The search for Muslim identity

All Muslims are called to defend the societies they live in, not attack them

In an east London hospital I examine the 17-year-old, his emaciated pigeon chest rising with each mechanical breath. Finely etched, his sleeping features remind me of Saudi camel sellers, who were once my patients. Wisps of hair peep through an unbuttoned thobe (an ankle-length robe), betraying a still-lingering puberty. An untrimmed beard and skullcap are final clues that my patient is an Arab Muslim.

His x-rays show a ferocious pneumonia. I wash my hands and go in search of family, expecting to see other Arabs. Instead, I encounter four robust Pakistani women. As a Muslim of British-Pakistani heritage and a physician, I am amazed at the extent of his racial transition. He has fooled me entirely.

Many British Muslims, like my patient, fervently erase their ethnicity with ritualistic religiosity, choosing distinction from their parents in a desperate search of politicised Muslim identity, with little understanding of Islam or politics. Raised in a virtual Ummah (community of believers) made vivid through satellite TV and YouTube, these young Muslims seek to relate to a Palestinian "neighbour" they will never know, in preference to the Londoner living next door.

Many first- and second-generation British Muslims shun their ethnic heritage and cultural frameworks in favour of a perverse, exaggerated, narcissistic compassion for worlds of which they will never be part. One explanation for this is what psychologists describe as terror management theory. Dr José Liht and his team at the University of Cambridge develop British Islamist de-radicalisation programmes. Earlier this year Dr Liht explained terror management theory to me and its role in radicalisation.

Foreknowledge of death is unique to humans and must exist in parallel to a fundamental drive to survive. The resulting tension becomes overwhelming. In response, vulnerable people trade individual identities for group identity, which enables them to escape the boundaries of their mortal selves. Becoming part of a group assuages the individual's internal conflicts and simplifies the "other" against which one seeks real or imagined refuge. Muslims, who feel disengaged from surrounding British society as well as their parents' heritage (whether for valid and/or imagined reasons), are particularly vulnerable at the moment. Wearing Arab clothing, assuming manufactured Islamic identities, is externally emblematic of this dissolution. Accepting terrorist operations, including suicide bombings, may follow as the group identity is built on this distorted shared world-view.

Islam reviles suicide, designating the taking of life as tantamount to the killing of "all mankind". Yet many Muslims condone "martyrdom" operations, particularly against Americans or Israelis. Disordered terror management can play a role here, as a loss of individual boundaries of identity enables a gross simplification of the "other" into an amorphous, unified, legitimate target for destruction. Suddenly, what is scripturally prohibited by Islam as suicide appears scripturally authorised as "jihad" instead.

But as a diaspora Muslim I feel I must belong to the real societies around me, even if I find that by doing so I am aligned with Israelis, Americans and Jews, groups increasingly repugnant to the mainstream Muslim Ummah. I am aligned with them as a physician, and as a Muslim, because we treasure the sanctity of life. The fabric of society is more important to me than any fabric of my clothing. As Muslims, that is our only authentic identity: one where we are human beings first, people of the book second.