PERSONALLY, I find it deeply immoral to gang-rape a woman in revenge for something her brother did. I also find it immoral — though more trivial in the scheme of things — to pass laws forbidding women to drive a car. But if I lived in Pakistan or Saudi Arabia, I would not feel justified in blowing innocent people to bits because I hated the way their society treated my sex. Indeed, I would not choose to live in those countries at all if I disagree profoundly with their social mores.

For that reason, the YouGov poll published in The Daily Telegraph at the weekend was deeply disturbing. Although the vast majority of British Muslims condemned the suicide bombings in London, a sizeable proportion — 24 per cent — said that they had some sympathy with the feelings and motives of the bombers. And a full 32 per cent believed that: “Western society is decadent and immoral and that Muslims should seek to bring it to an end.”

What, precisely, is so decadent and immoral about the way we lead our lives in the West? Men here seem to cope perfectly well with female colleagues whose hair is uncovered or whose arms are bare. It does not send them into frenzies of lust. Our children seem to cope perfectly well with having mothers who work — if they are girls themselves, it helps them to realise what opportunities may one day be open to them.

Like Muslims, I abhor the coarseness and violence that accompanies binge-drinking. But the moderate drinking that oils our relations with friends and acquaintances is hardly tearing our social fabric apart. Nor is premarital sex between a regular girlfriend and boyfriend. None of these ills, in fact, compares with the gang-rape of an innocent woman condoned by a village council in Pakistan or the kidnap and forced marriage of young British Muslim girls. What is revealing is that the feelings of alienation suffered by Muslims in the YouGov poll are far greater among men than women. Muslim girls, on the whole, are liberated by living in Britain. Their education is deemed as important by the State as their brothers’. Those whose parents don’t encourage them to stay on at school and go to university will be encouraged by their teachers instead. For many of them, Western society offers the chance of escape from oppression by fathers, brothers and husbands.

The proportion of Muslim men who say that they feel no loyalty to Britain (18 per cent) is more than three times higher than the proportion of women who say the same. In other words, nearly all Muslim women feel attached to this country and grateful for what it has given them, while a solid core of Muslim men do not. Muslim men are also far more likely than women to say that Western society is decadent and immoral.

This suggests that the problem with Britain — and the West as a whole — is not that it is un-Islamic. If that were the case, then Muslim women would surely feel as alienated as Muslim men. More plausible is that Muslim men resent the way in which their traditional feelings of superiority over women are challenged in the West. Here, they simply can’t get away with subjugating their womenfolk in the way that they can in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan or Somalia.

Bushra Nasir, the head teacher of Plashet School for girls in East London, was one of the delegation of Muslims invited by Tony Blair to Downing Street last week. In an interview on Tuesday she expressed herself astounded by the findings of the YouGov poll. “If 32 per cent of British Muslims really do think that Western society is immoral and should be brought to an end, then I ask myself: if they hate it so much, why live here?”

I ask myself the same thing. The world is so globalised these days that it is relatively easy to move to a country whose social values are more in sympathy with your own. Nasir explained how she had been nurtured in this country — by her teachers, her colleagues and the British people — and added that “young Muslims have a huge stake here and can be enormously successful”.

So they can. If they want to join in and be valuable members of British society, they will experience a warm welcome. But if they don’t even want to try, they are always free to seek out a society more congenial to their tastes. They may find, however, that their sisters are unwilling to follow them.

Marked men

AFTER the terrible shooting of the innocent Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes, I’ve been pondering a list of crimes that now seem to warrant summary execution by armed police as a punishment.

“Wearing a padded coat in a built-up area,” is apparently good enough justification. “Failing to buy a ticket before entering a Tube train,” has to be added to the charge list. Worst, for all Asian or East African Londoners these days: “Carrying your gym kit in a rucksack on public transport.”

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