The London Bombings: Globalization's Revenge?

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Second, the attacks are evidence of the enormous impact of globalization outside the United States. Most Americans have never experienced globalization physically, materially, and spiritually, in the way that the majority of citizens of the developing--and especially Muslim--world have felt its effects. Globalization's consequences for Muslims--massive politically and economically motivated population migrations, economic marginalization of the Muslim world, and intense cultural penetration and even military occupation by the forces of globalization in their home countries--all have created a potentially poisonous brew of alienation and rootlessness that groups like Al Qaeda expertly exploit to recruit new followers.

Perhaps the most important experience of globalization here is what scholars call the "deterritorialization" caused by the migration of (largely) young men from their home countries to the West, and especially Europe. These rootless young men, no longer grounded by their home cultures, have little in common with the long-established, mainstream if socially conservative Muslim communities in Europe. Most of these communities are in the midst of intensive efforts to become legally integrated, if not socially assimilated, into their host societies.

The economic prospects of these migrants in Europe are often quite narrow, as are those of the majority of second- or even third-generation children of the previous waves of Muslim immigration (which includes "shoe bomber"

). If the European Muslim scholar

and others have called for the creation of a

that combines the best of both cultures, this group of Muslims, often economically marginalized yet constantly tempted by a hyper-secular and consumerist culture that is as difficult to afford as it is to resist, creates a

that is disconnected from the surrounding societies.

The inhabitants of these ghettos (which are as much a state of mind as a specific neighborhood) naturally feel their presence in the host country to be transitory. It is not surprising that unlike their more established religious counterparts, they have no stake in their host societies, and so feel little sympathy with or concern for its citizens. It is from these dynamics that an "Al Qaeda in Europe," the name of the previously unknown group that has claimed responsibility for the attacks, arises.

This process is evidence of a third phenomenon associated with globalized Islam that signals an important transformation in the nature of "radical Islam" epitomized by 9/11. From the Iranian Revolution of 1978 through the early 1990s, the dominant expression of Muslim activism was explicitly political: Islamist movements sought to create some sort of Islamic state. However problematic those movements were from a Western perspective, they had specific political goals and even used the language of contemporary politics--democracy, human rights, and free elections--to articulate their goals.

Even the terrorist movements of that era had clear political goals (most often some sort of sovereignty) that could be understood and potentially become the basis for negotiation. But as French Islamic scholar

points out in his new book,

as the chance for creating an Islamic state has been frustrated repeatedly, a new generation of "neofundamentalist" movements--led by Osama bin Laden and epitomized in its more violent tendency by Al Qaeda--emerged to fill the void left by the failure of political Islam. But these movements have few positive goals and are as unwilling to dialog with non-Muslim social systems as they are to accommodate Muslims who don't follow their narrow vision of Islam.

_Related Features

London: The Theater of Sacred Terror London's Blind Eye to Islamist Terrorists Imam Feisal Rauf: No Violence in Islam's Name

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