Karim Ben Khelifa for TIME BRITAIN Sajid Sharif, head of a radical Muslim group, hopes for the worldwide dominance of Islam

	GENERATION JIHAD

Posted Sunday, Oct. 23, 2005; 10.53BST
That lack of connection to their native societies can be aggravated by extremists. Zaheer Khan, a 30-year-old British Muslim who grew up in Kent in southeast England, says his own experience was fairly common among Muslims of his generation. He was drawn to radical Islam while in college in the mid-1990s, he says. The Wahhabi and Salafist recruiters, he says, “would tell you that things like taking out car insurance is against Islamic principles, or voting — this is haram, forbidden. Slowly, the disengagement [from British society] was there. You didn't say, 'Let's explore what it means to be living in Britain.' This didn't come up.”

The feelings Khan had back then — though still devout, he has rejected radical Islam — are wide-spread among second-generation European Muslims. “The problem is that they have no real roots,” says Dominique Many, a lawyer for one of the Muslim Frenchmen taken into custody by French officials on suspicion of volunteering to fight against U.S. forces in Iraq. “In Tunisia, they are considered foreigners. In France, they are considered foreigners. This is the new generation of Muslims.”

Muslims will not condone the London bombings, but inside they believe Britain had it coming

Some of those marks can be found at a youth and job-seeking center set along a canal in the depressed Belgian industrial town of Mechlin, between Brussels and Antwerp. Yassin el-Abdi, 24, an accountant who's been unemployed for three years, recently scanned job listings on a computer and complained bitterly about the extremists in Europe who, in his view, are making a bad situation for Muslims even worse. “These people who are planting the bombs are wrecking things for us,” says el-Abdi. But the reality, says el-Abdi's friend, Said Bouazza, who runs the center, is that joblessness among Muslims in Europe can only add to jihadist ranks: “It's like a ticking time bomb. There are people who fight back by opening their own store. Or they plant bombs.”

Tough economic times and racial discrimination are age-old triggers of anger and disillusionment. Just a decade ago, many of the youths now taking up the extremist cause might have been more inclined to drift into a life of crime or drug use. The more committed would have had to journey to training camps in Afghanistan and then return to isolated sleeper cells in order to pursue jihad. Now, they don't need to leave home. The Internet has played a huge role in fostering a sense of community among fanatics and those who would join them. It brings jihad to them — instructions on how to build a bomb, for instance, are just a click away. Sayful Islam, 26, formerly a government tax-office employee in Luton, an industrial town 48 km north of London, and then a full-time spokesman for al-Muhajiroun in the area, now concentrates on spreading his radical message among the local youth. “Even if my own family were killed by a jihadi's bomb, I would say it's the will of Allah,” he says.

There's little doubt that, in the last two years, the disaffection and anger shared by many young Muslims has coalesced around a single, galvanizing issue: the war in Iraq. Time's reporting across Europe shows that the conflict has had a profoundly radicalizing effect on some Muslims, convincing them that the U.S. and Britain are bent on eradicating Islam, and that the only proper response is to fight back. The sentiment voiced by the head of the Arab European League in Belgium, a radical Muslim named Karim Hassoun, is all too common: “The more body bags of Americans we see coming back from Iraq, the happier we are.” A senior French security official says that Iraq ”has acted as a formidable booster” for extremist groups.

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