By Farrukh Dhondy
Jul 03, 2015
Every hour, every minute,
Any possible divide of time
Come visions of the beloved
A verse without rhyme
Or reason — constructs of the heart
Or of the fact of distance
And eternities apart…”
From Keegull the Seagull by Bachchoo
A family of 12 from Luton, north of London, has gone “missing” and are believed to have travelled to the Islamic State and Syria. The family of Muhammed Abdul Mannan, 75, his wife Minera Khatun, 53, their daughter, five sons, two daughters-in-law and three grandchildren under the age of 11 are of Bangladeshi origin. They left Britain a month ago, visited Bangladesh and on their return trip via Turkey, left for the war zone.
There are hundreds of families who leave Britain on holidays or to emigrate, but the Mannans have drawn the attention of the media and the government because of their destination and the implied, profound, decision about their lives and futures. Abdul Mannan has acute diabetes, his wife was being treated for cancer, their children were all educated at the British state’s expense and their three grandchildren are much too young to make decisions about anything.
They have British passports but Britain is even now debating the prospect of depriving those who travel to the self-proclaimed Caliphate of their British citizenship. This may be against international law and the Westminster Parliament may have to restrict this sanction to suspending the passports and interning citizens who return from IS territories on grounds of security.
The Mannans have not contacted the relatives and neighbours they left behind in Luton. This would indicate that they have collectively decided to abandon their lives in Britain and seek a life under the diktat of the IS, which will mean for the young men and perhaps the young women enlisting in IS’ fighting force, living under their version of Sharia law with active or passive subscription to executions, beheadings, crucifixions and to the restrictions it imposes on women, on belief, on speech and on rethinking their presence in the war-torn territories IS has occupied.
The family that decides to go to, say, Australia and seek citizenship and a life there are no concern of the British state or media. The Mannan family is because it is symptomatic of restlessness, an ideological malaise and even a “radicalisation” which could pose a threat to the internal security of Britain. Their absconding to Syria is a ray of evidence escaping from the enclosed, almost completely Muslim communities and enclaves within what one may call the dead-mill-and-live-mosque towns of Britain.
The word “radicalisation” has been around for years, but in the last two decades it has been mainly applied to the process whereby individuals or gangs and groups from the Muslim community of Britain are persuaded to embrace the ideology and animus of jihad. This process has many roots: fundamentalist mullahs in mosques, online videos and sermons, the religious leanings and teachings of friends and families, perceptions of the treatment of Muslims by the Western powers, alienation from British society through an awareness of some real or imagined unfairness and racism and through several of these roots in combination feeding the flowering of IS “ideology”.
The Muslims of the UK, including white converts, number less about four per cent of the population. They have, on the latest estimate, contributed 800 jihadis, male and female to the IS cause. “Jihadi John” the jerk who is seen beheading Western hostages on video footage is the most notorious. Then there are the three 15-year-olds who ran away to become jihadi brides. Now the Mannan family.
Britain need not be concerned about those who get “radicalised”, find their life’s cause and wish to leave. Good riddance. But the body politic should certainly be concerned about those who wish to return from IS and, perhaps, even more about those who get radicalised and wish to stay in Britain to inflict the sort of terror which five suicide bombers on July 7, 2005, brought to London’s underground-trains and buses, killing 53 “travellers”.
One could refer to the communities within which most of this radicalisation takes place as a “black hole”, an astronomical metaphor for an entity from which no information escapes. The investigative agencies of the UK are extremely active in their attempts to detect signs of radicalisation. For every terror atrocity committed, they have foiled more than 20 plots and brought the would-be terrorists to be publicly charged with offences and tried for them. Even so, they failed and will continue to fail to detect the radicalisation of the likes of the three schoolgirl Jihadi brides or the Mannan family.
In order to assist this detection process, the government has, from July 1, imposed a legal duty on schools to detect and report the radicalisation of their pupils.
This legal obligation is, uncharacteristically for most British statute law, extremely unclear. Who is to report what and to whom? The “who” is probably individual teachers through the head teacher, the “whom” can easily be the police, but the “what” is the question. Is Islamic dress or piety to be subject to surveillance? Is the tradition of praying five times a day to be policed?
Obviously, if a teacher detects Islamist radical websites, with beheadings and instructions on bomb-making at home, on a pupil’s school or personal computer, there is something to report and follow up on. But is, for instance, the sixth-former who openly argues that Sharia law will bring peace and freedom from crime to a society to be reported to the police? Is the girl pupil who argues with her fellow Muslims that they should all cover their legs and heads to be treated as a potential recruit to IS?
The lawmakers will not be able to answer these questions. It will probably be left to trial and error in the practice of determining what the reporting of radicalisation means that will sketchily define it.
Source: http://www.asianage.com/columnists/tracing-radicalism-trial-error-316
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