Adux
01-16-2009, 03:35 PM
Book review: Friends of Al Qaeda in Europe —by Khaled Ahmed
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/images/2008/12/28/20081228_ed05.jpg The Frontiers of Jihad: Radical Islam in Europe
By Alison Pargeter
IB Tauris 2008
Pp244; Special Price Rs 1495
Available at bookstores in Pakistan
Here is another book on the phenomenon of radical Islam in Europe although it is less of an indictment of the British government than Londonistan (2006) by Melanie Phillips.
Both books carry a photograph of Abu Hamza al-Masri on the title page. Together with Umar Bakri, Al Masri was the single most effective advocate of Al Qaeda’s worldview in the UK and attracted jihadis from all parts of Europe because of his brazen attack on what the Western political system stood for.
He is interesting for us because he inspired expatriate Pakistanis in the UK and, from his Finsbury Mosque, is alleged to have organised terrorist plots that the Pakistani youths joined.
Pargeter is also less interested than Phillips in the allegation that terrorism in the UK by the Islamists was a blowback from an earlier policy, spearheaded by the UK and followed less enthusiastically by the rest of Europe, of welcoming and nurturing dissenters from the Muslim world and thus revengefully gaining the high moral ground while pretending to be friends of the ‘undemocratic’ governments in the Islamic world.
When Umar Bakri was finally disallowed return to the UK, he had fathered eight children on British money, was living in a house gifted by the UK government, and was driving a luxury car put at his disposal. The man had spawned together with Al Masri two organisations that are banned today in Pakistan because they threatened the very idea of the state of Pakistan: Al Muhajirun and Hizb al-Tahrir. Britain was the ‘zone of contact’ between Pakistanis and the Arabs, and English was their medium of expression, something that never happened in the Middle East where expat Pakistanis are much larger in number.
But the author gives us a wider canvas of the terrorist cult in Europe and its connections within the UK. The account begins with the career of the Syrian radical Abu Musab Al Suri, who arose as the intellect of Al Qaeda, writing its encyclopaedia of terrorism. He travelled to Pakistan and came under the influence of the famous Dr Fadl — now opposed to Al Zawahiri from his prison in Egypt — and met Osama bin Laden, telling him he shouldn’t appear on the media too much and not build up his own personality cult too much.
Al Suri’s base was in Spain but he thought he would do better in the more ‘helpful’ environment in the UK. He was traced to bombings in Spain in 2004 and the UK in 2005. He was caught in Pakistan in October 2005 and handed over to the US with USD5 million on his head.
The Brotherhood, Syrian and Egyptian, was wooed by Europe, and its Saudi brand was borrowed by Algeria and Morocco before immigrants infected by it were stuffed into Europe. The UK borrowed the hardline Islamists from France and the rest of Europe thinking it was acquiring “assets” for its Middle East policy. It doomed its majority Muslim population composed of Pakistanis in the process as most of these Arab extremists linked up with Al Qaeda and its funded madrassas in Pakistan.
The Saudis funded everything in sight in the UK, including the big universities, which immediately began to expurgate their orientalist publications, and the Pakistani mosques, which, as Gilles Kepel tells us, began as Barelvi places of worship, finally succumbed to Wahhabi funds and became Deobandi mouthpieces of Al Qaeda.
At least one Pakistani appeared at the head of radical Islam in the UK before the Arabs took over from him. He was Kalim Siddiqi, who took the UK’s multicultural policy to the absurd extreme of establishing a separate Islamic Parliament with its own laws. He was inspired by Iran’s Revolution; so were many Arabs who thought their countries too needed something like that. As the number of Muslims swelled and their radicalisation became a serious possibility, Middle Eastern regimes competed in funding their Islamisation, thinking the expats will send back killers against them.
The Saudis opened the purse-strings but so did Libya and Baathist Iraq. As a result, mosques proliferated and the expat Muslims in Europe apparently flocked to them forgetting that they had to integrate like other expats for their own good. It got to a point where it was difficult to say if radical Islam got exported to Europe or got exported from Europe.
The orders to go to Afghanistan and fight a new kind of war came from Al Azhar and from Saudi Mufti Abdul Aziz bin Baz, the blind sheikh who was one of the many blind sheikhs with extremist worldview, such as the two we know, Sheikh Abdul Hamid Kishk and the chief of Jamaa Islamiyya, Sheikh Umar Abdur Rehman. The launching pad was Pakistan with Lahore as the post where Arabs were received and then sent on to Kunar, the Afghan province with strong Wahhabi influence which also flowed into a sympathetic Bajaur tribal agency in Pakistan. When the veterans of this jihad went back they caused discord in their countries from Algeria to Indonesia and were pushed out. Europe accepted them and began incubating something that was to explode in the fullness of time.
The book gives us an excellent survey of who was embedded where. The Moroccans had a big presence in Spain but were “innocent” till Morocco thought it should allow the extremist infection to creep in from Saudi Arabia and Egypt. The author gives us a detailed account of the Al Qaeda strike in Spain in 2004, killing 129 that had the effect of taking Spain out of the war in Iraq. Now Moroccans are causing sleepless nights in the Benelux states where minority rights are treated as sacred trust but which the expat Muslims exploit. Many Pakistani clerics have transplanted their Pakistani sectarianism into Belgium.
The Egyptian Sheikh Anwar Shaban was granted asylum in Italy as he could not enter Egypt because of his dangerous views based on his expertise of hadith. He organised the jihad that opened up in Bosnia in 1992, creating a virtual army from out of the expat Muslims living in Europe. Britain took in the vitriolic Abu Qatada al-Filistini from Palestine who denounced the un-Islamic regimes back in the Middle East but was to become a thorn in the side of the UK that took his fulminations to mean that he supported democracy back home.
The Algerians dominated in France which has more Muslims than any other state in Europe. When Libyans and Algerian Islamists found the going tough in Europe they shifted their headquarters to Londonistan and guided their strategy in the Arab world from here.
Europe is now reacting to what has happened in the past; so is the UK. The reaction is measured and rational. One can’t agree with people like Oriana Fallaci who think Europe is becoming a ‘colony of Islam’. The fact is that Islam is on the boil and will take time subsiding if the world holds fast and doesn’t play around too much with democracy as a fix-all formula. That much of the Islamic radicalism got spread around because of old policies will surely cause the right kind of corrections in Europe and the UK. *
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2008/12/28/story_28-12-2008_pg3_5
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/images/2008/12/28/20081228_ed05.jpg The Frontiers of Jihad: Radical Islam in Europe
By Alison Pargeter
IB Tauris 2008
Pp244; Special Price Rs 1495
Available at bookstores in Pakistan
Here is another book on the phenomenon of radical Islam in Europe although it is less of an indictment of the British government than Londonistan (2006) by Melanie Phillips.
Both books carry a photograph of Abu Hamza al-Masri on the title page. Together with Umar Bakri, Al Masri was the single most effective advocate of Al Qaeda’s worldview in the UK and attracted jihadis from all parts of Europe because of his brazen attack on what the Western political system stood for.
He is interesting for us because he inspired expatriate Pakistanis in the UK and, from his Finsbury Mosque, is alleged to have organised terrorist plots that the Pakistani youths joined.
Pargeter is also less interested than Phillips in the allegation that terrorism in the UK by the Islamists was a blowback from an earlier policy, spearheaded by the UK and followed less enthusiastically by the rest of Europe, of welcoming and nurturing dissenters from the Muslim world and thus revengefully gaining the high moral ground while pretending to be friends of the ‘undemocratic’ governments in the Islamic world.
When Umar Bakri was finally disallowed return to the UK, he had fathered eight children on British money, was living in a house gifted by the UK government, and was driving a luxury car put at his disposal. The man had spawned together with Al Masri two organisations that are banned today in Pakistan because they threatened the very idea of the state of Pakistan: Al Muhajirun and Hizb al-Tahrir. Britain was the ‘zone of contact’ between Pakistanis and the Arabs, and English was their medium of expression, something that never happened in the Middle East where expat Pakistanis are much larger in number.
But the author gives us a wider canvas of the terrorist cult in Europe and its connections within the UK. The account begins with the career of the Syrian radical Abu Musab Al Suri, who arose as the intellect of Al Qaeda, writing its encyclopaedia of terrorism. He travelled to Pakistan and came under the influence of the famous Dr Fadl — now opposed to Al Zawahiri from his prison in Egypt — and met Osama bin Laden, telling him he shouldn’t appear on the media too much and not build up his own personality cult too much.
Al Suri’s base was in Spain but he thought he would do better in the more ‘helpful’ environment in the UK. He was traced to bombings in Spain in 2004 and the UK in 2005. He was caught in Pakistan in October 2005 and handed over to the US with USD5 million on his head.
The Brotherhood, Syrian and Egyptian, was wooed by Europe, and its Saudi brand was borrowed by Algeria and Morocco before immigrants infected by it were stuffed into Europe. The UK borrowed the hardline Islamists from France and the rest of Europe thinking it was acquiring “assets” for its Middle East policy. It doomed its majority Muslim population composed of Pakistanis in the process as most of these Arab extremists linked up with Al Qaeda and its funded madrassas in Pakistan.
The Saudis funded everything in sight in the UK, including the big universities, which immediately began to expurgate their orientalist publications, and the Pakistani mosques, which, as Gilles Kepel tells us, began as Barelvi places of worship, finally succumbed to Wahhabi funds and became Deobandi mouthpieces of Al Qaeda.
At least one Pakistani appeared at the head of radical Islam in the UK before the Arabs took over from him. He was Kalim Siddiqi, who took the UK’s multicultural policy to the absurd extreme of establishing a separate Islamic Parliament with its own laws. He was inspired by Iran’s Revolution; so were many Arabs who thought their countries too needed something like that. As the number of Muslims swelled and their radicalisation became a serious possibility, Middle Eastern regimes competed in funding their Islamisation, thinking the expats will send back killers against them.
The Saudis opened the purse-strings but so did Libya and Baathist Iraq. As a result, mosques proliferated and the expat Muslims in Europe apparently flocked to them forgetting that they had to integrate like other expats for their own good. It got to a point where it was difficult to say if radical Islam got exported to Europe or got exported from Europe.
The orders to go to Afghanistan and fight a new kind of war came from Al Azhar and from Saudi Mufti Abdul Aziz bin Baz, the blind sheikh who was one of the many blind sheikhs with extremist worldview, such as the two we know, Sheikh Abdul Hamid Kishk and the chief of Jamaa Islamiyya, Sheikh Umar Abdur Rehman. The launching pad was Pakistan with Lahore as the post where Arabs were received and then sent on to Kunar, the Afghan province with strong Wahhabi influence which also flowed into a sympathetic Bajaur tribal agency in Pakistan. When the veterans of this jihad went back they caused discord in their countries from Algeria to Indonesia and were pushed out. Europe accepted them and began incubating something that was to explode in the fullness of time.
The book gives us an excellent survey of who was embedded where. The Moroccans had a big presence in Spain but were “innocent” till Morocco thought it should allow the extremist infection to creep in from Saudi Arabia and Egypt. The author gives us a detailed account of the Al Qaeda strike in Spain in 2004, killing 129 that had the effect of taking Spain out of the war in Iraq. Now Moroccans are causing sleepless nights in the Benelux states where minority rights are treated as sacred trust but which the expat Muslims exploit. Many Pakistani clerics have transplanted their Pakistani sectarianism into Belgium.
The Egyptian Sheikh Anwar Shaban was granted asylum in Italy as he could not enter Egypt because of his dangerous views based on his expertise of hadith. He organised the jihad that opened up in Bosnia in 1992, creating a virtual army from out of the expat Muslims living in Europe. Britain took in the vitriolic Abu Qatada al-Filistini from Palestine who denounced the un-Islamic regimes back in the Middle East but was to become a thorn in the side of the UK that took his fulminations to mean that he supported democracy back home.
The Algerians dominated in France which has more Muslims than any other state in Europe. When Libyans and Algerian Islamists found the going tough in Europe they shifted their headquarters to Londonistan and guided their strategy in the Arab world from here.
Europe is now reacting to what has happened in the past; so is the UK. The reaction is measured and rational. One can’t agree with people like Oriana Fallaci who think Europe is becoming a ‘colony of Islam’. The fact is that Islam is on the boil and will take time subsiding if the world holds fast and doesn’t play around too much with democracy as a fix-all formula. That much of the Islamic radicalism got spread around because of old policies will surely cause the right kind of corrections in Europe and the UK. *
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2008/12/28/story_28-12-2008_pg3_5