Terror on the London Underground

Paper Summary:

The paper explores whether Islam was truly the cause of the London Underground bombings. The paper explains the idea of Jihad, or holy war, that is central to the view that Islam can be held accountable for the bombings. The paper further explains what led to the radicalization of the values of the four bombers. The paper therefore concludes that to say Islamic ideology was the cause of the bombings is highly incorrect, rather, Islam was an instrument that was skewed and radicalized to serve as legitimization for a conflict that was already deeply entrenched in the tumultuous social terrain of multicultural Britain. The paper shows how this environment, when mixed with personal conflict, created the suicide bombers of July 7th.

From the Paper:

"It was 8:50 AM, July 7, 2005 when three trains in the London Underground suddenly exploded in close succession. Nearly an hour later, the explosion of the Number 30 bus culminated in the death of a total of 52 people, and the injury of another 700 ("London Bombings: Reaction Timeline"). After false initial reports and days of uncertainty, the public finally learned the startling truth. Not only had the explosions been carried out by terrorist bombers, but they had been carried out by citizens of the United Kingdom who had grown up in England amongst the very people they sought to injure. The British public was baffled. They could not understand what could have prompted the four young men to turn their back on their fellow citizens in such an act of violence, and thus turned to the most immediate characteristic that set three of the four bombers apart from themselves; Islamic Pakistani origins."

Sample of Sources Used:

• "7 July Bombings: The Bombers." BBC 21 July, 2005. 19 Oct. 2007<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/uk/05/london_blasts/investigation/html/bombers.stm>
• Abbas, Tahir. Islamic Political Radicalism: A European Perspective. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007.
• Burke, Jason, Antony Barnett, Martin Bright, Mark Townsend, Tariq Panja and Tony Thompson. "Three cities, four killers". Guardian Unlimited. 17 July 2005. 3 Dec. 2007 <http://www.guardian.co.uk/attackonlondon/story/0,16132,1530338,00.html>.
• Fields, Barbara Jeanne. "Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America." New Left Review 181 (1990): 95-118.
• Hacking, Ian. "Why race still matters." Daedalus 134.1 (2005): 102-116.

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