Culture still matters!
I said, earlier, that:
“ We have our own large, growing and apparently self sustaining Muslim underclass: disaffected young men with inadequate educations, no challenging, well paid job prospects, who are easy pickings for radical imans and sheiks in our increasingly culturally isolated (there's that word again!) suburban, neighbourhood mosques.”
Where these doctors come from? They hardly qualify as people with “inadequate educations” and lacking “challenging, well paid” jobs, do they? How to explain them?
Culture.
They have been through a cultural looking glass, so to speak. Some, many or even most of the core cultural values they learned, as children of better off families in relatively sophisticated countries like Jordan and Iraq (yes, Iraq
was amongst the most ‘sophisticated’ and secular societies in the region), were tossed into their faces in Britain.
Consider a couple of examples:
1. They had to work side-by-side, on a collegial basis with women doctors – including
Muslim women doctors or, worse, in subordinate positions to those women. This is contrary to what they
believe to be their god’s law – it isn’t, actually, anything of the sort, so I’m told, but Arab/Persian
culture values women as chattels, property and the cultural values have passed into religion.
2. Then there are the Jews … a constant
problem for many, many Muslims. Despite Islam’s historic
tolerance towards Judaism and Christianity – quite benign compared, overall, to Christianity’s
toleration of Islam and Judaism – modern anti-Semitism has been whipped up throughout the region over the past 60 years. Anti-Semitism was, probably, no more pronounced in the Middle East in, say, 1920 than it was in modern,
liberal Germany at the same time. We saw what an aggressive anti-Semitic propaganda campaign could do in Germany; the same campaign (“cleanse the
umma of the Jews”) is being waged in the Middle East today – we should not be surprised that educated young men would fall victim to it’s siren song; they did in Germany in the 1930s. It must be a shock to have to work side-by-side with Jews. For complex social-economic and cultural reasons Western Jews have placed a very high value on education with the consequence that they are
statistically over-represented in the professions, including medicine. Imagine the difficulty of being required to work, peacefully and cooperatively, beside a person you really feel you ought to kill.
Islam does not, so far as I know, require that women wear burkas and remain illiterate child-bearing
machines; nor is it, relative to Christianity, overly anti-Semitic. But, traditional Arab/Persian
culture does see women and chattels and modern Arab/Persian
culture is awash in virulent anti-Semitic propaganda.
So, despite having ‘advanced’ educations, which is not quite the same as being
well educated, and despite being from sophisticated Middle Eastern societies these doctors might not have been willing, much less able to ‘escape’ their culture.