Islam in Britain: David Cameron goes too far in equating theology and terror | The Economist

Worth reading:

Nobody could deny that Britain’s madrassas are a huge, under-regulated social phenomenon (about 250,000 children attend around 2,000 such institutions) and that at worst, they are dreadful. In Birmingham last month, a 60-year-old imam and his son, a fellow Islam teacher, were both jailed for a year after pleading guilty to beating a ten-year-old child for his supposed failures in religious classes. It is certainly a bit crazy that up to now, “supplementary schools” have not been subject to the sort of inspection regime that has long been applied (albeit rather too leniently, until recently) to all full-time schools, including faith-based ones.

Mr Cameron’s words will reassure citizens whose sympathies teeter between the Conservatives and parties further to the right; but they will be badly received in the hard-core Muslim areas of British cities, like Bradford and Birmingham, even among those who agree that their communities suffer from all sorts of pathologies, from forced marriage to domestic violence to self-segregation to intolerance, that badly need to be tackled.

And the main reason, says Bradford imam Alyas Karmani, is not so much the contents of the prime minister’s statement, but the context; and in the particular the implication that by teaching, sometimes rather badly and brutally, a fairly purist form of Islam, madrassas are incubators for jihadist violence. What Muslim listeners to the speech will have noticed is the fact that Mr Cameron’s reference to madrassas came immediately after a segment deploring the fact that British boys and girls are being lured off to Syria to fight for the terrorists of Islamic State. “People do not become terrorists from a standing start,” said the Tory leader, after pledging to “take on extremism in all its forms, violent and non-violent.”  Both openly and subliminally, he was implying that deeply traditional Islam is a step on the path to terrorism.

And there, precisely, lies the nub of the deep argument between the British political class and many of the country’s Muslim leaders, especially those who are close to the grass roots. In parts—not all—of the former camp, it has become an ideological axiom that ultra-traditional social attitudes (on gender and sexuality, for example) and terrorism are points on the same spectrum, and not very far apart. But there are many Muslims (including those who resolutely oppose terror, and don’t much like ultra-traditionalism either) who insist that this is simply wrong. On the contrary, they say, social and theological conservatism is one thing, and sympathy for terrorism is another; they need to be separated not conflated.

Whatever their (often dire) failings, British madrassas are not an especially significant factor in incubating terrorism, insists Mr Karmani who knows the Muslim scene in London and many northern cities. The sort of youngster who is tempted to quit Bradford for Syria is often the product of a secular, non-madrassa-going family who is led into fanaticism by material on the internet. As evidence against against any link between hard-line theology and terror, he says that hardly any of the British youngsters who have left for Syria have been products of the purist Deobandi school of south Asian Islam, which accounts for a lot of Muslim education in Britain. As another prominent British Muslim adds, madrassas (especially those attached to well-known mosques) are the last place where a rogue teacher would try to find a jihadist warrior; they are watched by too many people and any such recruiting drive would be quickly found out.

Of course, while there appears to be little to no link to violent extremism, from an integration perspective, such ‘hard-line theology’ is hardly helpful.

Source: Islam in Britain: David Cameron goes too far in equating theology and terror | The Economist