London 7/7: the atrocity we don’t talk about

On a stone plinth in Tavistock Square, in Bloomsbury, central London, sits a sculpture of an aged Mahatma Gandhi. He’s rendered cross-legged, with a shawl over his shoulder and his eyes cast forever downwards – a picture of contemplation, of peaceableness. Twenty years ago, this tribute to history’s most famous pacifist bore silent witness to an act of almost unspeakable violence.

At 9.46am on 7 July 2005, a No30 double-decker bus was drawing into the square. It shouldn’t have been there. But that morning, London’s transport network had descended into chaos. Throughout the Euston Road area, buses packed with the now late rush-hour crowds were being sent on diverted routes. Including the No30 to Hackney Wick making its way through Tavistock Square. On this particular bus, however, there was one passenger who was not off to work, or to college or even for a spot of sight-seeing. Eighteen-year-old Hasib Hussain was instead looking for an opportunity to detonate the bomb hidden inside his rucksack. At 9.47am, Hussain found that opportunity. The subsequent blast tore the bus apart, ripping through those closest to it. Hussain killed himself and 12 innocents, and injured many more.

It soon emerged that the carnage in Tavistock Square was the fourth and final act in an orchestrated suicide-bombing campaign, carried out by a gang of British jihadists. Six hours earlier, Hussain, alongside the bombers’ leader, 30-year-old Mohammad Sidique Khan, and 22-year-old Shehzad Tanweer, had set off from their hometown of Leeds in a rented car bound for Luton. There they met up with the fourth member of their crew, 19-year-old Germaine Lindsay, then living in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, but originally from Leeds. With backpacks laden with explosives, they then caught the train to London Kings Cross before entering the Tube network. The intention was clear – to set off bombs in packed train carriages during the morning rush hour.

At around 8.50am, three of them completed their squalid mission. Khan detonated his device on a westbound Circle Line train heading towards Paddington, killing six people. Tanweer did the same on an eastbound Circle Line train between Liverpool Street and Aldgate, killing seven people. And Germaine Lindsay set off his bomb on the southbound Piccadilly Line just after it pulled out of Kings Cross, killing 26.

Hussain was meant to be on the Northern Line, but the service was suspended that morning. And so nearly an hour after his fellow radical Islamists had blown up three train carriages, Hussain destroyed one of the capital’s most famous symbols – the red double-decker bus.

Aside from the bombers, 52 men and women were killed that awful morning. Fifty-two lives ended mid-sentence. Like Gladys Wundowa, a 50-year-old mum of two travelling between cleaning jobs. Like young Carrie Taylor, an aspiring novelist on her way to work at the Royal Society of Arts. Like Atique Sharifi, a 24-year-old Afghan Muslim who had fled the Taliban and was trying to rebuild his life in Britain’s capital. People, who meant so much to so many others, who were suddenly no longer there.

Nearly 800 other people were injured, 24 critically so. The blasts had seared people’s skin, while shrapnel had sliced through their flesh and bones. Dozens of people were maimed and mutilated that morning. They lost their limbs, their sight and their hearing. They survived, but their lives were irrevocably altered.

Though largely hidden in the tunnels beneath this great city, the devastation was immense. The London bombings constitute the single deadliest act of terrorism in Britain after the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie in 1988, when 270 people were killed.

And yet despite the scale of the atrocity visited upon London there has long been an awkwardness around the remembrance of 7/7. It has not been forgotten exactly. Prince Charles opened a memorial in Hyde Park in 2009, featuring 52 stainless steel columns to mark each of the bombers’ victims. And there has been a slew of insightful documentaries to mark the 20th anniversary this year on the BBC, Netflix and Sky. But 7/7 has never been invested with anywhere near the same cultural and political significance in Britain that 9/11 has for the US.

The disparity can be partially explained by the sheer magnitude of al-Qaeda’s attack on the Twin Towers. But there’s a more important reason. The London bombings raise troubling questions about British society that 9/11 didn’t raise about America. After all, the perpetrators of the attacks on New York City and the Pentagon were nationals from Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – 9/11 could therefore be conceived as an attack mounted by people from outside the US. But that wasn’t the case with the perpetrators of the London bombings. They came from Leeds. And with the exception of Germaine Lindsay, who was born in Jamaica, they were all British born. 7/7, then, was an attack mounted by UK citizens. As former prime minister Tony Blair has put it recently, the London bombers ‘had been brought up in Britain and… enjoyed all the advantages of being British [and yet they still] wanted to cause deep, profound harm to our country’.

Why did a group of Brits, three of whom were born here, want to massacre their fellow citizens? It’s the question that still hangs over 7/7. The question that remains stubbornly unanswered, preventing the significance of what happened two decades ago from being truly grasped. This is despite Islamist extremism, much of it home grown, remaining by far the largest source of lethal terrorist violence.

Of course there have been easy answers for 7/7 proffered. As some on the right had it, these young Muslim men brought death to the capital simply because they were Muslims. To use the terms of Bernard Lewis’s famous 1990 Atlantic essay, they were fuelled by a uniquely ‘Muslim rage’ against the West. But Islam alone doesn’t explain why it’s only some young Muslim men who turn into suicidal jihadists.

What is notable about the London bombers was just how un-devout they were for most of their young lives. Even their leader, 30-year-old Khan, had seemed little interested in Islam until his mid-twenties. Indeed, like other homegrown jihadists in Europe, Khan’s existence was largely secular. Known as ‘Sid’ at school, he fraternised with girls, drank alcohol, smoked drugs and later got into a bit of trouble with the police – he was given cautions for assault and handling stolen goods. It was only later, in and around Iqra, an Islamic bookshop in Leeds, and a local gym, that he and an increasingly tight circle of fellow, young British Pakistani Muslims began to lean into radical Islamism – a fundamentalist strain unconnected to that of his parents or their mosque.

There does seem to be a key moment in each of the bombers’ young lives, from Hussain’s trip to see relatives in Pakistan in 2004 to Tanweer’s trouble with the police that same year, which prompted a turn towards radical Islam. Their commitment to a violent, anti-Western Salafist strain of jihadism was an adult, or near enough adult, choice, not an inevitability.

The left’s pat explanation – the ‘blowback’ theory – is also unconvincing. They still seem to believe that the London bombers were driven to massacre blameless strangers because of anti-Muslim sentiment in the UK and, above all, by Britain’s involvement in the Iraq War and the occupation of Afghanistan. As a London Review of Books essay put it just days after 7/7, ‘Blair’s war has been a drafting exercise for young jihadis’.

Perhaps because it sounds ‘anti-imperalist’, this has been the standard, thoughtless leftish response to 7/7 almost from the moment the bombs exploded. From the Stop the War coalition to the Guardian, sections of the left cast 7/7 as a terrible but predictable reaction to Britain’s involvement in wars in predominantly Muslim countries. In 2015, Ken Livingstone, the London Mayor at the time of 7/7, told a BBC Question Time audience that Tony Blair was warned by security services that if Britain went into Iraq, it would be a target for terrorism: ‘And he ignored that advice and it killed 52 Londoners.’ It’s a sentiment that persists to this day. Human-rights campaigner Yasmin Khan told the Independent this month that extremists were able to use ‘the legitimate anger’ people ‘felt around Iraq, Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib’ as fuel for terrorist attacks like 7/7.

It’s certainly true that Khan, in a posthumous video released by al-Qaeda in September 2005, justified attacking ‘Western citizens’ because they had elected governments that had supposedly committed crimes against humanity. Osama bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, also appeared on the tape, claiming that Blair’s decision to go to war in Iraq was responsible for 7/7.

But dig a little deeper, and this nasty ‘we brought this on ourselves’ argument makes little sense. The sequence is wrong, for one thing. Al-Qaeda’s attack on the Twin Towers preceded the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. More importantly, 7/7 ringleader Khan’s own decision to embrace militant Islamism also preceded not just the invasion of Iraq, but also 9/11 itself. His first serious involvement in jihadist groups started in July 2001, when he attended training camps at Mansehra in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province. These were run by Harkat-ul-Mujahidin, a Kashmiri terrorist group allied with the Taliban. Indeed, if there was an international conflict that motivated Khan, it wasn’t a product of a recent Western intervention – it was the long-running dispute between India and Pakistan over Kashmir.

Both of these easy answers to the central question that haunts 7/7 suffer from the same problem. They look almost entirely over there for the answer as to why this gang visited death on the country in which its members were raised. They point either solely to their Islamic heritage, or they blame the Western wars in the Middle East and its near abroad for driving them to atrocity.

But the problem of homegrown jihadists isn’t just over there, it’s here in the West, in Britain, too. These young second-generation Muslims growing up in a down-at-heel suburb in Leeds were shaped by their own situation, not that of people in Afghanistan, Iraq or Pakistan – of which they knew very little. As Kenan Malik argues in From Fatwa to Jihad (2009) the root of their embrace of a militant form of Islam lay in a profound estrangement from and resentment towards mainstream society. A curdling sense of grievance. A sense that life in Britain was not offering them what they felt entitled to. A sense that mainstream society was alien to them.

A sense of alienation, or a failure of integration, is not enough in itself to drive someone towards Salafism. Indeed, in the past, it might have driven them towards forms of distinctly non-religious youthful rebellion. It might even have pushed them towards secular class politics. But this was turn-of-the-millennium Britain. Class-based politics had almost disappeared by this point.

What’s more, since the 1980s, and the publication of Lord Scarman’s report on the Brixton riots in 1981, the state had been determinedly promoting multiculturalism. This had become the state’s preferred method of managing ethnic and social tensions, in the absence of any positive, unifying vision for Britain. This approach effectively divided society up into different cultural-identity blocs, and set these up against the mainstream. People were encouraged to see themselves not in secular national or class terms, but in narrow ethnic terms – often as victims of one or another form of prejudice from the majority. Migrants and their children would no longer be encouraged to integrate or assimilate into mainstream British society.

Above all, the state’s promotion of multiculturalism encouraged the development of a form of Muslim identity politics, especially among second-, third- and fourth-generation immigrants. Up until then, religion had largely been a matter of conscience for British Muslims, just as it was for Catholics, Anglicans or Sikhs. But by the 1990s, it was morphing from being a private matter into a public identity – to be performed and asserted often against the mainstream of British culture. This was evident in everything from the uptick in veil-wearing among young Muslim women to the increasingly vehement, if shallow, identification with transnational ‘Muslim’ causes, such as Palestine.

International forces played a role, too, of course – inflaming the identitarian tensions and antagonisms created by multiculturalism. Above all, the decline of a largely secular Arab nationalism during the 1960s and 1970s, and the rise of militant Islamism in its place, simultaneously supercharged Muslim identity politics in Britain. The Muslim Brotherhood may have been promoting political Islam since the 1920s, but by the 1970s it had been joined by the Saudi government, which had begun pumping oil money into fundamentalist Salafi organisations around the world. And then in 1979, the Iranian Revolution gave rise to a real-life Islamic state. In all cases, Islamism was conceived of as a global cause. Indeed, in 1989, the decision of the Islamic Republic’s supreme leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini, to issue a fatwa against Salman Rushdie brought Muslim identity politics right into the open in Britain, as largely young Muslim men began challenging the secular values of their own nation – with sadly little to no real resistance from the moral invertebrates of Britain’s political and cultural elites.

It was in this social context – bereft of secular radicalism, shaped by decades of multiculturalism and infused by Islamism from afar – that first Khan and then Tanweer, Lindsay and Hussain came to understand and frame their youthful alienation from the mainstream. And they did so as very modern Muslims. As bearers of a cultural identity supposedly threatened by a godless West. As supposed victims of an inhospitable society.

Through informal social networks around the Iqra bookshop, the gym, and in Khan’s and Tanweer’s case, a local Muslim gang called the ‘Mullah Boys’, they were soon drawn to the most extreme form of Muslim identity politics – militant Islamism. There they found what they were looking for. Not faith in the traditional sense, but validation, recognition and purpose. Islamism provided them with the script for their depraved rejection of British society. They were able to cast themselves as heroes in their own tale of good vs evil, of victimised Muslims vs a cruel, soulless West.

When Khan and his gang rented a flat in Leeds to begin making their bombs in early 2005, with help from a contact in Pakistan, they had effectively committed themselves to death. Since 9/11, the pursuit of suicide while committing mass murder began to mark out radical jihadists from earlier generations of Islamists. The London bombers were no exception. This is because the act of violence for modern jihadists is not a means to an end. It is an end in itself. It is the moment in which their rejection of the societies in which they live, in which their revolt against the society they have come to loathe, becomes authentic. The moment in which they hope to be recognised, validated for what they believe they are – holy warriors. The London bombers were driven by a narcissistic nihilism – an intense desire, fuelled by a vicious identity politics, to be seen in the act of self-destruction as the purest, most violently virtuous of Muslims. ‘I and thousands like me are forsaking everything for what we believe’, said Khan in his posthumous al-Qaeda video.

And so on 7 July 2005, four young men arrived at London’s Kings Cross station with a plan to kill themselves and as many of us as possible. Because they believed they were pure, and we were not. It was an atrocity made possible not by the war in Iraq, but by a vicious Muslim identity politics. A vicious Muslim identity politics encouraged by Britain’s own elites just as much as by overseas Islamists.

This is why 7/7 has become the forgotten atrocity. Why Britain’s deadliest terror attack of the 21st century has left so little cultural imprint, and has had so little political impact. Because it raises uncomfortable questions, particularly about multiculturalism and integration, that the authorities do not want asked. But until we’re prepared to reckon with the homegrown sources of 7/7, the lessons from this calamity will remain steadfastly unlearned.

Tim Black is associate editor of spiked.