There’s a spot in the north corner of Hyde Park in London known as Speaker’s Corner. It was set up in 1872, as a place where dissident political views could be expressed and angry political opposition could ‘let off steam’. It’s become a symbol of British tolerance, attracting in its time the likes of Karl Marx, Engels, Lenin, Suffragettes, evangelists, and more than a few lunatics.

For the last few years, however, it has been dominated by large crowds of angry young Muslim men, denouncing, in English or Arabic, the corruption and decadence of the Western world.

This Sunday, I took a Russian friend there to see it, more as a tourist sight than as an opportunity for genuine political debate. But, as I watched a young Muslim man shrilly defending Islam to a crowd of nodding young Muslims, I found myself getting angry.

It was a particularly tense weekend in London. Two weeks before, around 56 people had died in the terrorist bombings on the Tube and buses. Then, on Thursday, the day I arrived in London, terrorists had tried to set off four more bombs. Luckily they all failed. On Friday morning, the police had chased a man they thought was a bomber onto the London Tube, jumped on him, and shot him eight times in the head. The following day, a bomb killed 83 people in Sharm el-Sheikh, while the London police admitted the man they had shot on the tube was in fact innocent.

The young Muslim man on his small ladder had a central theme: the hypocrisy of the West. We have candle-lit vigils for 56 dead in the July 7 bombings. “But why no minutes of silence for the 20,000 civilians killed in Iraq?” The British press tried to suggest that all terrorists were Muslim. “But what are the US and UK attacks in Iraq, if not terrorism?”

To my surprise, I found myself remonstrating with the man. Yes, the West was not perfect. Yes, the war in Iraq was deeply suspect, and millions of British people marched against it, including me. But at least we had the strength to admit our mistakes, and examine our consciences.

The police had admitted they killed an innocent man just 24 hours after they shot him. The British army has provoked outrage by bringing charges of war crimes against its own soldiers operating in Iraq. Our own press, far from being exclusively pro-government and anti-Muslim, has consistently attacked the British government for its lies over Iraq. It’s only the weakness of the opposition that keeps Blair in power.

There is a debate, at least, within British society over the rights and wrongs of the War on Terror, and over our own society’s mistakes in fighting it.

What I heard from the young man at Speaker’s Corner, however, was complete denial of Muslim society’s own responsibility for the worsening global climate. It was all the West’s fault. Terrorism was America’s fault for electing George Bush junior, even though the September 11 attacks happened just a few weeks after his inauguration. Terrorism was the West’s fault for attacking Iraq, even though September 11 happened long before that war began. Muslim terrorism was mainly a fiction invented by the western media, because as every Muslim knew, the Koran actually forbid the killing of innocent people.

In this version of the truth, Muslim society in Britain and around the world is actually a terrible victim. It’s a victim in Palestine, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Guantanamo Bay, in London. The corrupt West bullies it, oppresses it and slanders it. The Muslim world was virtuous, saintly, and the more it was oppressed, the more virtuous it became.

This, while men, women and children were killed and horribly mutilated by virtuous young Muslims every day, in Egypt, in Baghdad, in London, in Moscow. None of this was the responsibility of Muslim culture, not at all.

It reminded me of a history of Iran that I recently read. When the British had a large presence in Iran, via British Petroleum, a large percentage of Iranian society found it convenient to blame all the ills of Iranian society on Britain, the hated colonial exploiter. The animosity towards the British was extraordinarily intense among young male Iranians. Eventually, BP’s oil reserves were nationalized, and the British kicked out. Yet Iranian society was still not perfect. It was the Americans’ fault! The hated Americans, who were exploiting and bullying poor Iranian society.

What a convenient world view, and what an incredibly primitive one. All one’s ills come from outside, and therefore aren’t your responsibility at all.

What about September 11, I asked our young orator. Didn’t the Muslim world have to take some responsibility for that? He asked me why the World Trade Сentre towers collapsed. Perhaps the two planes hitting it had some influence, I suggested. No! Never! The foundations of the building had intentionally been weakened. It was a CIA plot, to give the US an excuse to wage its war on Islam.

What he said was true, a polite young Muslim man next to me whispered to me. He had seen a documentary on it, on the BBC. So it must be true. “Open your eyes”, said the polite young man. “Discover the truth.”

It struck me then that much of the young Muslim population in Britain is really badly educated. If you can seriously believe the CIA would destroy the World Trade Centre, and that the attacks weren’t the responsibility of Muslim terrorists, then you must be very badly educated, and strangely cut off from mainstream media.

But that, I’m afraid, is the case. Young Muslims receive their political education from hot-heads like our friend on the ladder, and the decrepit looking Mullah sitting at his feet, and it is a political education that is primitive and one-sided in the extreme. And somehow, they tune out anything that disagrees with that world view, such as Muslim terrorists’ responsibility for September 11, by clinging to completely outlandish and foolish conspiracy theories.

What had happened to Muslim intellectual life, I thought. What had happened to the culture that once led the world, that produced Averroes and Avicenna? How has it remained in the Middle Ages? How can one bring it into the modern world?

Well, it is not all darkness and gloom. Last week, a conference of Muslim thinkers met in London. One of them, a controversial leading Muslim thinker called Tariq Ramadan, declared that the Muslim world needed to become more self-critical. Muslims need to reject "this binary vision of reality - the Us versus Them, the idea that everything Western is decadent and unIslamic."

It was possible, Ramadan suggested, to assimilate Muslim identity to British identity. One can preserve one’s right to be Muslim while respecting others’ right to drink or smoke or even fornicate. Islam can comfortably exist in liberal European culture without being destroyed, Ramadan asserted. A European Muslim can take a critical, even rational attitude to religious texts.

Ramadan is not loved by many Middle East experts, who see him as a sophist who speaks liberal rhetoric to the West but violent extremism to Eastern audiences. I don’t know if this is true or not.

But I think he is absolutely right when he says “we Muslims need to get out of our intellectual and social ghettoes”. That’s precisely what I felt at Speaker’s Corner, that these young British Muslims around me were living in an intellectual ghetto, completely cut off from mainstream opinion and thought, being lied to and deluded by self-serving Mullahs and demagogues.

The West certainly has many sins against the Arab world. But at least we are not blind to our sins.

Julian Evans is a British freelance journalist based in Moscow. The article is written specially for "Eurasian Home".

July 26, 2005