Europeans, unlike the Americans (although this is changing) are sometimes accused of having been exclusivist in their attitude towards these foreigners. Equally and quite often, it is also the immigrant who wishes to preserve his exclusivity, his cultural, ethnic and religious bonds, which create problems for the second-generation immigrant. The assimilation is superficial in that they speak with the same accent, but peer pressure at school, college or at place of work, and the claustrophobic atmosphere at home, especially for the girls, does not help. Besides, all this talk of gender equality, secular democracies, and cultural mores are foreign to the conservative Muslim immigrant. These are not those laid down in the Koran, hence are an anathema.
Add to this the sermons of the mullah in the mosque who continually asserts the superiority of his religion but the youth find it difficult to reconcile this with the reality that the man or woman from a professedly inferior religion is doing considerably better than them. All this internal resentment eventually leaves the second and third-generation immigrant uncomfortable in the place his parents still call home but is not quite acceptable in a place he wants to call home. This mutual unacceptability and resentment are more perceptible after the Madrid and London terrorist attacks.
The problem is not in the Pakistani madarssas alone. Jehad continues to be taught in mainstream schools even today. Hatred towards other religions and India is a common diet.
Post 9/11 and particularly post-Madrid 2004 have led to a hardening of positions in Europe among the majority population and at the same time there are more second and third generation Muslim youth finding their way to jehad. The stereotype of the jehadi coming from the Arab world is changing. Post-September 11, recruits are just as easily to be found in poly-techniques, high schools and university campuses in Europe. Hundreds of European youth, mainly second generation immigrants, have found their way to Iraq to fight in the Sunni triangle. There were reports of a two-way traffic between West Asia and Europe of illegals coming in to Europe and legals going to perform jehad in far away places. Three of the July bombings in London were young second-generation youth of Pakistani parentage. Youth in the UK have been increasingly under the influence of the Deobandhi mosques where al Qaeda, Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, Lashkar e-Jhangvi (LEJ) and Hizbut Tehrir (HT) activists have been active.
In Europe, intelligence and police officials from the UK, Spain, Germany, France and the Netherlands meet in state-of-the-art environments to exchange information and data, reports and wiretaps that would help follow leads in their anti-terror effort. Cooperation on this scale or even at a much lower scale is unthinkable on the Indian sub-continent as this would be counterproductive to policies followed by the Pakistani establishment. Indo-Pak talks on curbing terror are more a dialogue of the deaf than any purposeful discussions.
Post-World War II European liberalism that had tolerated other religions and political beliefs, is today threatened with an immigrant Muslim population that constitutes four to five per cent of the population (European census usually do not ask for religion). This is expected to go up to ten per cent by 2025 and the indigenous populations is expected to decline. So long as multi-culturalism did not affect Europe’s way of life, immigration was acceptable but once it became clear that this being taken advantage of by the immigrant and seen as encouraging terrorism, restrictions have begun to be applied. This push of immigrants from Asia brings its own social problems. This aspect is going to be a major cause for concern in Europe in the years ahead.
The ferment in the entire Muslim world creates the impression of a monolith with one common or a set of common remedies to the problem. The Muslim ummah did get together in the Afghan jehad and now seems to be getting together again post-Iraq and even more strongly should there be a post-Iran, but there are continuing differences and Muslims still kill Muslims in defence of the same religion. It is also assumed that Osama is the symbol of this ferment. He has been glorified into a cult figure but he is not really the single unifying factor in the Muslim world. There are many who are anti-US and anti-Israel but who feel that al Qaeda over reached by attacking the US, which invited massive US military retaliation and occupation of Muslim lands.
There is a naive assumption that if local grievances or problems are solved, global terrorism will disappear. The belief or the hope that, if tomorrow, Palestine, or Kashmir or Chechnya or wherever else, the issues were settled, terrorism will disappear, is a mistaken belief.
A new ideologue for the Islamists seems to have been active in recent years. Syrian born but hiding in Pakistan, 48-year old Mustafa Setmariam Nasar turned out volumes on the Net arguing that with the Afghan base having been lost, Islamic radicals would have to revise their approach. His thesis, in a 1600-page work called “The Call for a Global Islamic Renaissance” has been in circulation on the Internet for 18 months and its thrust is that a truly global conflict should be on several fronts and carried out by small cells or individuals rather than traditional guerrilla warfare. Nasar was arrested in Quetta last October and handed over to US officials but his creed continues to be assimilated and followed.
The problem is not in the Pakistani madarssas alone. Jehad continues to be taught in mainstream schools even today. Hatred towards other religions and India is a common diet. The worry is that while most of the madarssa alumni end up in the caves of Tora Bora or the heights of Parachinar, those from mainstream schools go to mainstream colleges and end up with main line jobs at home or abroad. Assuming that 3 million school children are added to Pakistan’s schools every year, an unknown number of the 70 million young persons have already imbibed jehadi leanings in the last twenty-five years.
The centre of jehad at the time of September 11, was in Afghanistan, specifically in the Pushtoon belt between Kandahar and Jalalabad. Since then, running away from the American onslaught, the epicentre for international jehad for the rest of the world (except West Asia) is now in Pakistani Waziristan. The Taliban, resurgent in Afghanistan from sanctuaries in the turbulent Waziristan of Pakistan, have been sending their volunteers to Iraq for training in suicide terrorism and arms. Waziristan is also a sanctuary for Chechens and Uzbek Islamic insurgents.
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