In City Journal, the Birmingham prison doctor Theodore Dalrymple has provided a profound and brilliant insight into the minds of those who turn themselves into British human bombs. Far from the problem lying in ‘fundamentalist’ religious faith, he identifies it instead as secularism — or to be more precise, the psychic war that rages within such an individual between a secularism that he cannot withstand and an ideology that provides his identity. The putative human bomb, writes Dalrymple, is deeply secularised, has little religious faith and adopts all the habits of his fellow inhabitants of the slums including soccer and pop music, drugs and casual sex. But rather than integrating, he lives in parallel with young white men who are indulging in similar activities; and he also has a particular desire to exercise dominance over women. In this fragile state of mind, any perceived insult can have an incendiary effect — particularly since he is told incessantly by every arbiter of British culture that he is the victim of discrimination. But he is so deeply westernised that he can only resolve the terrible conflict inside him between the two irreconcilable cultures by becoming a human bomb, since to die for the faith is the one thing that can expunge the west from his psyche:

Muslims who reject the West are therefore engaged in a losing and impossible inner jihad, or struggle, to expunge everything that is not Muslim from their breasts. It can’t be done: for their technological and scientific dependence is necessarily also a cultural one. You can’t believe in a return to seventh-century Arabia as being all-sufficient for human requirements, and at the same time drive around in a brand-new red Mercedes, as one of the London bombers did shortly before his murderous suicide. An awareness of the contradiction must gnaw in even the dullest fundamentalist brain. Furthermore, fundamentalists must be sufficiently self-aware to know that they will never be willing to forgo the appurtenances of Western life: the taste for them is too deeply implanted in their souls, too deeply a part of what they are as human beings, ever to be eradicated. It is possible to reject isolated aspects of modernity but not modernity itself. Whether they like it or not, Muslim fundamentalists are modern men—modern men trying, impossibly, to be something else.

They therefore have at least a nagging intimation that their chosen utopia is not really a utopia at all: that deep within themselves there exists something that makes it unachievable and even undesirable. How to persuade themselves and others that their lack of faith, their vacillation, is really the strongest possible faith?

What more convincing evidence of faith could there be than to die for its sake? How can a person be really attached or attracted to rap music and cricket and Mercedes cars if he is prepared to blow himself up as a means of destroying the society that produces them? Death will be the end of the illicit attachment that he cannot entirely eliminate from his heart.

The two forms of jihad, the inner and the outer, the greater and the lesser, thus coalesce in one apocalyptic action. By means of suicide bombing, the bombers overcome moral impurities and religious doubts within themselves and, supposedly, strike an external blow for the propagation of the faith.

Read it all.