The man who held four worshippers hostage in the synagogue in Colleyville, Texas was not a member of America’s large and diverse Muslim population, but a British subject who came to the U.S. to carry out an attack. And as Ed Husain notes, radical and violent understandings of Islam have a great deal of influence in the United Kingdom. Looking back through Islamic history, from Mohammad himself to the 17th-century Muslim emperor who built the Taj Mahal, Husain draws a contrast between a legacy of tolerance, respect for learning, and cultivation of the arts and what is preached in many British mosques today:
Britain’s first purpose-built mosque, erected in 1899 in [the London suburb of] Woking, was spearheaded and commissioned by Dr. Gottlieb Leitner, a Hungarian Jew. The female ruler of the Indian state of Bhopal, Shah Jahan Begum, after whom the mosque was later named, began financing the project in 1880. William Isaac Chambers, an English Christian gentleman, designed the mosque with the architectural flamboyance of earlier Mughal buildings in Delhi. Still standing in Surrey, the mosque was a gathering place for Muslims, and often their Jewish and Christian friends, for decades.
[Today], radical Islamist activists have a grip on more than 30 madrasas across the country. Each madrasa produces hundreds of imams for future leadership positions. I visited such institutions in Blackburn, [the hometown of the Colleyville hostage-taker], London, Bury, and Dewsbury. . . . [Their] radical, puritanical clericalism is on the rise across Great Britain.
What is more, these cleric-heavy ghettos, dominated by activists, are developing a loyalty to their increasingly radicalized community that is in opposition to any loyalty towards the country in which they live. They imagine “the Muslim community” and seek to represent it as a single, confrontational political bloc. For this reason, they find it hard to condemn causes of terrorism; . . . Palestine matters more than Preston or Peterborough. Loyalty to the nation-state is heresy. The hardline clerics and activists are busy bullying and silencing the individual Muslim citizen who aspires to healthy and patriotic civil participation.
Read more on European Conservative: https://europeanconservative.com/articles/essay/a-choice-for-europe-between-beauty-and-bigotry/