Within the Gates
'The whole Arab world was dangerous for me; I went to London," an Egyptian Islamist, Yasser Sirri, a man 41 years of age, with three convictions against him in his native land, recently said of his decision to move to England. An opponent of the autocracy of President Hosni Mubarak, Sirri had initially fled to Yemen, then to Sudan. He found refuge in London, where he runs an "Islamic observation center" and carries on with the "holy struggle" against "ungodly" Arab regimes and their supporters in the West.
The Islamists are now within the gates. They fled the fires and the terrors of the Arab-Islamic world but brought ruin with them. This new Islamism mocks the borders of nations and the very idea of nationality. "We may carry their nationalities," a Wahhabi preacher decreed recently, "but we belong to our religion." The geography of Islam has altered. A religion of Afro-Asia has migrated westward. It arrived in Europe, timid at first, carried by migrants glad to escape the failing lands of the Islamic world. Then the migrants were joined, in the 1980s, by preachers and militant men who had fought and lost cruel, bloody wars against the regimes in Syria, Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, and other despotic lands. These plotters were merciless men; they had been shown no mercy in their native lands. They hated the West but were drawn by its magnetic power. There were liberties in western Europe to be used, and welfare subsidies, and laws against extradition. There were the new technologies--developed by "infidels" but available to the holy warriors. It was easy for the preachers of hate to find foot soldiers in Amsterdam, Antwerp, London, and the suburbs of French cities. There were second-generation children who were in no man's land, on the fault line between the civilization of Islam that they did not know and the civilization of the West to which they did not fully belong.
These lands in the West were bilad al-kufr, lands of infidelity and unbelief. In these new extensions of Islam, London was the most accommodating of cities. It was there that the big Arabic newspapers, denied oxygen by the repressive regimes of Araby, were published. And it was there that men and women from Arab and Islamic lands built new lives, free to live the life of the faith. The terrorism against London is thus a singular act of betrayal.
A fanatic London-based preacher from Syria by the name of Omar Bakri Muhammad tells the tale of this great betrayal. A man of Aleppo, Bakri fled his native Syria in the 1980s and turned up in England in 1996. Since then, he has given his host country nothing but grief and sorrow, calling openly for "holy war" against the West, exhorting young Muslims of Britain to join the insurgency in Iraq. He hailed the death pilots of 9/11 as the "magnificent 19 who changed the world," and he called on Muslims to give the "infidels a 9/11 day after day after day."
"Eurabia." The vulnerability of Europe to the furies of this malignant Islamism is a defining feature of its contemporary life. There are the young men "next door" in Leeds and Madrid, and there are the burning grounds of the Middle East and North Africa hurling their disinherited young people across the Straits of Gibraltar to an aging European continent. We are not in "Eurabia" yet; that great city is still London and not "Londonistan," and no reverse reconquista of the Iberian peninsula by the Moors of North Africa looms on the horizon. Still, liberty is not a suicide pact. We should be done with the search for "explanations" that dignify the hatreds, that attribute them to western deeds and policies. We should see the new hatred dressed in religious garb for what it is: a war against the very order of contemporary life. A man of Moroccan origin, Muhammad Bouyeri, who killed the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, shot him, then slit his throat, and with his knife attached on his body a message of unadorned barbarism. "I knew what I was doing," Bouyeri said. "I slaughtered him."
It would have been nice to think that in the new lands of the West, a more tolerant version of Islam might have taken root. Instead, a neurotic zealotry has made its appearance. In Scotland the leaders of the industrialized world had assembled to discuss disease and poverty. Then a more deadly animus struck, reminding all of us of more atavistic furies still on the loose.
This story appears in the July 25, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.