Another data point about Islam in the UK

The article in City Journal by Theodore Dalrymple titled When Islam Breaks Down tells of the cruelty to women he found in Muslim (but not Sikh!) Pakistan, and of the brittleness he sees as the source of the shrillness of modern Islam. He judges the fatal flaw in Islam to be its failure to distinguish church and state, which left 'both' susceptible to attacks by radical clerics and which left no neutral zone for independent thought. And without some independent thought, there's never likely to be any reform. So far, so good--his analysis is worth reading on this account alone.

But even more interesting to me than the theory is his information about what young Muslim men are actually like in the UK.

One sign of the increasing weakness of Islams hold over its nominal adherents in Britain--of which militancy is itself but another sign--is the throng of young Muslim men in prison. They will soon overtake the young men of Jamaican origin in their numbers and in the extent of their criminality. By contrast, young Sikhs and Hindus are almost completely absent from prison, so racism is not the explanation for such Muslim over representation.

Confounding expectations, these prisoners display no interest in Islam whatsoever; they are entirely secularized. True, they still adhere to Muslim marriage customs, but only for the obvious personal advantage of having a domestic slave at home. Many of them also dot the city with their concubines--sluttish white working-class girls or exploitable young Muslims who have fled forced marriages and do not know that their young men are married. This is not religion, but having ones cake and eating it.

The young Muslim men in prison do not pray; they do not demand halal meat. They do not read the Quran. They do not ask to see the visiting imam. They wear no visible signs of piety: their main badge of allegiance is a gold front tooth, which proclaims them members of the city's criminal subculture--a badge (of honor, they think) that they share with young Jamaicans, though their relations with the Jamaicans are otherwise fraught with hostility. The young Muslim men want wives at home to cook and clean for them, concubines elsewhere, and drugs and rock n roll. As for Muslim proselytism in the prison--and Muslim literature has been insinuated into nooks and crannies there far more thoroughly than any Christian literature--it is directed mainly at the Jamaican prisoners. It answers their need for an excuse to go straight, while not at the same time surrendering to the morality of a society they believe has wronged them deeply. Indeed, conversion to Islam is their revenge upon that society, for they sense that their newfound religion is fundamentally opposed to it. By conversion, therefore, they kill two birds with one stone.

But Islam has no improving or inhibiting effect upon the behavior of my city's young Muslim men, who, in astonishing numbers, have taken to heroin, a habit almost unknown among their Sikh and Hindu contemporaries. The young Muslims not only take heroin but deal in it, and have adopted all the criminality attendant on the trade.

This, while a disaster, is a different disaster than you might be led to expect from the usual news sources. It is just one datapoint, of course, since the UK's Muslim population is dominated by Pakistanis and Bangladeshis ( see this.

Always check your theories against experiment...