After the London tube bombings last year, British Muslims mobilized to fight Islamic extremism.

The Radical Middle Way project was designed to give young people a different view of their religion.

Within three weeks of the 7 July bombings, the British government set up a series of “Preventing Extremism Together” workshops with 100 British Muslims. Mostly young and from all walks of life, their job was to provide insight into why a small minority of Muslims veer over the edge into fundamentalism, while the majority do not.

Economic deprivation, second-generation tensions, social isolation from the mainstream had all played a part and all got their due.

But what came through emphatically from the advisers was that extremists, no matter how warped and misguided their interpretation of Islam, perceive themselves as devoutly religious.

Indeed, the final report concluded: “The problem is not primarily rooted in socio-economic deprivation: it is based on a global ideology motivated by political grievances and justified by a mistaken interpretation of Islam.”

And the only way to combat the ideology is to take on its arguments and knock them down flat, says Fareena Alam, the 27-year-old managing editor of trend-setting Q-News, the U.K.’s largest Muslim magazine, who was one of the 100 advisers.

“If these young people are motivated by faith, and the idiots who tell them to kill in the name of the faith, then we need to use religion to get at them,” she says from London. “We can’t run away from the fact that religion is important to these young people. So, we must counter extremism with more religion, not less.”

Which is precisely what the British government, with the help of Q-News and three other young-Muslim groups, decided to do in setting up the Radical Middle Way project. “Middle Way” because balance is a primary value in traditional Islam; “radical,” well, to attract teens.

The project involves a group of international Islamic scholars with credibility among young people travelling across Britain to give theological counter-arguments against extremist interpretations of the faith.

“We told government, let’s not reinvent the wheel here,” Alam says. In other words, let Q-News and cohorts run the show. The government agreed.

With public funds, Q-News books the venues — deliberately not mosques, but concert halls or auditoriums — and flies in speakers from around the world, including Yemen, Germany and Canada.

Since it started in December, the “Imams Tour,” as it’s dubbed, has been a huge success. More than 25,000 curious young Muslims have turned out to listen to, or argue with, scholars whose names are venerated in the Islamic world. Attendance is free.

When the highly respected Abdallah bin Bayyah from Mauritania walked on stage at a Middle Way event in London, awestruck teenagers craned to capture him on their camera-phones as if he were a rock star.

But the biggest draw, perhaps, has been the charismatic young American convert, Hamza Yusuf. The former Mark Hanson of Walla Walla, Washington state, understands the problems of integrating as a Muslim into the non-Muslim West and that, Alam says, is key.

“Most mosques and imams don’t have a clue what’s going on with young people and fewer kids go to them for guidance. So, the vacuum gets filled in kebab shops or bookstores or on strange sites on the Internet.”

But there is always the person-to-person exposure, she adds. Someone slightly older becomes a “mentor,” all too happy to supply a quick theological fix to young people enraged by what’s happening to Muslims in the Middle East.

The fix? Born-again fundamentalism — a “pure,” literalist Islam — that teaches rejection of national loyalty and the embrace of the black-and-white militancy.

Alam isn’t surprised the phenomenon has spread to Canada: “Extremists live in a media-savvy world and they learn from each other. Your kids there were not immune. The 7/7 bombers here, they were angry. `Our people are being killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.’ They wanted to help them. They wanted to be men.”

The logic of helping by blowing up London’s transit system or anything else doesn’t simply elude reason, says Jamal Badawi, an Egyptian-born Canadian scholar — it flatly contravenes and betrays the traditional faith.

Badawi, imam to an 18,000-member Muslim community in Halifax, Canada and professor of religious studies at St. Mary’s University, was the speaker at a Middle Way event in April. His message to the sellout crowd was clear-cut: “Terrorists have a totally perverted interpretation of the faith.”

Koranic references, he says, “are taken out of context to justify terrorism, just as biblical texts are warped by Christian fundamentalists to justify bombing abortion clinics.”

Extremist ideology holds that true Muslims cannot be loyal to their country and to their faith, Badawi says from Halifax.

“That’s erroneous. Normative Islam believes in peaceful co-existence, in being `justly balanced.’ It rejects extremism, whether of excess or neglect.”

Fundamentalists who try to stop fellow Muslims from contributing to the culture and politics of their new, non-Islamic country — as one of the Mississauga accused, Qayyum Jamal, reportedly did during the last federal election — couldn’t be more wrong “and must be countered,” he says.

Badawi is not deaf, however, to the frustrations of the young, a point his Middle Way audience undoubtedly appreciated.

“Extremism didn’t come out of the thin air,” he says. “The deaths of 100,000 Iraqis does arouse resentment, which can turn into blind hate. A feeling of anger is fine. But what is not justified is taking violent action.”

Source: Lynda Hurst, Toronto Star (Canada), 10 June 2006

Related link: Radical Middleway