Note on the History of Londonistan

This is probably old stuff to cognoscenti, but I’m slow, so I had to read Peter Mansfield, A History of the Middle East. One reason there are so many Muslim radicals in Europe is that the repressive regimes of the Middle East chased them abroad:

“Britain’s reputation as a haven of tolerance for foreign opposition groups and its lax asylum laws … made it an attractive destination. … [M]any mujahideen had grave misgivings about resorting to infidels to salvage their Islamic mission. In the summer of 1993, twelve jihadi scholars, including the Jordanian spiritual mentor of radical Islam, Abu Qatada, met in Peshawar to debate the question of whether Islamic law permitted a Muslim to seek asylum in a non-Muslim land. … ‘There’s no difference between British and the Arab governments,’ Abu Qatada is said to have argued. ‘None of them are Islamic governments. As a Muslim, you must go where you feel secure.’

Following their fatwa, or legal opinion, Arab Afghans flocked to Britain … . To the fury of Arab leaders, Britain dismissed Egyptian, Saudi, Yemeni, Tunisian and Algerian requests for extradition as interference in its liberal traditions of asylum.

A curious corollary is the way in which Western exile reshaped Arab radicalism:

[The London exiles] saw individual Arab rules not as towering Pharoahs, but as American puppets, and their rampant repression and corruption as a symptom of a larger evil, namely Western neo-imperialism. Their target audience was not a nation state but the worldwide umma, or nation, of one billion Muslims, and their goal was to spark a global Islamic rebellion. The new ideology sparked a bitter doctrinal rift between the nationalist jihadis and Bin Laden’s ‘cosmopolitans.’ … The ideological conflict raged with all the passion of Stalinists disputing with Trotskyites. Former borthers-in-arms denounced him as a renegade jihadi, and one group tired to assassinate him.

Peter Mansfield, A History of the Middle East 385-6

Revised and Updated by Nicolas Pelham

(Paperback ed. 2004)

Soon as I can rustle up a copy of Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station, I will see if I can retrieve a wonderful passage about what happened when the Russian revolutionaries washed up in London after the failed Revolution of 1905.