EUROPE: MOSLEM MOVEMENT SWEEPING EURABIA

Growing gulf sets young Muslims at odds with society
By John Lloyd

A profoundly unsettling movement is sweeping through the universities, colleges and even schools of the Muslim communities of Europe. There, a minority of young Muslims, mainly men, have embraced a form of faith-cum-militancy which puts them at odds both with their fellow citizens and their (usually older) co-religionists. Whichever group promulgates the radical nostrums they ingest – Hizb ut-Tahrir, which Tony Blair, UK prime minister, had proposed banning, before drawing back, is among the most active in calling for a global caliphate enforcing Sharia law – the result is to produce a cohort within which a significant number views the replete and largely godless societies of Europe with scorn.

They hate Marxism, but owe much to it. Writing in the New Statesman, Shiv Malik, who attended Hizb seminars, reported on gatherings of enthused, driven radicals of the kind who fuelled far left movements 20 years ago. He quotes a Hizb member, Hassan Mujtaba, as saying that “as a political party we wouldn’t engage in action that would divert us from our main aim, which is the establishment of the caliphate. We wouldn’t go around building a school or a mosque or setting up a drugs project. We would collate information, really closely observe what is going on in British society and then provide a template that would assist those people to go and establish an Islamic community.” As Ariel Cohen, a researcher at the US Heritage Foundation, writes: “This ideology poses a direct challenge to the western model of a secular, market-driven, tolerant, multicultural globalisation.”

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