At the risk of being branded a supremacist, I’ve spent 30 years travelling around the Middle East and Africa and I’ve come slowly to the conclusion that all religion feeds on ignorance and lack of education. Even intelligent Arabs I’ve met are un-worldly and ill-experienced in life. ISIS appeals to young men who have little culture in their lives beyond vacuous MTV and the internet yet their bodies are flooded with testosterone and energy, so Jihadist Islam gives them a goal and a common purpose. The really extreme jihadists are actually pathalogically unbalanced.
I remember hearing about a young Britsh guy who embraced Islam because the purity of the religion appealed to him. But he said that his biggest disappointment was the low intellect of the Imans; at Friday prayers he said there was no attempt to get to grips with the place of Muslims in modern Britain and instead, the Iman rambled on for an hour about the length of the beard, how much ankle a woman could show, fasting and other trivia.
I have brought up the issue of daylight hours in the north during Ramadan with intelligent Muslim customers, a nice lightweight subject, which I understand the British Council of Mosques is trying to discuss with Mecca. But my fiends just block me and quote the Koran at me as they are incapable of seeing any point of view outside what they have been taught.