married, cricket-loving. And, in Amersterdam, when Mohammed Bouyeri murdered
film-maker Theo van Gogh he attached a poem entitled ‘In bloed gedoopt’
(‘Drenched in Blood’) to the knife he used; the poem, with its rhyming couplets,
was written in a style Dutch families send to one another at Christmas, thus not
only a demonstrating an excellent command of the Dutch language but a highly
developed sense of irony. It is clear that radicalisation is a complex process.
The British study in reviewing the literature came to the conclusion that
radicalisation often involved a search for identity at a moment of crisis:
whilst defining oneself is part of the normal process of identity-formation amongst
young people, for those who are at risk of radicalisation, this process creates a
‘cognitive opening’, a moment when previous explanations and belief systems
are found to be inadequate in explaining an individual’s experience.
(Choudhury, 2007: 6)
Underlying the identity crisis is a sense of exclusion, intensified by experiences
of discrimination, racism and blocked mobility. Radicalised individuals often have
a fragmented identity – they strongly identify with some aspects of Britain (or
another Western society) but are alienated from others. Discrimination rather than
poverty is a crucial factor, which is one of the reasons why organisations such as
Al-Muhajiroun (now a banned organisation in Britain) recruited in universities.
As well as alienation from some aspects of British (or Western) society the
radicalised individual is also alienated from his family. The parents’ version of Islam
‘seems distant and irrelevant’, and the religious leadership at the local mosque is
poor, with Imams often unable to speak English. In many ways, radical Islam is
Western: it addresses the needs of Muslims who have been socialised in the West,
as distinct from immigrants to the West. Some writers, such as Tariq Ramadan,
have argued that in response to both the traditional, often rural and un-Western,
Muslim leadership of the mosques, and to the radical Islam of groups such as Al-
Muhajiroun there must develop a ‘European Islam’. He argues for a separation of
religion and politics, and of religion and culture, and for a reinterpretation of Islamic
texts in the light of Western experience (Ramadan, 2005: 4–5).
Several points of relevance to multiculturalism emerge from this brief discussion
of radicalisation. First, religious conflict in the twenty-first century is only partially
continuous with the religious conflicts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
This is because a genuinely new problem has emerged in the twentieth century: the
problem of identity. We explore this further in the next section. Second, there is a
socio-economic dimension to cultural diversity and exclusion: multiculturalism is
not just about beliefs but also about resources. However, unlike traditional debates
about resource distribution, conflicts arise not only due to poverty or absolute
inequality, but to relative and perceived inequalities: concerns over distribution meet
newer concerns about identity and self-worth. Third, there is a complex relationship
between religion, race (ethnicity) and culture. Some hostility to Muslims is likely
to be explained as racially motivated, and for some movements on the radical right
culture has become a code word for race. Putting aside race there are genuine, non-
racially motivated questions about the relationship between culture and religion,
and we explore these further in this chapter, especially in the context of women’s
rights.
Chapter 15 Multiculturalism 341