Stephen Schwartz, in The Origins of British Jihad in the Weekly Standard, asserts,

"CONTRARY TO COMMON WISDOM, Muslim radicalism in the United Kingdom is not rooted in grievance against British, American, Israeli, or other Western policies. Nor is it a reaction to fear or prejudice by non-Muslims. It originates in a specific ideology imported to the country by two generations of Sunni Muslim radicals from Pakistan."

Schwartz says that ideology, known as Deobandism, "produced the 7/7 bombings and the trans-Atlantic airline terror plot, and has made Britain the epicenter of jihadist violence in Europe.

"Deobandism is not an ancient Islamic tradition. It began in India after the 1857 mutiny against the British raj, and was originally a fundamentalist, but peaceful, movement, convinced that the failure of the mutiny made religious teaching and cultivation a preferable alternative to violent combat against foreign rule."

I'll take exception to the above oxymoron, fundamentalist but peaceful, as applied to Islam. Given the plentiful and plainly violent content of the Qur'an, a fundamentalist or (my preference) orthodox application of the faith is a commitment to beheadings, amputation, throat cutting and numerous and varied other persuasions to conversions and/or dhimmitude. [Am I just being stubborn here? I'm told repeatedly that jihad is an internal, spiritual thing--beautiful really--by credentialed experts, geniuses really, like Karen Armstrong, and yet all this yelling, killing, bombing and beheading in the name of jihad by the yellers, killers, bombers and beheaders is somehow persuading me otherwise. Oh well.]

Moving on, Schwartz traces the history of Deobandism in detail in a long article worth reading or at least scanning. His conclusion speaks for itself:

"If Islam is to survive in Britain, it must reject the theological, political, and social blandishments of Saudi and Pakistani radicals. There should be no more tolerance of the misuse of British and Western hospitality by its sworn enemies."

 

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