Spoiling for a fight

Published July 21, 2014
The writer is a member of staff.
The writer is a member of staff.

IT’S widely known that the Islamist fighters in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere are having their ranks swelled to an unascertainable degree by young men who hold nationalities of the very countries to which groups such as the self-styled ‘Islamic State’ are deadly opposed.

After parts of Iraq were overrun several weeks ago, even before the militants/insurgents announced that they had created a ‘caliphate’, a picture widely doing the rounds on the internet — and apparently put out by the media cell of the violent group itself — showed several such men holding up their passports issued by countries including Norway, the UK and Denmark.

Some two weeks ago or so, the BBC reported its radio station having spoken to a British citizen who claimed to have been fighting for a year (though this has not been independently verified) alongside the al-Nusra Front in Syria, a group that is banned by the UK.

In a West Yorkshire accent, he said that he would not return until the “black flag of Islam” was flying high over Buckingham Palace. He described his home country as “pure evil,” and added: “If and when I come back to Britain it will be when this Khilafah — this Islamic state — comes to conquer Britain, and I come to raise the black flag of Islam over Downing Street, over Buckingham Palace, over Tower Bridge and over Big Ben.”


A sense of alienation is rife among young Muslims abroad.


This is not the only Briton to tell such a tale. Concerns first started to be raised in the UK when, several weeks ago, citizens of the island nation appeared in a propaganda video for what then called itself the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, the same that now makes claims to being the Islamic State. One such person was Rayaad Khan, who went to St David’s Catholic College in Cardiff. He’s pictured holding a gun and sitting next to his friend Nasser Muthana, who according to the BBC has been offered a place to study medicine by four universities. A third Briton in the video is from Aberdeen.

In the UK, more than 100 imams have signed an open letter urging British Muslims to not go to Iraq or Syria, and to offer help “from the UK in a safe and responsible way”. Nevertheless, security services in the UK estimate that upwards for some 500 nationals have gone to fight in Syria; this does not include guesses about those that may have joined the fight elsewhere.

Why would young men who have been born and raised in comparatively privileged conditions feel such hatred towards the country whose nationality they hold? Sadly enough, at least some aspects of it are not hard to understand.

Back in 2005, in Bagh whilst involved in earthquake relief efforts, I met a young man from Manchester who was similarly occupied. He had graduated with top honours from a medical college, he said, and had only a month earlier got a job with a major hospital. But, when the earthquake struck, he resigned and made haste to get to Pakistan where he met up with a team of medics and, eventually, ended up travelling in our truck.

He related a rather sad story of alienation and loneliness even though he had enjoyed access to good educational and other opportunities. His family, which moved to the UK from the outskirts of Lahore some three generations ago, was quite conservative, he said, so while he was encouraged by them to aim high professionally, true integration in society at large (as opposed to the Pakistani diaspora) was not possible.

He talked about feeling rootless, of being in the UK but being taught that his ‘true’ identity was Pakistan and Islam, of having been raised to expect team spirit, fellow feeling and camaraderie from only this part of the world, not from the other boys and girls of his age. The problem, he emphasised, was not with the state, but of the effects of ghettoisation whose key architects, in his view, were his family and the Pakistani-Muslim community. So here he was in Kashmir, he explained, looking for a sense of belonging.

Through this lens, the stories of the men who are fighting in the Middle East and possibly elsewhere, and who hold such contempt for the countries that have made them what they are, become somewhat fathomable. Given the particular demographics of the UK, and other developed countries, it is certainly not hard to imagine hundreds of people from minority communities and diasporas growing up with an acute sense of alienation. This would be especially true for Muslims, perhaps, many of whom have reacted to the ‘war on terror’ by wrapping their perceived identity ever more tightly around themselves.

It remains only to be wished that the cause for which they lay their lives on the line was as positive as that of the doctor fashioning splints out of felled timber in Bagh.

The writer is a member of staff.

hajrahmumtaz@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, July 21st, 2014

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