In the nearly two years since 7/7, no one has come close to solving the mystery of how a soft-spoken, Leeds-born teaching mentor—Mohammad Sidique Khan—became a jihadist terrorist. Until now. Thanks to dogged reporting and a close knowledge of the many shades of Islamic belief and politics, Shiv Malik has breached the wall of silence in Beeston—the Leeds suburb that was home to three of the four bombers—and laid bare the roots of the radicalisation that left 56 dead.
Malik's account decisively refutes the claim, often heard in the weeks after 7/7, that Khan had been a well-integrated British-Pakistani Muslim driven to angry despair by the war in Iraq. In fact, he had been a Wahhabi fundamentalist since the mid-1990s, and began contemplating jihadist violence as early as 1999. It is also seems unlikely that Khan would have been deflected from his path by school lessons in British values: he seemed fairly well settled in his school years, before his fundamentalism sucked him into a racial/religious ghetto. The best explanation of Khan's story is the "lost second generation" pattern—children of immigrants who reject their parents' ways but fail to find a place in secular, anomic Britain and fall victim to the temptations of extreme identity politics. Khan's story powerfully illustrates the depth of that generational conflict, as well as the extent to which extreme Islam can act as a kind of "liberation theology," allowing young Muslims to claim western freedoms, such as marrying for love, without rejecting their Islamic heritage. (In Khan's case, these factors may have been exacerbated by the death of his mother when he was still young.) Britain's young jihadists are at the violent end of a Muslim youth movement asserting its right to choose how to live, not unlike western youth in the 1960s and 1970s. Malik's account underscores the intractability of the problem and the extent to which the rest of us are largely bystanders in this generational conflict. If there is any comfort to be drawn, it is perhaps the evidence that, unlike Khan, some Islamists—such as Hassan Butt (the source for some of Malik's story) and Ed Husain (author of The Islamist)—do come to their senses before it is too late.
Elsewhere, everything you always wanted to know about tax credits—one of the most emblematic policies of New Labour's first ten years. And Prospect has finally given in to popular clamour and set up "First Drafts," our own editorial blog. Let us know what you think.
