KEY POINTS:
The convictions in Britain of Banaz Mahmod's father and uncle for murder - an "honour killing" done because the 20-year-old had left her husband to love a man outside her tribe - has properly provoked a huge outcry.
It was horrifying; it was preventable; it was alien. But for some the subtext is that it was also connected to the family's religion - Islam.
Britain's relationship with its Muslim community is not getting any easier. Many Muslims want to build mosques, schools, and adhere to Islamic dress codes with ever more energy. But that energy also derives from the same culture and accompanying institutions that produced British-born suicide bombers. The space in which to argue that Islam is an essentially benign religion seems to narrow with every passing day.
Nor are matters likely to get better soon. The leading European theorist on Islam is Paris-based Professor Olivier Roy. In Globalised Islam, he argues that Muslims everywhere, but especially the minorities living in the West, are undergoing a crisis of identity that is easily misunderstood by both the West and Islam itself as being about the integrity of religious faith.
But it is better not to understand a British recruit to suicide bombing like Mohammad Sidique Khan, the leader of the July 7 attacks on the London Underground, or even al Qaeda, in terms of their self-professed religiosity. Instead they are about a crisis of Islamic identity which makes mutual tolerance ever more elusive.
Roy's belief is that the deep driver of Islamic fundamentalism, terror and murderous intra-religious rivalries is the interaction of this very particular culture and its norms with Western culture and norms.
Those who think that what we are observing is solely a blowback against Western foreign policy, the invasion of Iraq and Israel's treatment of Palestinians, vastly underestimate the profundity of what is happening - or the possibility of changing it by changes to foreign policy. The tensions between Islam, the British and the West have much deeper roots. Can Islamic theology and culture compete with the march of globalisation, Western values and their self-evident superiority in delivering a prosperity that Islam cannot match?
The West provokes Islam not by doing anything, although what it does is hardly helpful; it provokes at least some strands of Islamic thought simply by being.
Just as the 21st-century West has little place for traditional views of manhood, for example, so generating a crisis of masculinity, so it has little place for some interpretations of Islamic canons - provoking an Islamist fundamentalism in response.
Western animal rights and green activists lose all sense of proportion in their violent campaigns because a personal agenda over how they assert their identity in today's world is in play; jihadists lose their sense of proportionality in the same way.
The invocations of the Koran and Allah to justify suicide and death may sound like throwbacks; in fact they are utterly contemporary. They signify globalised Islam responding to modernity and the success of the West. Thus a thread links the militant jihadists in Britain, the Taleban-like fundamentalism of the Hamas militias who have just taken over in Gaza and the rise of Wahhabi schools everywhere.
It is a complex if depressing thesis, but it is driven home by an important article in Prospect on Mohammad Sidique Khan. If you think Sidique plotted July 7 and took his life only because, as he said in the video clip released after his death, "we are at war and I am a soldier", think again. The underlying reasons were much more to do with identity and culture. Shiv Malik, who undertook months of research into the Sidique story for an aborted BBC drama documentary, explains that political jihadism occupies only one-quarter of Sidique's taped message. The rest is about settling deeply personal scores that related to his identity and experience as a second- generation immigrant.
This was a man who had been cut off from his family for marrying out because at first he had rejected Islamic norms, and who, in relative social isolation, had been recruited by tried and tested means into a jihadist network - an effective way of making sense of his circumstances, finding friendship and fighting back both as an individual and as a member of a culture. Thus the tape's savage indictment of his community leaders and scholars; they looked for material wellbeing before the rigours of truly following Allah. Sidique would show them how.
The message from Roy and Malik is bleak. There is no quick fix. Nor should the West too readily accept at face value demands to accept Islamic dress codes, protocols over food, the cultural context of honour killings, Islamic schools and Sharia law. The virulence and sometimes violence with which these demands are made are not because of religiosity or genuine grievance which we should respect; they are ways of responding to a profound identity crisis and should be understood as such.
I recently heard Aayan Hirsi Ali, author of Infidel and The Caged Virgin, speak of her experience of being brought up in Somalia under the restrictive doctrines of the Koran. As she explains she remains a Muslim, but one with a Western attitude of proper scepticism to her religion. She has found a new identity, but she needed the West not to compromise on its values while she made the journey.
There are many years of tension ahead. There needs to be an equitable settlement between Israel and the Palestinians not because of hopes it will halt Islamic fundamentalism or al Qaeda but because we believe in equity.
To respond to jihadism by declaring a war on terror was wrong; to make war on a crisis of identity is crass. Jihadist terror is a security issue. Peace will only arrive in the Middle East and Leeds when many more Muslims arrive at Hirsi Ali's destination.
And that will only happen if the West never gives ground on its values, and never accepts it has sole responsibility for the tensions.
The violent engagement with modernity by some strands within Islam is inescapable. We should certainly avoid inflaming matters with injustices such as Guantanamo Bay. But we cannot and should not stop being ourselves.
- OBSERVER
