Seeds of Islamic Militancy Find Fertile Soil in Britain

The featured speaker at the annual dinner of London Metropolitan University’s Islamic Society thundered with fundamentalist zeal while warning of the rage spreading among young British Muslims.

College students should try to curb their “anger and frustration at injustices I see against myself and my Muslim brothers and sisters in this country and globally,” said cleric Abu Aaliyah, according to an audio feed on the student group’s website.

The next speaker at the March dinner congratulated a biomedical student, referred to as “Brother Waheed,” on his election as president of the society.

Today, that up-and-coming activist, Waheed Zaman, is one of the 23 British Muslims detained by London authorities on suspicion of plotting to blow up at least 10 U.S.-bound jetliners in midair.

Whatever the verdict is on the 21-year-old Zaman, his arrest and that of several other well-educated, middle-class men cast a spotlight on the rise of jihadism here among second- and third-generation members of Muslim immigrant families.

The alleged plot, in which police say they have seized evidence from Internet cafes and homes, and in which extremists reportedly met on campuses and at community centers and mosques, suggests that British militants have found an array of gateways for international jihad.

The phenomenon highlights the especially virulent convergence here of Muslim anger and the opportunity for young activists to connect with experienced militants.

“The unregulated existence on campus life allows the formation of a group of sympathizers,” said Anthony Glees, who teaches politics at Brunel University in London. “It allows the invitation to outsiders, be they imams, be they travelers who may have fought against British troops in Iraq, British and American troops in Afghanistan. They are invited on campuses without anyone knowing and inspire young men and women to their fanatical cause.”

Alienation in Muslim communities across Europe runs high.

In the Netherlands in 2004, filmmaker Theo Van Gogh was killed by a Muslim extremist, and the same year in Madrid, Islamic militants planted bombs on commuter trains, resulting in 191 deaths.

But British militants stand out for their willingness and capability to attempt large-scale suicide bombings.

In 2001, Al Qaeda-trained “shoe bomber” Richard Reid tried to bring down a U.S.-bound flight. Subsequently, Britons of Pakistani descent featured prominently in cases including a suicide attack on a Tel Aviv cafe in 2003, a foiled truck bombing in London the same year and the London transit system blasts last year that killed 52 people.

The large numbers of Muslims of South Asian descent plays a role in the amount of homegrown militants in this nation. Britain has the largest population of Pakistani immigrants in the world, and British radicals find inspiration, training and direction in Pakistan, an outpost for the remnants of Al Qaeda and affiliated networks that operate training camps and hatch plots against the West.

Moreover, critics say, a longtime British policy of tolerating Islamic ideologues has turned London, known sardonically as “Londonistan,” into a haven for holy warriors and allowed extremist ideas to seep into mainstream thinking in Muslim communities.

Britain remains a caldron of Islamic movements and militants whose diversity and volatility are unmatched in Europe: Somali refugees, Saudi financiers, Egyptian scholars, Afro-Caribbean jailhouse converts.

“There are just too many extremist groups in Britain. The British have to make choices about which ones to monitor,” said a senior European anti-terrorist police commander. “The development of Londonistan, combined with the large numbers of Muslim immigrants, created this phenomenon, and it lasted a long time out in the open with little control.

“The British woke up too late. Now the police are working effectively, but the numbers are against them.”

The jihad movement in Britain dates back at least 26 years to the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, when a number of young British Muslims traveled to fight with the mujahedin.

Since then, the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina and British foreign policy have been rallying calls for Muslim activism, which now takes aim primarily at Britain’s partnership with the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan and its support for Israel.

British Islamic militants are largely the children of parents who immigrated to England and worked hard to support large families. In some ways, those families have fared better than their counterparts in France and Germany: The open, multicultural approach to integrating immigrants in Britain helped a Muslim middle class take root and attain a presence in politics and government.

But the young people, brought up free of the hardships their immigrant parents’ faced, resent the barriers they still find to success in Britain.

Unlike in France, where many children of the North African diaspora aspire to hold regular jobs and escape from housing projects, young, educated British Muslims say they feel discriminated against in their efforts to move up the socioeconomic ladder -- and see that injustice writ large in British foreign policy.

“There is no equality in jobs,” said Mohammed Khan, 29, a manager of the Foot Market, a shoe store in the shadow of the Brixton mosque, who said he was unable to move up after four years at Barclays Bank despite good performance reviews. “Even when you know you are qualified, you don’t get a job because of your skin color or your name and when you see the injustice in the country’s foreign policy.”

Radicalism among many British-born Muslim university students reveals a bleak irony: Academic achievement and upward mobility do not necessarily prevent radicalization, and may sometimes spur it.

In a poll of Muslim students released last year by the Federation of Student Islamic Societies, nearly 25% said they would not notify police immediately if they knew a fellow Muslim was planning a terrorist attack.

Although she said she would never resort to terrorism herself, University of Greenwich management student Mahmada Sultana, 19, acknowledged that there was a strain of sympathy for jihadism among younger Muslims. She attributed it to the frustration some Muslims feel about the bombings that kill Arab civilians in Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories.

“What’s happening in Lebanon isn’t helping,” Sultana said as she ate lunch with girlfriends, all dressed in traditional head scarves, at a restaurant near the East London mosque. “Iraq is another thing. There are children dying and being bombed.

“It’s for our brothers and sisters,” she said, describing the rationale of jihadists. “The feeling is, ‘I must do something.’ ”

Such anger, combined with the ready access to extremists, increases the potential for violence among Britain’s middle-class Muslims, security experts say. And British-born militants of Pakistani descent, when teamed with terrorist networks in their own country, are ideal operatives because of their European passports, Western ways and language skills.

“Pakistan is an inexhaustible reservoir of combatants, a country full of hatred for the United States, a base for radical madrasas, training camps, terrorist groups,” the anti-terrorist police commander said. “The networks in Pakistan serve as catalysts for the networks in Britain.”

Although Britain clamped down on militant preachers who used inflammatory language in sermons, especially after the transit system bombings last summer, radicals continue to recruit at mosques, several spokesmen for Muslim organizations said.

But they are just as likely to get together at a campus prayer room or a lecture.

Often, the sponsors urge their listeners to eschew violence and avoid anger, as did the speakers at the dinner Zaman attended at London Metropolitan University, where many students pursue vocational training. But that does not prevent small groups with extreme views from linking up at such events.

About two dozen Muslim university students or graduates, most of them born in Britain, have been implicated in terrorist plots or extremist activities, according to the Community Security Trust, a Jewish group that tracks Islamic radical activity in Britain.

Among them have been students killed fighting on the side of the Taliban in Afghanistan, a convicted accomplice of “shoe bomber” Reid and the leader of last summer’s transit system bombings, who was a student at Dewsbury College and Leeds Metropolitan University.

The National Union of Students has repeatedly called on universities to ban at least two fundamentalist Islamic organizations, Hizb ut-Tahrir and Al Muhajiroun, from speaking or recruiting on campuses. The organizations and others have been involved in clashes between Muslim and Jewish students and Hindu and Sikh students.

Britain has been hobbled in its effort to deal with radicalism because of its long tradition of free speech and attempts to assimilate extreme Muslim figures. Even after the transit system bombings, Britain invited Swiss-born Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan, who has been forced to leave the United States for security reasons, to join an advisory committee helping the British government work on Muslim issues.

British authorities say it is easier to monitor extremism and gather intelligence when nonviolent radical activity happens in the open rather than underground. And they say the proper response to hate and intolerance is time-honored values of free speech and democracy.

“We have to address the terrorists’ world view,” said a high-ranking British police official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “We have to be confident about the strengths of our system.... We don’t want it to be presented that we can’t cope with Muslim free speech. It’s of huge importance how our values are seen.”