London Bombing AnniversaryNext Friday marks the first anniversary of the 7/7 terrorist bombings in London. The occasion has prompted a raft of publications, none of which are more controversial or talked about than Melanie Phillips's Londonistan. Phillips is a kind of British equivalent of John Waters or Fintan O'Toole - an original and provocative columnist who (whilst probably enjoying it) has the ability to get under people's skin.
The premise of her latest, brilliantly written polemic can be boiled down to one simple argument: Britain brought 7/7 on itself. Not a particularly new argument you might think given that those who opposed the Iraq war, such as George Galloway MP, have frequently said the same. Melanie Phillips, however, argues that it was not British military action overseas that prompted the attacks. Instead 7/7 resulted from traditional British liberalism and tolerance, which had allowed Islamic fundamentalism to take hold "like a cancer". Twenty-first-century Britain, she says, has become "Londonistan" - the "global hub of the Islamic jihad".
Phillips presents official statistics to support her claims. Britain has around two million Muslim citizens in a total population of approximately 60 million. According to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, some 16,000 British Muslims are actively engaged in or support terrorist activity, while around 3,000 are estimated to have passed through al-Qaeda training camps. Several hundred are estimated to be actively planning an attack within the United Kingdom.
"These figures are staggering, and their implications go beyond any immediate concern for security," writes Phillips. "They suggest that something has gone very wrong for British society."
The "something" is that "liberal society is in danger of being destroyed by its own ideals". Phillips offers up as an example the Salman Rushdie controversy. In 1989, Rushdie's novel, The Satanic Verses, was published to widespread critical acclaim. But the novel was a biting satire on Islam, which caused offence throughout the Muslim world. The Iranian leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa sentencing Rushdie to death and put a bounty on his head. Rushdie was forced into prolonged hiding.
In Britain the book was publicly burned in many cities. Sayed Abdul Quddus, the secretary of the Bradford Council of Mosques declared that "Muslims here would kill him and I would willingly sacrifice my own life and that of my children to carry out the Ayatollah's wishes should the opportunity arise". A Labour MP, Keith Vaz, led a 3,000-strong demonstration to burn an effigy of Rushdie in Leicester. No charges were brought against any individual for incitement to murder throughout the entire affair.
"Here in microcosm were all the key features of what only much later would be recognised as a major and systematic threat to the British state and its values," writes Phillips. "There was the murderous incitement; the flagrant defiance of both the rule of law and the cardinal value of free speech; the religious fanaticism; the emergence of British Muslims as a distinct and hostile political entity."
Such is the drive of Phillips's vivid prose style that it is easy to be completely swept along by her arguments, only later thinking "hang on" before frantically turning back several pages. For example, her assessment of the Rushdie case includes a damning judgment on "the supine response by the British Establishment". She quotes the historian Lord Dacre saying that he "would not shed a tear if some British Muslims, deploring Mr Rushdie's manners, were to waylay him in a dark street and seek to improve them". Reprehensible certainly - but by the late 1980s Dacre was in fact a national laughing stock, humiliated by his authentication of the hoax Hitler Diaries.
Far more representative was the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. She may have loathed the left-wing Rushdie personally - the feeling was mutual - but she made it an article of faith for her government to defend his person.
The success of Londonistan is to challenge our preconceptions about multiculturalism, liberal values and religious fundamentalism. Even when not agreeing with her, it is impossible not to be engaged by Phillips's forceful polemic. That this debate is not merely an academic one is something made only too clear in One Day in July by John Tulloch. He was sitting three feet away from the 7/7 suicide bomber, Mohammed Sidique Khan, who blew up the Edgware Road train.
The next day, his photograph and the story of an incredible escape appeared in newspapers round the world.
Tulloch's elegant book is a poignant and forgiving work, which understatedly reveals what it is like to stare death in the face and survive. "I don't remember seeing anything being detached and flying around: bodies, parts of seats, my own bags," he writes. "It all seemed still one connected image, but deconstructed by distortion and stretching. I do remember a very disagreeable feeling, where everything was wrong, out of phase, inconvenient and, in that instant, unknowable."
The image, in fact, of a world out of joint.
Richard Aldous teaches history at UCD. His forthcoming book, The Lion and the Unicorn: Gladstone vs. Disraeli, will be published by Hutchinson in October
Londonistan: How Britain is Creating a Terror State Within By Melanie Phillips Gibson Square, 304pp. £14.99 One Day in July: Experiencing 7/7 By John Tulloch Little, Brown, 232pp. £12.99