I was invited to a seminar this week about radicalisation of British Muslim youths. A former navy man present, now working for a British Government department, claimed the root cause of radicalisation of young British Muslims was their lack of role models. Where are the Muslim footballers, the Muslim pop stars, the well-known Muslim entrepreneurs? He rightly described their anger and noted their ability to find oxygen for their anger online in extremist forums and chat rooms where they were made to feel part of the Muslim Ummah and contentedly separated from British life. For him, here was the key - find Muslim role models in Britain and the wannabe terrorists will become sportsmen, set up businesses and train as ballerinas. In sum, switch ammonium nitrate for tutus and these youths will be Brits first and Muslims second.

September 11th was the first time most in the West ever bothered to think about Islam - to find out about it and wonder why anyone could be so crazed as the 9/11 hijackers as to fly passenger jets into US landmark buildings thinking that by doing so they would end up in paradise. Many copies of the Koran were sold and the Internet was scoured for explanations as to why the terrorists could be so simultaneously gullible and wicked. Those who really studied were shocked to find that the hijackers were not zero sum Branch Dravidian lunatics in the deduction of their beliefs; rather gambling on theological niceties. According to their interpretation of the Koran and Islam’s place in the world of 2001, they were doing the right thing.  

The public fear aroused by 9/11 and subsequent atrocities forced some gangs in Western cities to capitalise on that fear and call themselves Muslim. The extent of Islamic knowledge of such thugs is to this day the equivalent of memorising a joke from a Lidl Christmas cracker. Still for them the moniker Muslim is a useful brand and justification with which to rob and terrorise valueless, inferior “non-believers”, even though many of their victims have been Muslims and their true idols (trainers, clothing, cars) are as kuffar as can be. 

Without September 11th, the great majority of Westerners would continue to see Mohammed as another minority figure of worship they cared to know little if anything about - another cuddly Buddha (Peace be upon him) or Shiva (Peace be upon him) or Chewbacca (Peace be upon him) - about as significant to their daily lives as Ron L Hubbard (Peace be upon him). The truth is that since 9/11 many more Westerners see Mohammed as the anti-Christ rather than as some cuddly, peaceful minority prophet, though they daren’t say so publicly because they fear being thrown in jail for a hate crime. 

 Islam in the West is viewed with deep suspicion and Islamists are seen as an irritating threat to Freedom and the continuing glory of Western Liberal Democracy. Muslims in the West can have a tough time - from glances to stabbings - if they dress up or wear long beards in the wrong parts of town. The West is increasingly fed up in general with victim-mentality Islamists who exploit democratic fair play at every turn, whether by closing public swimming baths one afternoon a week for Muslim-only swimming (are us shaven Kuffar so filthy?) or whining about prison food until it is changed for Muslim prisoners to the point where other prisoners feel embittered.  

In Britain the death of one or two bearded Muslims has been blown out of all proportion by the likes of the MCB and other whining Islamists.  In sum fewer Muslims have been killed or beaten for being Muslim in the West than the Satanic Verses translators who were murdered or the number of Muslims who killed themselves on 7/7 - all of them pointless victims of pointless violence. Let’s keep some perspective here. The world has changed. Islamophobia exists (and is cynically exploited by Islamists) but Islam in its chaotic organisation hasn’t changed one iota. 

The incessant problem with Islam is its lack of organisation - its lack of any visible hierarchy since the times of Mohammed and those Caliphs who knew how to wield power. If the hierarchy of Islam were a radio call-in today, it would be the biggest shouting match of them all to the extent that you’d hear an endless, uninterrupted wail. Islam is a Brownian motion yet its energy is never contained. If it’s not war-war, it’s excessive jaw-jaw.  Islam has too many leaders and none of them seem to agree. Let’s face facts - they never will. Black flag of Islam over Downing Street? It’d be ripped down in hours and replaced by a green one, then a yellow one, then a different black one and so on.

 Anyone - you or I - can have the shahada done by breakfast, the salwar kameez bought by elevenses, the YouTube preach video produced over lunch and we’re a fully-fledged Muslim leader by tea time. We can go to the Saudi embassy, kufe in hand, and, merely by nodding and scraping, find the funds to set up our own mosque. We can set the mosque up tax free under English law simply by copying and pasting the charity objects of any other mosque and submitting them to the UK Charities Commission who won’t ask any questions for fear of offending our faith. We can dip into collections and charge a cash fortune for marriages and Sharia law pronouncements whatever our training. We don’t need any certificates and we can have our own version of Islam fashioned, if we want, creating our own body of followers without any assent being granted by any official superior human body. We can even stick our mistresses on polygamous benefits if we play the system right and gradually own houses in our name by sticking our other wifelets into houses bought on mortgages set up and paid for by housing benefit. It’s that simple. Being an imam really pays - I know a few in the Birmingham “no-go” zones who drive the latest blacked out Range Rovers and one who I am informed regularly attends Brummie swingers parties (his Range Rover keys perhaps spotted in the bowl).  

 So, Islam is not open to abuse? Islam is not likely to attract some of Britain’s biggest charlatans? Islam is currently not funding the careers of Omar Bakri, Khalid Khan and Anjem Choudary? Islam is not the current excuse of the Muslim Boys, the pretext behind the racket of the Nation of Islam, the raison d'être of Al Qaeda and the explanation for why poor Nicky Reilly’s mother cries every night for her brainwashed, scarred, imprisoned son? 

How far can Islam’s disorganisation go?  

Let’s look at Algeria where the Armed Islamic Group, known by its French acronym, GIA, waged a violent war against Algeria's secular military regime during the 1990s. On August the 26th 1994 the GIA set up a rebel government in Algeria. One of the GIA's leaders, Antar Zouabri, proclaimed: "in our war, there is no neutrality. Except for those who are with us, all others are renegades." In other words, you believe in our version of Islam or we’ll slit your throat.  

The GIA gained a notorious reputation for mayhem and murder, targeting those affiliated—even remotely—with the Algerian military and government, as well as innocents and foreign nationals. The GIA vowed to raze the secular Algerian government and, in its place, establish a Muslim state ruled by Islamic law. The ensuing civil war ranked as one of the most violent in the world during the 1990s but petered out in 2002. At one point - not for the first time in world history - illiterate goat herders clutching copies of the Koran declared their version of Islam as the only version and killed other goat herders who refused to follow them.  

Algerian and Western counterterrorism officials say that many GIA members may have defected in recent years and joined al-Qaeda or its sister organisation al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). Islam can be so disorganised at its extremes it can make Clockwork Orange seem as logical as Sudoku. Islam can be bedlam - alas, it often is. 

The aforementioned Navy man fell into the trap of the “U” word. Ummah. The global Muslim community - that perfect symbol of order and community -which has never existed, does not exist and will never exist. A tidy word for what is an awful, spiky clutter. The notion that Islam unites all Muslims across the globe in one people, one homogeneous race that is bound one day to assume the reins of world power - this is a falsity. Just take a look at the U word’s namesake website, Ummah.com, where argument after argument - from moon position to ankle-exposure - dominate, even amongst Muslims who claim to be of the same sect, whether Salafi, Barelvi, Tablighi or from some other splinter of Islam. Some Muslim sects have more potential brotherhood with Satanists than fellow Muslims, whilst other Muslim sects would not know the difference if they stumbled into an evangelical, happy-clappy Christian ceremony clouded in incense smoke and submerged in dizzy chants leading to spiritual orgasm. 

 Ummah the concept - the global Muslim community - is a hotchpotch of arguing parties which can never unite because they have nothing in common - even down to the most basic interpretation of their prophet, Mohammed. The Ummah has a million different leaders and hundreds of different languages; an imaginary place where Osama Bin Laden and the Aga Khan sip tea together. Forget the Tower of Babel, we are talking about the largest Alcatraz ever dreamt up. Putting all the multifarious worshippers of Islam into one bracket is lazy thinking and those who believe in the existence of an Ummah are dim-witted, naive or brainwashed. Advertise the post of human leader of Islam and the application forms you will receive will stretch from London to Neptune - many of them with postscripts not to choose so-and-so because he once pinched a little boy on the bottom at Friday prayers.  

I have heard more intelligent speakers than the aforementioned navy man mentioning the word Ummah as if it really existed. One decent British Muslim referred after Christmas to “us” as he described the Muslim response to Israel in relation to land-grab - he’s a Londoner. It’s an easy trap for Muslims to fall into - to imagine that they are bound by their religion to those who are also Muslim on paper but in reality can be as different to them in views and beliefs as night and day. “We are all one Hezbollah” was a banner carried by the British left in an anti Israel protest a few years back - does the Ummah include Leftists now or are they excluded because they are non Muslims? The Ummah as imagined has less common ground than many Muslim compacts with other non-Muslim groups. 

Those who tend to believe in a Muslim Ummah also tend to believe in being able to formulate a British Islam. This imagined British Islam will be peaceful and fit into the British way of life in a progressive, quietist fashion. Yet again, those who suggest a British Islam are dreamers, albeit for all the right reasons.  

How do you impose or even begin to agree a British version of Islam with a leaderless (rather leader-full) community of Muslims? Why will brainwashed British Islamists - some of whom are doing very nicely from the disorganisation of Islam - disconnect from their perceived Ummah? Why will British Muslims even attempt to agree with a British version of Islam when they can’t agree with each other about Islam as it stands? The whole project is a complete waste of time and my advice would be to give it up now and spend the government funding set aside for such a British Islam on school trips to Auschwitz. 

What Britain and the Western world need to do is keep their Islamists in check by exposing their true motives and emphasising the hell which they see as the ideal world according to governance based on Sharia law. To make these Islamists redundant - keep them far away from politics and make sure that religion is kept a private matter rather than a public wedge. The future of Britain and the West is secular - there’s no argument, so certainly no need for negotiation.  

When those who follow the religions of Islam, Christianity, Hinduism or whatever other religion wake up to this one, solitary fact - that religion in the twenty-first century is a private matter which should be kept at home and restricted to the mosque, church or temple - then we can get on living our lives as we did pre-911 when liberty was taken for granted and you could wear virtually anything in the street without anyone even raising an eyebrow, let alone thinking you are about to explode. Away from the chaos. Away from the religious pressure groups. Away from those who exploit victimhood. Away from the ranters and the ravers. Keep the extremists and the political religionists in check and the future is not only secular it is bright, progressive and liberated. 

The argument between the progressive Muslims (who will eventually win the day against extremism and terrorism) and the romantic, unrealistic Ummah-believers will go something like this: Progressives:  Spare us this life from this monstrosity. Easy come easy go - will you let it go?

Dominic Whiteman is the Editor of the Westminster Journal.

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