...Not long ago when I asked an imam in a London mosque why it was that God hardly featured in his sermons, he thought I had lost the plot. “What matters today is the suffering of our brethren under occupation,” he snapped.

In other words: in our Islam we don’t do God, we do Palestine, Kashmir, Afghanistan and Iraq.

That is not all. This political Islam also has grievances about aspects of British and more broadly European domestic politics. It is unhappy that gays and lesbians are allowed to live without hindrance. It does not like the way women are allowed to “get cheeky” and even argue with their menfolk.

It is scandalised by the West’s “corruption and debauchery” and that there is no “moral force” to set strict limits to individual liberties...

...Because it offers a unique freedom, Britain has become host to dozens of Islamist parties which are banned in the Muslim world. The Algerian Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), the Tunisian An-Nahda al-Islamiyah, the pan-Islamist Hizb al-Tahrir (Liberation party), the Iranian Mujaheddin Khalq (People’s Holy Warriors), the Iranian-sponsored Hezbollah movement and a number of other groups that could best be described as terrorist outfits have had propaganda bases and safe havens in Britain for two decades.

The third reason for the politicisation of Islam in Britain is its rapprochement with the extreme left over the past decade. Today political Islam and the British extreme left are in coalition in a number of organisations, including the anti-war alliance. Muslims provide the street muscle and the “poor masses” that the traditionally atheistic extreme left lacks. In exchange the extreme left puts its experience in militant politics at the service of political Islam. Hatred of “bourgeois democracy”, anti-Americanism and opposition to Israel provide the unifying factors of this unnatural alliance.

Islam cannot have it both ways: pretend to be a religion and demand special respect while operating as a political ideology which, by definition, must be open to criticism and even denigration...