My Brother the Bomber

[AdmiralAdama]

The article also refers to the success that the Islamists are having in recruiting these youths. There is the matter of ideology here and terror recruitment -- that is why we don't see Hindu teens (or anglo "punks") blowing themselves up in the UK, even though there is "anomia" in those communities too. If radicalization was merely a matter of confused norms and rebelling, we'd see a lot of non-Muslim terror in the West. But we don't.

So while traditionalist mosques carry on recruiting imams from back home, keep their sermons in Urdu and other Asian languages and neglect to publish material to engage new members, the Wahhabis and the Islamists give their sermons in English and take their recruitment on to the streets of Pakistani or Bangladeshi ghettos such as Beeston Hill. They have also encouraged the schooling of British-born imams, have learned to use the internet and have generally come to understand what makes the second generation tick. The Wahhabis and Islamists win new members by contrasting their galvanising message of world Islamic justice with the inactivity and irrationality of the first-generation traditionalists. (Among those who turn to violence, such as Khan, their beliefs are often a mix of fundamentalism and Islamism.) And by arguing that the traditionalists—with their saint worship, mysticism and forced marriages—have been corrupted by weakness and Hinduism, they provide useful arguments to those Pakistani and Bangladeshi youths who want to cling on to Islam but throw off their parents' constraints.

For all these reasons, many British Muslim youths who had drifted towards fundamentalist or Islamist organisations were susceptible to the violent global jihadism that emerged in the mid-1990s.