On a rare dry evening last week I walked to a meeting in London. The streets were full and the pubs overflowing with drinkers, many of whom are on the pavements because of the smoking ban: people having a good time at the end of an average working day, smiling and joshing each other. Too often the British forget that they have built a successful and good-natured society over the last 10 years at the same time as absorbing a million or more people from scores of countries around the world.

If one wants to see the accumulated virtue of British culture one might start with the humour, consideration, tolerance, generosity and all-round nous to be found in any mixed gathering anywhere in the United Kingdom.
It is on this society that al-Qaeda has declared a particular war. The people having a good time are the ones that al-Qaeda wishes to blow apart and maim and intimidate with its bloody plots and fantasies. The recent failed attacks in Glasgow and London, the guilty verdicts of the July 21 bombers and the statement by bin Laden’s deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri promising a precise response to the knighthood for Salman Rushdie makes it plain that Britain is the prime target for al-Qaeda in the West. There is a devotion to cruelty among the extremist sects of Islam which seems to go way beyond the desire to gain certain political goals or religious goals. Brutality has come to signify purity of faith among the followers of radicalised sects.

In Black Mass, John Gray places al-Qaeda in the European tradition of murdering utopians, movements that believe that the world can be permanently improved by the elimination of one class or race of people. The important part of his argument is that it demystifies al-Qaeda’s project and makes it entirely recognisable to Europeans steeped in the history of the murderous tyrannies of Stalin and Hitler. It also defuses for Europeans the potency of its religious motor.

There are two theories on al-Qaeda’s future. The first suggests it is like the Ebola virus, which cannot spread far because it kills its victims too quickly. The second sees Islamism as an organism which will gradually take a hold throughout West Asia where demographic studies predict a boom in the population of young males and there is little energy devoted to job creation.

I think the father of radical Islam is the Egyptian thinker Sayyid Qutb, who in the 1950s advocated the overthrow of regimes in West Asia and their replacement by Islamic governments.

A reformation would certainly be welcome but I don’t see it happening any time soon because the tide in the Muslim world is flowing in the opposite direction. Besides, it is not the whole answer because when you come down to it the impulses that drive al-Qaeda and the 175 extremist groups being watched by the police and security services in Britain are no different from the Nazis or Stalinists.
Observer