The story in today's paper about the son of a Rochdale Councillor stopped on the Turkish border on his way to Syria prompted this thought. Why are we still pussyfooting around the issue of religious extremism in our society and who to hold accountable for these runaways?
I feel for Mr Shakil Ahmed, the aforesaid councillor, but only a bit. It seems to me that he, and a lot of other parents in our Islamic communities, are doing a passable impression of an ostrich with its head in the sand. The media ask why children brought up in middle class households, with a good education should show signs of extremism. I think the answer is obvious; blame the parents. Many of them, and I think this is a feature of many South Asian communities (though my comments may apply to others, I have insufficient experience to comment) tend have authoritarian tendencies and are patriarchal is extreme. Wives and daughters are required to subjugate themselves to the father's will; sons are spoilt but also expected to do as they are told; all children are expected to absorb their conservative cultural traditions. None of this sits easily with the liberalism of modern Britain. And the parents, and children, I am talking about are second or third generation, not recently arrived in this country.
How difficult is it for these kids to reconcile the messages they get from their friends, peers at school and the media with the messages their parents are giving them? All teenagers struggle to develop their own independence and some of course rebel; it is part of growing up. But if your family and society's values are so different the strain must be even greater. In these circumstances is it so surprising that some will be lured by a third alternative that offers a unified view of the world, based on your own religion, revolutionary, with the excitement of being in at the start of something new? Never mind about the gross depravity that we see in the media from ISIS (or is it ISIL?); this can be explained away by conspiracy theorists as deliberate media distortion. After all no one can be that ghastly, right? You don't make omelettes without breaking some eggs! And anyway, look at the people killed by the USA in pursuing it's foreign policy (I used to work with an active Catholic American who was absolutely convinced that abortion was murder and should be stopped, but that killing a few dozen wedding celebrants or children with a stray bomb in Afghanistan was "just collateral damage").
Returning to the theme,what is so different between these children running to Syria and the kids who joined the Moonies, Charles Manson or the Bader Meinhof Gang? Some are no doubt sociopaths, but most are just rebelling against the straight jacket of family expectations and looking for a way that they can live their own lives that may even, when the caliphate is up and running, make them heroes. Perhaps their parents are also quite fundamentalist in their religious thinking (in the sense of the 50 million Americans who think that the bible is literally the word of God, not in the sense of chopping heads and hands off unbelievers) and will one day be proud of them for what they did.
So I blame the parents. Let your children grow up as full members of 21st century Britain, and not try to make them live by a different set of standards (yours). They are different from you and should be allowed to express that fact. This is not a plea by the way for sex, drugs and rock and roll; these are temptations that all parents and children have to struggle with. But at least their children will not be torn in two directions. And they may even be more open to more liberal interpretations of their religion that are consistent with a modern liberal democracy. However for that the parents ought also to be more active in their own Mosques so that they know what is gong on and can ensure that extremist views are effectively countered.
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