Instead, they inadvertently confirmed the ideas of Ernest Gellner, the late and unjustly neglected professor of anthropology at Cambridge. In Postmodernism, Reason and Religion (1992), Gellner asked why a puritanical version of Islam was in the ascendant when godlessness was flourishing everywhere else. His answer was that Wahhabism and its ever more zealous theocratic variants could appear as modern as secular humanism. They represented the pure religion of scholars and the city, which would free Muslims from their peasant parents' embarrassingly superstitious faith. Accepting fanaticism was a mark of superiority: a visible sign of upward mobility from rural idiocy to urban sophistication.
And so it proved in Leeds. The picture of Beeston the BBC presents is a disorientating mixture of the parochial and the cosmopolitan. On one hand, Beeston is almost as much of a village as the ancestral homes of its Pakistani inhabitants. On the other, its parochialism is an illusion. Cheap flights take the bombers to the madrassas and terrorist training camps of Pakistan. The internet connects them to the global jihadi network.
In one telling scene, Hasib Hussein hears a message ping on his mobile. He flips it open and finds a beheading video. He watches the snuff movie impassively, showing no emotion when the killer cuts a hostage's throat. Later Khan and Hussein learn how to make a bomb, not by infiltrating an army regiment, but by the simple expedient of going to an internet café and logging on to an Arab jihadi site. "What did people do before Google?" the admiring Hussein asks.
Sidique Khan is the dominant figure. He turns against the traditional Sufism of his father, who remains stuck in the tribal and religious loyalties of the subcontinent. By breaking with both, Khan escapes an arranged marriage designed to keep wealth within the extended family, and enters into a love match with a fellow student at Leeds Metropolitan University.
His father's pir, or Sufi priest, demands a hearing. While Khan waits to talk to him, he sees the elder hang a miracle cure - a miniature Koran - round a child's neck. Khan looks on in disgust. "What you do here is not harmless, it's dangerous," he thunders. "How dare you contaminate Islam? There is only one Allah and he does not share his power, not with anyone... Your tradition of Islam, your parlour tricks, they belong in the hills of Pakistan."


















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