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| Islam's young radical front At least three of the suspected al-Qaeda fighters held by America are British. They represent the extreme element of an increasingly radical Muslim youth in the UK. "Platoons of young angry Muslims are mushrooming all over [Britain]... they are bitter and resentful - potential fifth-column guerrillas for the numerous causes in the Muslim world." In the light of recent developments at Camp X-Ray, whoever wrote such a passage might be accused of rather stating the obvious. But Fuad Nahdi issued this prediction in a national newspaper more than four years ago. Resentment among young Muslims in Britain has been bubbling for some time. And to those who have been aware of this, news that four of the suspected al-Qaeda fighters held by the US authorities have been revealed as British citizens may come as no surprise. Ruhal Ahmed is being detained in the Afghan city of Kandahar - a former Taleban stronghold - according to the latest information from the Foreign Office. However, it is the predicament of Asif Iqbal and Shafiq Rasul which has generated most interest. Both from Tipton, in the West Midlands, the young men were captured by the Americans following the bloody siege at Mazar-e-Sharif in Afghanistan. The pair are being held prisoner at Camp X-Ray, part of US military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, along with fellow Briton Feroz Abbasi and almost 160 others suspected of fighting for Osama Bin Laden's terror network. As yet nobody knows what drove them there - Jamila Rasul believes her son may have been brainwashed - but some, like Mr Nahdi, think it is a result of a growing radicalisation among some of Britain's young Muslims. It's the sort of radicalism that last summer sparked riots in urban centres in the north of England, he says, and a sign of young Asians' growing disillusionment with life in the UK. It is also a long way from the image projected by most first-generation Asian immigrants to the UK, who were widely seen as diligent, compliant and conformist. The roots of this unrest lie in a combination of external factors, says Mr Nahdi, publisher of Q-News, a magazine aimed at young Muslims. The decline in traditional British industries that had originally attracted Asians to these shores, discrimination in employment, housing, access to healthcare, and legal protection, have all contributed. But cultural changes within Muslim communities also had a hand, he believes. "Most of the Muslims who came here were from the Indian subcontinent, and generally from rural parts rather than the big cities. "They had very little idea of how to bring their children up as Muslims in what was a vastly different environment. Many of them would import an imam from their old village to do the job. "It was a very forbidding interpretation that [the children] learned: don't do this, don't do that." The result was that young Muslims were left with great gaps in their religious education and were ill-equipped to apply what they had learned to life in the urban West. The influx into Britain of extremists from the Middle East - many of whom were expelled from their native lands - and news of the plight of Muslims in places such as Bosnia and Chechnya contributed to the radicalisation. But if there was a single turning point, says Mr Nahdi, it was the Salman Rushdie affair. "This was the first time that the Muslim youth took to the streets and realised common cause with fellow Muslims," he says of the demonstrations that were organised in the late 80s and early 90s in response to Salman Rushdie's "blasphemous" novel, The Satanic Verses. Massoud Shadjareh agrees that Rushdie was highly significant. "It manifested the idea that they were second-class citizens," says Mr Shadjareh, a spokesman for the UK-based Islamic Human Rights Commission. "Like the Gulf War, and 11 September, it gave some of them a reason to come out the cupboard and express their radical views. These events legitimised their view of the world." But even then it's a big step for a young English man to end up with a Kalashnikov slung over his shoulder, battling the country of his birth and upbringing. No-one knows what led the Tipton pair to be in Afghanistan in the middle of a war with the West, but Mr Nahdi can imagine a series of relatively innocuous events that led them there. "Boys of this age go travelling. It's perfectly normal to take a year off and go to Australia or America. Well, they may have family in Pakistan to stay with," he says. "People are curious. They might have travelled up to the frontier to see what's happening and someone gives them a gun to fire as a bit of fun and next thing they know they are in the middle of a war. "It's a sad story, but not so impossible to believe." 29th January 2002 |
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