immigrants to feel like equal members of society. For example, a person of Turkish descent who was born in Germany, whose father was born in Germany, whose grandfather was born in Germany was until recently not automatically considered a German citizen. (The laws were reformed in 1999 to make it easier for immigrants to apply for citizenship.) Europe’s antidiscrimination laws are equally restrictive, in that they provide legal protection only for ethnic or racial groups and not for religious communities. Though some laws have recently been extended to include so-called monoethnic religious groups, such as Sikhs and Jews, multiethnic religious groups, such as Muslims, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Rastafarians, are not afforded the same level of legal protection from religious discrimination. In fact, in Italy, Muslims are not even officially recognized as a religious community (despite being the largest religious minority in the country), meaning they are severely hampered by laws pertaining to the construction of religious buildings and the distribution of federal taxes.
To make matters worse, new antiterrorism laws throughout Europe have resulted in what some human rights groups term “institutional discrimination.” Such laws have poisoned relations between religious groups and law enforcement officials so that young European Muslims often bluntly admit that they would not cooperate with the police under any condition for fear of being “databased,” that is, put under surveillance themselves.
Many of these youths feel they are living in a continent in which discrimination and Islamophobia are becoming increasingly mainstream, and the European Monitoring Center on Racism and Xenophobia agrees. In a 2006 report, the Vienna-based organization concluded that physical attacks, acts of vandalism, and discrimination against Muslims in both the job and housing markets have surged to unprecedented levels throughout Europe. (A survey by the Allensbach Meinungsforschungsinstitut, for instance, found that 83 percent of Germans equate the word “Islam” with terrorism.) A large proportion of Muslims interviewed for the study felt that their acceptance into European society was predicated on the assumption that they should “lose their Muslim identity,” that they could be either Muslim or European but not both.
This was exactly the challenge faced by Hasib Hussain. Like most of his peers, Hussain (as well as Tanweer and Khan) made numerous visits to Pakistan to visit family. And like most of his peers, he found that he had little emotional connection to the country or culture of his parents. A former member of Hizbut-Tahrir in Britain put the dilemma of many Muslim youths in Europe this way: “When I went to Pakistan I was rejected. And when I came back to Britain, I never felt like I fitted in to the wider British community. And you’ve got to remember that a lot of parents didn’t want us to fit into the British community.”
The crisis of identity faced by these young Muslims, many of whom feel they belong in neither the West nor the East, drives them to seek out new identities that cannot be contained by any culture or society, that in fact reach across all boundaries of race, ethnicity, and nationality. That is, they seek a deterritorialized identity to match the deterritorialized world in which they live. And they find that identity online. Indeed, thanks to the Internet, the worldwide community of faith that the Jihadists have long envisioned has become a virtual reality.
The Internet allows Jihadist leaders to conduct sophisticated media campaigns aimed at communicating their message to a global audience. Al-Qa’ida even has its own media wing called as-Sahab, which produces and distributes a daily stream of media content, from high-quality propaganda videos and documentaries dubbed into multiple languages to audio recordings and statements by bin Laden and others. The videos often depict images of Muslims around the world suffering at the hands of Western aggression. These images are spliced together with successful Jihadist attacks against enemy targets in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, creating a master narrative in which the Jihadist fighters are seen as the saviors of besieged and oppressed Muslims around the world.
Although the Internet provides Jihadist leaders with an invaluable tool for communication, it is debatable what role their online offensive actually plays in radicalizing Muslim youths. (The official British inquiry into the 7/7 attacks concluded that there was little evidence that Khan, Tanweer, and Hussain were big Internet users.) That is because the overwhelming majority of participants in social movements comprise what sociologists refer to as “free riders”—people who share the movement’s grievances, who associate with the movement’s goals, and who have absorbed the movement’s symbols into their own identities, but who do not take part in the movement’s actions. In the case of Global Jihadism, free riders are those who join chat room discussions and download Jihadist videos but who are attracted to Jihadism as they would be to any other antiestablishment movement—casually, and as a form of rebellion. Theirs is a “pop-culture Jihadism,” akin to the radical student movements of the 1960s, the punk rock subculture of the late 1970s, or the grunge “anticulture” movement of the 1990s. It boasts its own style of dress, its own slang, its own symbols of conformity, even its own music—rap and heavy metal songs glorifying jihad against the kafir. These kids may don the Palestinian kaffiyeh, or national headscarf, in fellowship with a people with whom they have no connection. They may wear Osama bin Laden T-shirts as though he were a modern-day Che Guevara or pin his poster to their walls as if he were a soccer superstar; they may identify with the grievances of the Global Jihadist movement and feel a sense of solidarity with the plight of Jihadist militants around the world. But to mobilize these youths and encourage them to move beyond mere collective identity and toward collective action requires a prolonged personal connection with active members of the movement that can be difficult to sustain. (This explains why it often takes an undercover agent posing as a member of al-Qa’ida to infiltrate these so-called bunches of guys and compel them to action.)
A prolonged personal connection is precisely what turned Hasib Hussain from a disaffected youth into a Jihadist suicide bomber. Mohammed Siddique Khan’s position at the Hamara Healthy Living Centre afforded him the opportunity to seek out and identify possible candidates such as Hussain for indoctrination into Jihadism, though the actual indoctrination took place away from any public space, privately, by way of sustained personal contact and intensive group bonding. Sociologists maintain that there are three necessary steps to incite social movement activism. First, question the legitimacy of the present social order. Then make people believe that the social order can be overturned. And finally, convince them that their active participation is crucial to the movement’s success. According to the official British report, these steps perfectly mirrored the mobilization techniques employed not only on the 7/7 bombers but on Muslim youths throughout Europe.
First, the potential recruit is identified as someone who may be susceptible to the Jihadist message. In Berlin, reports have surfaced of Jihadist leaders posing as parents and attending “parent-teacher conferences” at schools where they can probe into which students are doing poorly, who is having trouble integrating, who may be expelled, and so on. Once identified, the recruit is exposed, through the Internet and satellite television, to the widespread injustices faced by Muslims around the world. Islam’s traditional religious and political leaders are revealed to be corrupt and complicit in the plight of these oppressed Muslims; they are the Near Enemy—hypocrites and apostates to be avoided. International conflicts involving Muslim peoples—whether in China, Kashmir, Chechnya, Afghanistan, or Iraq—are presented as part of a larger “war against Islam,” led by an imperial, crusading West (the Far Enemy), which only the Jihadist militants fighting on Islam’s behalf have the courage or power to repel. Examples are offered of the miraculous successes these fighters have had in battling the world’s great superpowers, both past (the Soviet Union) and present (the United States and Israel), demonstrating that change is possible, that, with the right actions, the world can be remade.
This may be sufficient to urge certain disaffected youths to become involved in Global Jihadism as a social movement, but it is not enough to mobilize them to action. Mobilization occurs only when the global grievances to which they have been exposed are connected to the local grievances that they themselves experience every day as outsiders who lag far behind their fellow Europeans when it comes to employment opportunities, legal representation, civil rights, and educational advantages; as outcasts who are constantly scrutinized by the media and by politicians who accuse them of disloyalty to the state; as foreigners forbidden to express their cultural and religious identity because of legal bans against head scarves or restrictions on the construction of mosques; as immigrants demonized not only by right-wing parties but by mainstream European society; as pious young men and women hectored and humiliated by pseudointellectuals such as Aayan Hirsi Ali, Oriana Fallaci, and Brigitte Gabriel, who make a living fanning the flames of racism and Islamophobia.
Thus, when the French legislature passed a law prohibiting young Muslim girls from wearing head scarves (hijab) in public schools, in a deliberate attempt to assert a cohesive national identity upon its citizenry by forcefully excluding from the public realm any individual religious or cultural identity (a practice the French term laïcité), Ayman Zawahiri issued the following communiqué to his followers across the globe: “Banning the hijab in France is consistent with the burning of villages along with their people in Afghanistan, demolishing houses over their sleeping residents in Palestine, and killing children in Iraq and stealing its oil under false pretexts…. It is consistent with tormenting prisoners in the cages of Guantanamo and torturing Muslims in the prisons of our leaders, the friends of the United States.”
Only after a master frame has been firmly established, wherein an injustice to any Muslim in the world is perceived as an injustice to them (and vice versa), are the theological doctrines of Jihadism introduced. Only then is their world cleanly divided between the oppressed and the oppressors, the slaughtered and the slaughterers, the good and the evil: al-wala’ wal-bara’. Only then does the recruit begin to believe that offensive jihad against innocent civilians and his fellow Muslims is justified. Once he has been stripped of his individual identity and fully assimilated into the collective, only then is the recruit offered the option of suicide terrorism as a legitimate act of war and, more important, a viable means of vengeance for his people.
The perception of the suicide terrorist is that he is driven by hatred toward his target or by a lack of value for life. But as Marc Sageman has argued, “It is actually quite difficult to convince people to sacrifice themselves just because they hate their target…. On the contrary, it appears that it is much more common to sacrifice oneself for a positive reason such as love, reputation, or glory.”
Hasib Hussain stepped aboard bus number 30 in pursuit of radical global transformation. He was not coerced into committing his awful crime; he was not brainwashed. He was a zealot, acting alone and without guidance from anyone save God; he was a knight, called by God to renew his faith by shedding the blood of unbelievers; he was a martyr, sacrificing his own life for the lives of “his people.” It may have been anger and humiliation and a deep-seated feeling of inequity that led Hussain to Global Jihadism. But it was love that made him a suicide bomber—imprudent, misguided, confused, and misplaced love. Love fueled by a romantic notion of jihad as a cosmic war fought on God’s behalf, by a juvenile belief that the world can be remade with just a few pounds of explosives.
Not long after the London attacks, I went to Beeston Hill to try to speak with Hasib’s friends and family. At the time, few in the community would accept that young Hasib had been involved in the attacks. “We are decent people,” Hasib’s father cried in a heartbreaking interview in the London Independent. “I worked hard all my life. Please, please, please don’t say it’s something to do with me or that I knew, my son knew, my wife knew. We are very, very decent people. I think it must have been somebody else on the bus. Not Hasib. He was a good boy.” Some in the neighborhood argued that Hasib had been manipulated by the leader of the group, Mohammed Siddique Khan. Many desperately clung to rumors swirling around the community that the 7/7 bombings had been “an inside job,” a deliberate attempt to trigger an anti-Muslim backlash in the United Kingdom, “a way to finally push us out of the country,” as one Beeston resident told me.
When I returned to the neighborhood some years later, the residents of Beeston Hill had more or less resigned themselves to accepting Hasib’s guilt and the guilt of his coconspirators, though their sense of disaffection and marginalization had only increased in the wake of the 7/7 bombings, the public discussions that had ensued over the compatibility of Islamic and European values, and the debates in the media about whether membership (read, citizenship) in the European Union requires immigrants and the children of immigrants to strip away their cultural affinities and their “communitarian attachments” to their race, religion, and ethnicity in order to sufficiently assimilate into European society.
What I found was that a great many of Europe’s young Muslims are becoming increasingly frustrated by what they consider to be unreasonable and inconsistent demands for them to fully subsume their Muslim identity into the national identities of their adopted countries. (Many feel that having religious values of any kind makes them outcasts in Europe.) The majority of European Muslims with whom I spoke claimed they had already done all they could to integrate into European society and honestly had no idea what more was expected of them. “I was born here,” a second-generation German Muslim from Turkey told me, “I speak German. I even have a Ph.D. I follow the laws. I accept the Constitution. What more do they want from me? What must I do to finally become German? Just tell me, and I’ll do it.” When I posed this question to a political studies professor at Germany’s prestigious Universität Tübingen, he paused for a long moment before answering with a shrug. “There is no such thing as becoming German. You either are or you are not.”
That statement, more than any religious or cultural or socioeconomic considerations, accounts for why Global Jihadism has become so appealing to Europe’s young Muslims. If in the face of globalization and the rapid deterritorialization of the continent the native populations of the European Union are having a difficult time defining their individual national identities, how much more arduous must that task be for immigrants and the children of immigrants? How can one fully participate as an equal member in civil society if membership is predicated on identifying with the dominant culture? The simple fact is that in a country wherein civic identity is difficult to define, where ethnicity and nationality are considered to be one and the same, a foreigner will remain a foreigner forever.
It is within such “identity vacuums” that Global Jihadism thrives. For kids like Hasib Hussain, whose religious and cultural affinities have been cast by their societies as other, Jihadism is more than an alternative form of identity—it is a reactionary identity, a means of social rebellion. It is an identity formed through the deliberate linking of local and global grievances—both real and perceived—to create a single, shared narrative of suffering and injustice. And only by severing that link, and disrupting the narrative, can Global Jihadism be defeated.
The first part of that process has already begun throughout much of Europe. In the United Kingdom, the government has begun placing far greater emphasis on addressing the socioeconomic obstacles, not to mention the religious and racial discrimination, that have kept a great many Muslim immigrants from feeling like equal members of British society. Nationality laws have been revamped so as to develop a more universal, more easily accessible conception of British national identity. Immigrants seeking citizenship in the United Kingdom must now demonstrate sufficient language skills, as well as become adept in British history, culture, and national customs. All of this is an attempt to construct a collective identity based not on ethnic or cultural homogeneity but on a common national narrative, one in which every member of society can share. (Similar programs are under way in France, Spain, Italy, and Germany, though at a much slower pace than in the United Kingdom).
Thus far, the response from Muslim leaders to these reforms has been overwhelmingly positive. There has been almost unanimous support from groups such as the Muslim Council of Britain—the largest and most active of Britain’s Muslim organizations—for new government initiatives requiring foreign imams who wish to work in the United Kingdom to be proficient in English. This seemingly simple gesture has had an enormous impact on the relationship between Britain’s religious leaders and the country’s young Muslims, allowing mosques and Islamic centers to reframe themselves as community hubs where kids can take part in the kinds of social programs that were once the sole purview of community centers like the Hamara Healthy Living Centre, where young Hasib Hussain first met Mohammed Siddique Khan. Meanwhile, a slew of British Muslim organizations, including the Federation of Student Islamic Societies, the Al-Furqan Islamic Heritage Foundation, and the Quilliam Foundation (a counterextremism think tank founded by former members of Hizbut-Tahrir), have set about defining a uniquely British conception of Islam, which has allowed a new generation of Muslim youth to feel increasingly comfortable exerting both their national and their religious identities.
These reforms have already begun to have an impact on Muslim integration throughout Europe. But they are only the first step in confronting Global Jihadism. It is not enough to merely address the local grievances of Muslims. Global grievances, bound up as they are with local grievances, must also be addressed. And in this regard, only the United States, which remains the most dominant economic and military power in the world, can change the narrative between Islam and “the West.” This is true not only because the United States is at the forefront—militarily, economically, politically, and culturally—of the conflict between Europe and North America on the one hand and Muslim majority states on the other, but also because, as the embodiment of the freedoms of faith and conscience for which all peoples of the world strive, America is itself the most powerful weapon against the spread of Global Jihadism.
Much has been written about why Muslims in the U.S. have, for the most part, managed to avoid many of the problems of identity and integration facing Muslim communities in Europe. Obviously, economic circumstances have played a significant role: While the majority of Muslims in Europe hail from impoverished immigrant families, the majority of Muslims in the United States are solidly middle-class. The median income for a Muslim household in America is slightly greater than it is for a non-Muslim household, and American Muslims have one of the highest rates of literacy and education of any immigrant group. And certainly America’s long and storied history of absorbing different cultures, religions, and ethnicities has made a difference in shaping the experience of American Muslims. According to demographers, America—already the most racially, ethnically, and religiously diverse country on earth—will soon become the only country wherein minorities form the majority.
But undoubtedly the most significant factor in allowing American Muslims to comfortably reconcile their faith and traditions with the realities of American life is the core American belief that there need be no conflict between one’s religious and nationalist identities. Above all else, it is America’s commitment to the freedoms of religion, and religious expression, that has made Muslims in the United States so much more resistant to the pull of Jihadism than their European counterparts. And it is precisely that same freedom that continues to draw Muslims from all over the world to the promise of the United States. Having traveled throughout the Middle East, I have experienced firsthand how the idea of America as a sponge that absorbs whatever faith, culture, or ethnicity it comes into contact with can overcome the often irresistible pull of anti-Americanism. I have watched Muslims chant “Death to America!” on the streets of Tehran, then privately beg me to help them get a visa to the U.S. Despite the way in which the War on Terror has poisoned America’s image across the Muslim world, even America’s staunchest critics still recognize that there is no country—and certainly no Islamic country—in which Muslims can pursue their religion with more freedom and openness than in the United States.
Of course, with all of this comes the enormous responsibility of placing the very ideals at the heart of the American experience—pluralism and democracy, sovereignty and the rule of law—at the center of U.S. foreign policy, come what may. As we shall see, this is certainly the case when it comes to dealing with Islamist groups like Hamas, Hizballah, and the Muslim Brotherhood. Reaching out to such groups will by no means be an easy task. But, in the end, it is the only way to truly become “the light among nations.”