Daley:
In order to persuade young Muslims that their allegiance belongs here, this country will have to question its own casual self-loathing.
In the
midst of the deeply unfunny news coverage of the two young British jihadi
volunteers who were arrested on terror charges when they arrived back from
Syria, there was one moment of comic absurdity. It seems that before setting
off on their mission, Mohammed Ahmed and Yusuf Sarwar found it necessary to
place orders with Amazon for those invaluable scholarly treatises, Islam for
Dummies, The Koran for Dummies and Arabic for Dummies. Hilarity aside, there is
something important to be noted here.
First,
these 22-year-olds were obviously not the products of some extreme mosque which
had drilled them in Islamist fundamentalism. In fact, they were so untutored in
the religion to which they were nominally affiliated that they had to equip
themselves with a crash course in its basic principles. Nor had they come from
families which were inclined to endorse their terrorist fantasies. Indeed,
their own parents were so horrified when they learned of the men’s activities
that they turned them in to the police. So we need to ask, as a matter of
urgency, where it came from, this bizarre determination to be inducted into a
campaign of seditious murder that (we can assume from their decision to plead
guilty to the terror charges) they fully intended to bring home with them. What
causes young men to risk their own lives, and those of who knows how many
others, for a cause about which they know so little that they have to mug it up
before they catch the plane?
Actually,
this kind of thing is not unprecedented: romantic death cults involving
nihilistic violence and garbled philosophy have a well-established attraction
for the young. (Even suicide is a form of power, to choose your own death being
the ultimate expression of omnipotence.) What is peculiarly dangerous about
this version is that it has a global power base. This is not a handful of
neo-Nazi fantasists plotting in a suburban garage, or a clique of misfit
teenagers arming themselves for a school shooting spree. There are
international, well-funded movements churning out professional recruitment
videos designed specifically to invade the daydreams of the credulous Ahmeds
and Sarwars of Britain and lure them into annihilation.
There
has come to be something of a consensus that this is a problem that only the moderate
Muslim community can deal with through its own moral authority. But parents as
courageous and civically responsible as these two would-be jihadis had are not
going to be ten-a-penny. And it is unfair for the society at large to wash its
hands and leave it all to the families and the neighbours, most of whom are as
new to all this as we are. If too many young Britons are drawn to a hateful,
barely understood dogma because it seems to bring some magical sense of
belonging, then something is clearly wrong with their lives in this country.
There is apparently nothing on offer here that can compete with the promise of
exaltation that is available for the price of a plane ticket.
Contrary
to all the educational shibboleths of our time, young men are motivated by
aggression and power: their dreams are of glorious triumph over rivals. If they
are denied these things – even in the ritualised forms that used to be provided
by an education system that understood how dangerous male adolescence was –
then they will seek them wherever they can be found. Gang violence, with its
criminal initiation rites, or Muslim fanaticism can fill a void, offering not
just a licence for brutality but for banding together into hostile tribes.
There was a time – before characteristically male behaviour was devalued in
favour of the female virtues of empathy and conciliation – when these
proclivities were dealt with quite effectively by combative team sports and
military cadet corps. Institutionalised aggression was supervised by adult
authority until the young men grew up and became responsible for their own
impulses.
But now
that the Western powers are clearly withdrawing from the global policing
business, what point could there be in the quasi-military training which
provided such a useful outlet for youthful male energy? As the great Atlantic
nations recede into domesticity and quieter recreations, what are young men
likely to do with their ungovernable instincts? Look abroad, presumably – to
somewhere with which they can feel some plausible identification, even if that
relationship does require a bit of homework. And that path is made particularly
compelling by the self-flagellating guilt with which Britain (and much of the
West) regards its own history. Most of what is taught in school about the
British past is designed to induce remorse – over colonialism, imperial
exploitation and vainglorious nationalism. It is not utterly beyond the bounds
of reason to conclude from this, if you are searching for a cause, that you are
morally justified in avenging the historic wrongs that were inflicted on your
race.
There
has been – until very recently – a carefully considered educational policy of
encouraging pride in minority ethnic identity. The assumption was that
pressuring pupils to be wholeheartedly British would be not just “racist”
(because it implied that British was better) but disorienting to the child who
needed to identify with “his own community”. So here we are – with a generation
of British-born young people eager to identify with a community that it isn’t
really “theirs” at all, and which they know so little about that they need to
study the crib notes in order to fit into it.
All of
this coincides rather too neatly with the decline of the West as a global
force. That retreat from power has an impact on this phenomenon on more than
one level. It downgrades our effectiveness in dealing with the foreign forces
who are seducing these recruits. Our wilful helplessness in the tumultuous
throes of Middle East power play, and apparent indifference to the suffering
being inflicted in Syria by the Assad regime, must make it so much easier to
see our side as defunct and defeated. We must seem to be conniving at our own
humiliation – almost to be suggesting that we are the losing side now and that
we deserve everything that militant Islam can dish out.
If we
expect law-abiding, loyal Muslims to handle this problem, we are going to have
to give them a lot more help. The parents and the mosques and the communities
can condemn as much as they like – and to their credit they have done a great
deal of that over recent months. But these are displaced people themselves who
need support in order to understand the values of British culture. In order to
persuade their sons (and some of their daughters too) that their allegiance
belongs to this country, Britain will have to question its own casual
self-loathing. And the West will need to consider the larger consequences of
its cynical isolationism.
