The 9/11 Wars (112 page)

  
10
.
Salahuddin Malik,
1857 War of Independence or Clash of Civilizations
, Oxford, 2003. pp. 13, 17, 115, 118–19, 140, 148. A British government anxious to shift the burden of blame from their own recent policies in the subcontinent blamed Muslim ‘Wahabi’ agitators for much of the violence – despite the fact that most of the ‘mutineers’ were Hindu. Media claims of a global ‘Islamist’ plot, however, failed to convince a sceptical public. Through the late nineteenth century and into the first half of the twentieth, other perils supplanted or complemented the one that many had once thought ‘the Muslims’ had constituted. In 1900,
Gunton’s Magazine
informed its readers that the Boxer Rebellion in China might prove the ‘gravest’ that ‘Christendom has faced since the Moorish invasion of Europe’ and could presage an apocalyptic struggle between ‘western civilization and oriental barbarism’. See William W. Bates, ‘Chinese Outrages’,
Gunton’s Magazine Review of the Month
, p. 113 of archive. For a long period too the fear was of supposedly highly organized networks of anarchists and left-wing political activists. As a British police report from 1911 noted, ‘These criminal organizations have grown in number and size. They are hardier than ever, now that the terrifying weapons created by modern science are available to them. The world is today threatened by forces which, once freed from their chains, will be able to one day carry out its total destruction.’ According to William Dalrymple, author of
The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty
, Vintage, 2009, the mutinous Company soldiery was 90 per cent Hindu, though there were regional centres such as Lucknow where the street fighting civilian population was maybe 50 per cent Muslim as well as some cavalry units which were majority Muslim. Personal communication with the author, December 2010.

  
11
.
Andrew Wheatcroft,
The Infidels: The Conflict between Christendom and Islam, 638–2002
, Viking, 2003, p. 41. Arab armies at the time were largely composed of footsoldiers with a few cavalry and some camels, not, as in later images, a horde mounted on fine Arab horses. ‘The Arabs were poor men, often with little more than a spear as a weapon. They walked … using less water and food than any animal. Previously they had fought in small groups, but now, marshalled by the leaders of Islam, they numbered hundreds.’ Nor incidentally did the early Arab invaders convert by the sword, rather the opposite. There was significant resistance to the conversion of many local populations from the elite who claimed their privilege as both as descendants of the original Arab settlers and as Muslims.

  
12
.
See Patrick Porter,
Military Orientalism
, Hurst, 2007, for a useful discussion of the idea of Western or Oriental styles of fighting.

  
13
.
Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit,
Occidentalism
, Penguin Press, 2004.

  
14
.
Wheatcroft,
The Infidels
, pp. 190–91, 202.

  
15
.
Munqidh quote in Amin Maalouf,
The Crusades through Arab Eyes
, Schocken Books, 1989, p. 39. See also the very useful Carole Hillenbrand,
The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives
, Edinburgh University Press, July 30, 1999.

  
16
.
Karen Armstrong,
Holy War: The Crusades and Their Impact on Today’s World
, Macmillan, 1998, p. 463.

  
17
.
See Malise Ruthven,
A Fury For God: The Islamist Attack on America
, Granta, 2004, for one of the best discussions of Qutb.

  
18
.
Porter,
Military Orientalism
, p. 57.

  
19
.
Tom Gross, ‘The BBC’s Augean Stables’,
National Review
, February 28, 2005. Sheikh al-Sudais led 15,000 worshippers at prayer at the opening of a six-storey Islamic centre in east London, though he was careful to avoid any anti-Semitic references.

  
20
.
See, for example, the Egyptian series
Horseman without a Horse
, a forty-one-part TV melodrama based on the forged
Protocols of the Elders of Zion
. ‘Egypt airs “anti-Semitic” series’, BBC News Online, November, 7, 2002. Or the Syrian
The Collapse of Legends
, of which the central premise was that there was no archaeological evidence to support the stories of the Old Testament and that the Torah was forged to give the Jews a claim to the Land of Israel. It featured a group of Syrian archaeologists setting out to expose a group of Zionists hoping to plant evidence at a famous archaeological site to give some scientific basis to the forged scriptures. Richard Z. Chesnoff,
Jewish World Review
, December 13, 2002.

  
21
.
The author found copies on sale in Kuala Lumpur airport in December 2004.

  
22
.
Europe had, of course, its own long and inglorious tradition of anti-Semitism – one that had led to worse violence against the Jews than ever seen in the Islamic world – and the many young British Pakistanis or French Algerians interviewed by the author who spoke of how ‘the Jews’ were behind the ‘war on terror’ were unwittingly echoing words which had been banished from acceptable conversation only a few decades previously. See Denis Mac-Shane,
Globalising Hatred: The New Anti-Semitism
, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2009, for a provocative and informed survey. For an impressive and profoundly researched history, Robert Wistrich,
A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad
, Random House, 2010.

  
23
.
Author telephone interview with Christopher Caldwell, July 2009. Caldwell’s book,
Reflections on the Revolution in Europe
, Allen Lane, 2009, is often tendentious, relying on the arrangement of carefully selected factoids and subjective readings of data to give what is overall a misleading and alarmist description of the genuine problems of integration and assimilation of ‘Muslim’ communities in Europe. He is right, however, to argue that little thought was given to the consequences of importing labour in the 1960s and 1970s.

  
24
.
‘A large coloured community as a noticeable feature of our social life would weaken the concept of England or Britain to which people of British stock throughout the Commonwealth are attached,’ a report of the British Colonial Office observed in 1955. Kenan Malik,
From Fatwa to Jihad
, Atlantic, 2009, p. 43.

  
25
.
Some in fact accelerated the influx as communities in the West sought to beat the deadlines imposed by successive waves of legislation. A total of 17,210 Pakistanis came to Britain between 1955 and 1960. In the eighteen months before the Immigration Act of 1962, 50,170 more arrived. See ibid., p. 43.

  
26
.
There are various guides to the vexed questions of numbers. One is the excellent and comprehensive Pew Research Center,
Mapping the Global Muslim Population: A Report on the Size and Distribution of the World’s Muslim Population
, October 2009, which says, on p. 22, of Europe:

Europe has about 38 million Muslims, constituting about 5% of its population. European Muslims make up slightly more than 2% of the world’s Muslim population. Readers should bear in mind that estimates of the numbers of Muslims in Europe vary widely because of the difficulty of counting new immigrants. Nevertheless, it is clear that most European Muslims live in eastern and central Europe. The country with the largest Muslim population in Europe is Russia, with more than 16 million Muslims, meaning that more than four-in-ten European Muslims live in Russia. While most Muslims in western Europe are relatively recent immigrants (or children of immigrants) from Turkey, North Africa or South Asia, most of those in Russia, Albania, Kosovo, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Bulgaria belong to populations that are centuries old, meaning that more than six in ten European Muslims are indigenous. Despite the limitations of the underlying data for Europe, it appears that Germany is home to more than 4 million Muslims – almost as many as North and South America combined. This means that Germany has more Muslims than Lebanon (between 2 million and 3 million) and more than any other country in western Europe. This also puts Germany among the top 10 countries with the largest number of Muslims living as a minority population. While France has a slightly higher percentage of Muslims than Germany, this study finds that it has slightly fewer Muslims overall. The United Kingdom is home to fewer than 2 million Muslims, about 3% of its total population.

As if to underline the difficulties of counting, Pew in 2010 revised their figure for UK Muslims upwards, to 2,869,000 Muslims in Britain, around 4.6 per cent of the population. See Pew Research Center,
Muslim Networks and Movements in Western Europe
, September 15, 2010. The European countries with the highest concentration of Muslims are located in eastern and central Europe: Kosovo (90 per cent), Albania (80 per cent), Bosnia-Herzegovina (40 per cent) and the Republic of Macedonia (33 per cent). Greece is about 3 per cent Muslim, while Spain is about 1 per cent Muslim. Italy has one of the smallest populations of Muslims in Europe, with less than 1 per cent of its population being Muslim. See also John Carvel, ‘Census shows Muslims’ plight’,
Guardian
, October 12, 2004. For France see the excellent discussion in the first chapter of Jonathan Laurence and Justin Vaisse,
Intégrer l’Islam, la France et ses Musulmans: enjeux et réussites
, Odile Jacob, 2007, pp. 31–9. Laurence and Vaisse argue for a figure of 5 million. The website of the French Foreign Ministry says ‘between four and five million’. The Ministry for the Interior gives the figure 4.5 million. See Haut Conseil à l’intégration,
L’Islam dans la République
, Paris, 2000.

  
27
.
By 2004, many of the younger militants suddenly coming to the attention of the authorities were in fact ‘third generation’.

  
28
.
Less than a half of non-Western immigrants had a salaried job compared to 67 per cent of native Dutch. Figures from The Netherland’s Social and Cultural Planning Office (Sociaal en Cultureel Planbureau, SCP), January 2009.

  
29
.
Carvel, ‘Census shows Muslims’ plight’.

  
30
.
Employees’ religious backgrounds are not registered in German employment statistics. Thus, estimations are based primarily on national origins. Unemployment rates are consistently twice as high for non-Germans, with Turkish nationals appearing to be in the worst situation. In some
Länder
, the unemployment rate among the young Muslim population is estimated to be around 30 per cent. Even when comparing foreigners to Germans without any qualifications, a greater proportion of foreigners (three-quarters) than Germans (one-third) are unemployed. See
http://www.euro-islam.info/country-profiles/germany/
. Not only are French Muslims more likely to be unemployed than the rest of the population, they also encounter more problems finding long-term and full-time jobs.

  
31
.
For France, see Laurence and Vaisse,
Intégrer l’Islam
, pp. 64–5.

  
32
.
The Commission on the Future of a Multi-Ethnic Britain, cited Malik,
From Fatwa to Jihad
, p. 62.

  
33
.
Author interview, November 2004.

  
34
.
Lawrence James,
Warrior Race
, Little, Brown, 2001. There were also questions of Englishness as opposed to Britishness (or Welshness, Irishness and Scottishness), with one poll revealing that immigrants felt happier with a ‘British’ identity rather than an ‘English’ one.

  
35
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Maleeha Lodhi, the Pakistani High Commissioner at the time of the 7/7 attacks, and many others saw a difference between ‘integration’ and ‘assimilation’. Lodhi called on Pakistanis in Britain to integrate even if they did not want to assimilate. Author interview, London, July 2005.