Madeleine Bunting has an interesting article in The Guardian's "Comment is Free" today, in which she discusses an (apparent) new seriousness within the British Muslim community to take home grown Islamist terrorism seriously. She opens it with this interesting snippet:
Two days after the 7/7 bombings in London two years ago, Muslim community leaders gathered at the London Muslim Centre to consider the impact of the attacks and who might have organised them. Many present refused to accept it might have been Muslims - the common refrain was that it could have been the French, because they had just lost the bid to host the Olympics.
The article goes on to say this:
In the past few days, key Muslim community activists have admitted to me that what worries them is how certain theological issues have not been properly clarified, and can be used to justify extremism. The most important is the age-old distinction between dar al-Islam (the land of Islam) and dar al-harb (the land of the other, of unbelief - or of war, according to the literal translation from the Arabic). This demonisation of all that is not Muslim is the "paradigmatic, instinctive response that people fall back on in a moment of crisis", I was told. Extremists such as Hizb ut-Tahrir use this dualism, as do jihadis, to justify their contempt for the rights - and lives - of the kufr, the unbeliever.
How long it will take to weed out the jihadist theology, though, is another question.
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