I'm British, but...

The book shows what attracts Muslims particularly those who live in Western societies, to a radical Islamic world-view.

A transatlantic hoopla resulted from the announcement in London that the British state had arrested a score of young people with terrorist intentions. They had apparently planned to carry liquid explosives on as many as 10 U.S.-bound passenger aircraft and detonate them using iPods as they made their transit across the Atlantic Ocean. Assistance from Pakistani officials and a long, patient surveillance of the plotters foiled their plans. Jubilation at this success was quickly followed by fear, as the governments of the United Kingdom and the United States instituted measures to counter any other similar terrorist actions. Armed guards patrolled Boston and Los Angeles airports, and business at London's Heathrow, one of the world's busiest airports, slowed down to a crawl. Since 1969, about 2,000 people have been killed on aircraft as a result of explosives. As the threat levels rose to Red, the highest possible, people braced for that number to double within days.

Two days later, the threat levels went down to Code Orange. U.K. authorities held 23 of their citizens under draconian anti-terrorist laws. The suspects were from London, Birmingham and the town of High Wycombe. Most of them lived in immigrant enclaves, many of them Muslim-majority. They bore similar biographies as the three Yorkshire men who blew themselves up and killed 52 people across London on July 7, 2005. Young Muslims who had grown up in the U.K., their actions shocked a nation that had until now ignored them. Many of them form the second generation, since their parents migrated from the Arab lands and from South Asia. Of the 1.6 million Muslims in the U.K., more than half are of Pakistani origin. This is why many of those involved in the most recent plot had ties to Pakistan, where some had travelled to visit family and get involved with one or another of the extremist outfits that headquarter there.

The U.K. and the U.S. media alerted their populations to a new threat. No longer, it seems, does the terrorist come from the bedraggled parts of the world. They are now, as the media put it, "home grown". The spectre of an internal minority, disgruntled and willing to conduct acts of terror against the home country, challenged not only the British and American idea of patriotism and nationhood, but also the security apparatus of the state. How can the British or U.S. state patrol the entirety of a million or so people who live cheek-by-jowl with others? What befuddled the media was that the neighbours and friends of these 23, and the four 2005 terrorists (one was a Jamaican-born Muslim), considered each of them to be a wonderful person - helpful, caring and kind. They were involved in such British institutions as the soccer league, they helped their neighbours, and they were reasonably affable towards their lower-middle and working-class neighbours. Some of them frequented mosques, but this was not something for all of them. After all, one survey showed that almost a third of U.K. Muslims learnt about Islam and built their Muslim community around websites, pamphlets and socio-political groups rather than through mosques. The Imams who knew some of the youth registered their dismay, although they indicated that some of them had been especially devout.

For the two states, and for the mainstream media, the only explanatory variable for the actions of these people is Islam, and particularly radical Islam. A new book, written by a British man who shares the same sociological world as these people, sheds light on what attracts them to a radical Islamic world-view and what drives them away from British society. All the concerned authorities now agree that Moazzam Begg is not a terrorist, although this only became clear after his prolonged incarceration at Kandahar, Bagram and Guantanamo, and after a great deal of pressure was placed on both the Blair and Bush governments by public opinion in the U.K. Begg had left his native Birmingham with his family to live in Kabul and was picked up on the borderlands of Pakistan and Afghanistan in the aftermath of the U.S.-led war in the region. Suspected of ties to Al Qaeda, he was held without charge for more than three years in U.S.-run prisons. Although he has no operational ties to any terrorist outfit, Begg grew up in the same sort of world that produced the British terror suspects. His narrative shows us that he was motivated far more by the racism in British society and by the seemingly interminable atrocities against Muslims in the 1990s (Bosnia, Chechnya) than by any diabolical intent within Islam.

Moazzam Begg's family comes from South Asia (his father is from Agra, his mother from Delhi - although both migrated to Pakistan in its early years, and then to Birmingham). He was raised in a liberal environment (spending his early years in a Jewish school), and he had friends from all spheres of life. Begg's father instilled in him pride for Islam, but Moazzam was not motivated by his faith. "Religion," he writes, "was not generally something any of us kids got too passionate about." Other things, youthful dreams and desires, moved him. But then, he says, "Things began to change by my mid-teens." The neo-Nazi and racist groups, such as the National Front, began a frontal assault on immigrants in the 1970s. Tacitly backed by the Conservative Party (and its hardline section led by Enoch Powell), these fascist groups routinely marched through immigrant neighbourhoods and assaulted the lives and labours of their fellow citizens. Young people like Moazzam Begg, who had aspired to a normal life within Britain, experienced the collusion of the state (particularly the police) and this well-organised racist element. "The idea of belonging to a gang that did not take a meek stance against racism," he writes in his new book, "attracted me. Although I was younger, about fifteen, I was soon in the gang too." The gangs confronted the violence of the fascists (and the police) with violence. A similar situation confronted the North African "twenty-something" youth in France, and the Turkish second-generation in Germany. When challenged by a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) official at Guantanamo about his migration to Afghanistan, Begg retorted: "Britain has the best multicultural society in Europe, but still in most parts of the country I feel out of place. I'd like to go to an English country village, with my dark skin, my beard and my wife in her hijab and not be started at or singled out... . I'd like the people to see that we generally want the same things in life, that they should not feel threatened by me. I want the English to like me, because they are accepting - not just to tolerate me, if I'm trying to assimilate." Britain failed him. He wanted something else.

Disenchanted with the U.K., Begg drifted towards his Muslim identity. Others who had been a part of the gangs and anti-fascist organisations went into progressive politics. With the suppression of an active Left within British politics, and with racist strands within the mainstream parties, these were few (George Galloway's Respect Party, founded in 2005, now provides a political outlet for many of the frustrations of people such as Begg). For a boy who once contemplated a life in the U.K. armed forces, the shock of the First Gulf War and of the massacre of Bosnian Muslims proved decisive. Begg had little experience with mosques. "I always felt nervous about mosques in Britain," he writes, "mostly because of the stern old men with long beards who could hardly speak English. But I put aside my inhibitions when I heard about Bosnian refugees who had just arrived, and were sheltered in the mosque." Begg travelled to Bosnia with a charity caravan, and closely followed the wars in Chechnya. His was an Islamic humanitarianism, an attempt to give succour to fellow Muslims in dire situations. On a family visit to Pakistan, Begg went across the border to a militant camp, whose emir told him: "To me jehad is like a drug I'm allowed to take, and I always come back for more. I feel I have fulfilled my purpose in life when I come to the defence of the oppressed. As long as Muslim lands are occupied I vowed to fight for their liberation. It is my duty as a Muslim, as a Pakistani, and as a human. Death in this path does not frighten me - I welcome it with open arms."

It was this experience in Afghanistan that made Begg a practising Muslim. "The Afghan visit was a life-changing experience for me. No few days had ever affected me like that. I had met men who seemed to me exemplary, in their faith and self-sacrifice, and seen a world that awed and inspired me."

In a remarkable book (Dying to Win: the Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism), U.S. scholar Robert Pape argues, "What nearly all suicide terrorist attacks have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland. Religion is rarely the root cause, although it is often used as a tool by terrorist organisations in recruiting and in other efforts in service of the broader strategic objective." Begg holds a well-articulated brief for Muslims around the world, but also for what he calls "underdogs". What he shares with many of those who moved to terror attacks is sympathy for those being squashed by the armed might of the Atlantic alliance. And, in response, the latter do not distinguish between those who have solidarity for the underdogs and those who move towards terrorist actions as a result of that solidarity. Begg is of the former, and the U.S./U.K. states could not see that. They arrested him and held him regardless of his lack of any operational linkage with Al Qaeda. As a U.K. politician put it after these recent arrests, it is sufficient these days to have "aspirational" aims rather than operational ones. Ones beliefs are enough to get one in trouble. This is a blot on the U.K.'s and the U.S.' claims to being democracies and being societies governed by laws. As Helena Kennedy put it in her book Just Law (2004): "In many ways laws are the autobiography of a nation and in Britain we have many proud stories to tell but we also have shameful chapters... our liberties are being eroded. A serious abandonment of principle is in train."

The dragnet around U.K. Muslims and the intensified war on Muslim-majority countries only increase the alienation and frustration. Blair's government went into high gear to crack down on terrorism in the aftermath of the August 2006 plot, even as it permitted the U.S. government to use British airstrips to transship 5,000-pound bunker-buster bombs to Israel where they were used against the Lebanese population. Pictures from Lebanon, like earlier ones from Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Chechnya, will inflame other young British Muslims angered by their government's hypocrisy. As Tariq Ali wrote in The Guardian the day after the July 2005 bombings, "The principal cause of this violence is the violence that is being inflicted on the people of the Muslim world. The bombing of innocent people is equally barbaric in Baghdad, Jenin, Kabul, as it is in New York, Madrid or London. And unless this is recognised the horrors will continue."

Begg's liberalism comes out in the friendships he made with his gaolers. Some of them, too, are underdogs, people who had to sign up for the armed forces out of necessity or who had been duped by the war propaganda. These interactions are complex, and yet heartening. Some get Begg little favours; others discuss their own dismay at the naked imperialism pushed by their own government. Kim, with whom he discusses literature and life, tells him, "You're not my enemy Moazzam." After his interactions with Jennifer, a twenty-something from Selma, Alabama, Begg writes: "She left me with a lasting impression. All Americans were not the same." Some, however, could get rapidly dehumanised as prison guards with no clear political mandate. One, who sympathised with Begg in Kandahar, grew up on a Native American Reservation. After a few months, he became a brutal enforcer.

In an elegiac vein, Begg ends his moving book, "In a world where the growing chasm between Islam and the West perpetuates animosity on a daily basis, even my habitual optimism is waning. The simple and sad fact is that we are spiralling towards more serious confrontation, while people in positions of responsibility offer justifications for themselves and those who serve them to act with impunity in the name of national and global security, instead of looking objectively at the reasons for the growth of anti-Western, anti-American attitudes." These are wise words from this veteran of America's growing gulag.