Religion, the great unmentionable

From the heart of Britain's 1.6 million-strong Islamic community to the core of the country's media, intellectual and religious elite, consternation and turmoil reign.

Were the four British-born suicide bombers who blew themselves up on the London Underground and a double-decker bus killing at least 54 people and injuring hundreds really Muslims? Or just alienated youth who fell prey to a murderous ideology that has nothing to do with the Koran? An aberration in a sea of peace-loving Muslims or more disturbing evidence of a poisonous nihilism infecting an ancient faith tradition in crisis?

The answer could determine the future of the British struggle to expose and root out the fanaticism that resulted in the terrorist attacks of July 7 and even the viability of this proudly multicultural nation. In the meantime, the nation -- still coming to terms with the enormity of the suicide bombing attacks on London -- is gripped by an intense semantic dispute that highlights underlying divisions over who must take responsibility for the emergence of home-grown terrorism.

Australians were shocked this week when the country's most radical Islamic cleric said he doubted whether the London bombers were Muslim, saying their actions were un-Islamic. Melbourne's Sheik Mohammed Omran said he would reserve judgment about the religious identity of the London bombers until more evidence emerged about them.

In Britain, similar sentiments were expressed across the religious and commentariat spectrum, typically with more delicacy, yet the underlying message was the same: don't see this as evidence of an Islamic or even a religious problem.

Leading Muslims from Leeds were among the first to send their messages of condolence and solidarity with the victims after the attacks. But once the bombers were revealed as from their own community, clerics and lay spokesmen were at pains to almost disown the killers as unrepresentative.

"This is nothing to do with religion," said Zaher Birawi, chairman of the Leeds Grand Mosque. "They are terrible crimes and should be treated as such."

The views were echoed in The Guardian. On Monday the Left-leaning daily published a front-page story headlined "Call them criminals, terrorists, but don't call them Muslims".

In his Sunday sermon following the bombings Paul Hawkins, of St Pancras Church, across the road from Euston station, cautioned his congregation against religious identification of the suspects. "There is one small thing that we can all do," he said. "We can name the people who did these things as criminals or terrorists. We must not name them as Muslims."

To some commentators, such remarks were unsuccessful, politically correct attempts to absolve Islam in Britain of any responsibility for the sheltering and education of extremists such as the bombers, and at the very least barely convincing in the opinion of novelist Will Self.

Writing in the Evening Standard, Self scoffed at the pussyfooting: "The move by Muslim clerics to deny that the suicide bombers are even co-religionists is facile ... for fundamentalists of all stripes the Bible, the Koran or the Torah is God's blueprint for the way society should be run."

The well-intentioned relativism proliferated in Anglican circles. Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams condemned the bombings but said it was false to assert that one religion is more prone to violence than another.

It was not only the identification of Muslim suicide bombers as Muslims that brought intense discomfort. The term terrorists also was too hot to handle for the BBC, which took the contentious decision to refer to the terrorists only as bombers. The BBC policy incited the derision of Gerard Baker in The Times: "The BBC was supposedly the model for the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and I can't think of a better recent example of pure Orwell than this painstaking effort at rewriting the verbal record to fit in with linguistic orthodoxy."

So why the reluctance on the part of some clerics of all creeds from Muslims to Christians and sections of the British intelligentsia to acknowledge reality? The extreme sensitivity to religious labelling was a manifestation of Britain's attachment to multiculturalism.

Muslims, many politicians and religious figures were understandably anxious about a sharp rise in racial tension as Muslim citizens endure harassment and worse in the wake of the bombings. And Britain would never force cultural integration as the staunchly secularist French had with the ban on the Muslim headscarf in schools.

Still, the fear of calling a Muslim a Muslim even when the bombers were reported to have met in the local Leeds mosque and undergone Islamic religious schooling in Britain and Pakistan was by no means uniform. While some journalists, editors, religious leaders and Muslim officials tied themselves up in linguistic knots, four outspoken British Muslim MPs who met Tony Blair to discuss the political response to the attacks were unequivocal.

The Labour MP who earned the ire of religious extremists, Khalid Mahmood, told The Guardian the bombers were the equivalent of a religious cult.

"We [also] have a big problem with much of the religious education that goes on in mosques after school," he said. "It is totally unregulated and much of it is low quality. I have argued for many years that we need to do something about the incitement to religious hatred and the quality of religious teaching in mosques."

But it was Shahid Malik, Labour MP for Dewsbury, where one of the bombers lived, who most dramatically threw down the gauntlet to his fellow Muslims.

"Condemnation is not enough and British Muslims must -- and I believe are prepared to -- confront the voices of evil head on," he said. "We have to look within the community. There is extremism there. We have not done enough to actually deal with that."