Pizzas galore!

This came to be combined with — or was inspired by — a distaste for British ways of life, specifically with the yob culture. Drinking and sexual display were particularly offensive to an increasingly devout generation.

This new adherence to the faith among the Muslim young made them dissidents amid the vulgar secularity of contemporary Britain. The boys at the London Islamic school just shrugged their shoulders at this — “They are not Muslims, we can’t tell them not to drink” — and they didn’t feel threatened. But others see yob culture as a mark of a diseased society. Our behaviour abroad — primarily in the Middle East — is equated with our loutish behaviour at home. Some British-born Muslims now see the native population as dissolute and dangerous, not as tolerant of but a threat to the global umma.

Professor Bernard Crick, the Labour political philosopher, sees macropolitics and especially the running sore of Palestine as directly related to the disaffection of British Muslim youth. For him, the whole issue is political and not religious and the continued use of the phrase “Islamic terrorists” tends to conceal this fact. “Of course they are in some sense Islamic. But we didn’t call IRA bombers ‘Catholic terrorists’.”

Crick welcomes what he sees as an apparent government return to orthodoxy on the subject of multiculturalism. For a while, there seemed to be a wobble when voices on the left began to doubt. But Charles Clarke has reassured the Muslims that multiculturalism is alive and well.

“Britain has been multicultural since the Act of Union in 1707,” says Crick. “From then we learnt to hold two identities in our heads — British and Scottish.”

It was Trevor Phillips, head of the Commission for Racial Equality who inspired doubt about multiculturalism by suggesting that it was an ideology that had the effect of freezing people into starkly segregated national, religious and racial groups. Liberals kept preaching that it was good to be Caribbean, Asian, African or whatever, but they omitted to tell them it was also good to be British.

“Bollocks!” says Phillips to Crick’s macropolitical explanation. “Nonsense,” he adds about the professor’s point about the IRA: “the point he is missing is that the IRA called themselves Irish not Catholic and these new terrorists call themselves Islamic. They have to be what they call themselves.”

For Phillips, the solution to the problems of the Muslims lies with the Muslims. “They need to create a strong Muslim-British identity. Multiculturalism has frozen too many groups and prevented them integrating. Too many people in this country still live in the old country in their heads.”

Phillips does not see faith schools as a problem. It is a question, he says, not of schools but of teachers. Many, however, do, fearing the segregation and indoctrination of young minds. Faith schools are now the fastest-growing educational sector, though the numbers are still small.

It is known, however, that there are concerns within Ofsted that Islamic schools are preaching too much faith at the expense of education. One Ofsted report in April on the Institute of Islamic Education in West Yorkshire spoke of “methods . . . better suited to the madrasah” and of memorising of text in the Koranic tradition rather than actual teaching.

In the run-up to the election Tony Blair distanced himself from such criticism by disagreeing with David Bell, the Ofsted boss, about the condition of Islamic education. It was an intervention he might now regret, confronted as he is with the evidence that extremists are now playing a part in the education of Muslims.

And, in fact, such sensitivities may not play as well among Muslim voters as Blair might think. Dr Mohamed Mukadam, principal of the Leicester Islamic academy, is more fiercely critical of Islamic extremism than many non-Muslims would dare.

He wants extremist clerics deported and he believes capital punishment for terrorists would be a good idea — “though I know that may not be acceptable in a European country”. He also regards blaming global politics as irrational. “This is a free country, they can demonstrate, they can show their dissent. This is a diverse society with many different opinions. You don’t kill people for disagreeing with you.”

Indeed, overall the message seems to be that the terrorists are recruited from the ranks of the most integrated rather than the most segregated Muslim boys. There is a logic to this. Judging by my own experience in Whitechapel and the words of Mukadam, at least some Muslim schools are highly disciplined places that place a fierce insistence on good behaviour and integration.

There is one quiet but crucial theme in this chorus that, for me, points to the heart of the matter. At Whitechapel, I ask Abdul Rauf about the preachers of hate. “In Pakistan, in Bangladesh, anywhere,” he says, “these are people who come from small villages and who know nothing about living in the outside world.”

The Islamic conception of home, as the philosopher Roger Scruton pointed out in his book The West and the Rest, is quite different from ours. Home, to the Muslim, is a more private place: their villages turn inwards, ours sprawl outwards. The piety of Islam is private piety and, as Scruton says, flaunting our conception of freedom “in the face of religious prohibitions is an act of aggression, inviting retribution from those whose piety it offends”.

Denied viable identities by alien societies that offend their piety and reinforce their isolation through multiculturalism and under pressure from a corrupted conception of Islamic truth, impressionable young men turn further inwards. Nuance of feeling and acceptance of common humanity vanish to be replaced by the vicious rationality of a perverted faith that they alone suffer, they alone are the victims. And so they take their rucksacks to paradise via King’s Cross.

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