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course, is to reject the West and all it stands for in favour of the affirming, empowering certainties of radical Islam which teaches him that he is no longer subordinate, but merely denied what is rightfully his. In this, the struggle going on in the mind of the 17-year-old over how to deal with modernity, how to match the West’s advances without sacrificing one’s identity, how to reconcile Islam with the modern age, mirrors that within wider Islamic society. Most people, like our 17-year-old, try, as most do, to reconcile the two. None of these processes are easy. All generate anger, energy and resentment and the potential for violent protest.
    The second group of activists emerged at the end of the 1980s and has become increasingly dominant through the 1990s. They are less educated, more violent and follow a more debased, popularized form of Islam. A good recent example would be Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. They are more unthinkingly radical, bigoted and fanatical. Instead of being drawn from frustrated, aspirant groups within society they are more often drawn from its margins, from those who have few expectations to be disappointed. This was very clear in Algeria in the mid 1990s where the most violent groups among the GIA drew their recruits from the poorest and most brutalized elements in society, in Pakistan where, in the same period, the various political Islamist groups found themselves forced to cede ground to those more rooted in the Deobandi medressa networks and in Kashmir where the teachers and doctors who formed the leadership cadres of Hizb-ul-Mujahideen have now been forced aside by the semi-educated militants of the new Jihadi groups. The same is true in Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and in much of southeast Asia. The Bali bombers were largely uneducated. The men who blew themselves up in Morocco in May 2003 were from the poorest stratum of society, marginalized men living in a marginalized slum community. So were those among the Bedouin community in the Egyptian Sinai desert who attacked Red Sea resorts in July 2005.
    The shift can also be seen in the West. At the beginning of the 1990s most of the Islamic activists living in London, or ‘Londonistan’ as it was called by critics of the British government’s liberal asylum policy, were highly politicized, educated and relatively moderate. By the end of the decade militants in the West included far more men like Richard Reid, a British petty criminal who tried to blow himself up on a transatlantic jet in December 2001 or Nizar Trabelsi, a former drug addict and refugee. These were poor, unemployed, angry people. The number of former convicts or asylum seekers among recently recruited Islamic militants is striking. The amateurish ‘second wave’ of bombers who tried and failed to follow the 7/7 attacks also fall into the category. Significantly, British security officers charged with countering Islamic terror in the UK have made the monitoring of prisons a priority. 12
    The third group are neither intellectuals nor marginal but drawnfrom society’s mainstream. This makes them all the more problematic, in terms of the security threat they pose and in terms of analysis. Bombers with this profile have emerged most recently, largely in Europe. A handful of such men figured in the Madrid bombing, they provide the vast bulk of suspected militants arrested in France, Holland and Belgium in recent years and this profile fits the London bombers. They are likely to provide most of the attackers in the years to come in the crucial battleground that western Europe will become. Their motivations are rooted in a complex and dynamic mix of identity crisis, politics in its broadest sense and reactions to globalization that are still far from clear. Such militants are being created by profound challenges caused by changes in the cultural, ethnic and religious composition of western European societies and the way those changes are interacting with