On paper, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab — the twenty-three year-old who tried to blow up a plane over Detroit on Christmas day with 80g of PETN crystals in his trousers — had everything to live for. He was the son of a wealthy Nigerian financier, he had a good education, studying mechanical engineering at the University College London and living in a luxury apartment. His religious observance — he was the chairman of the university’s Islamic Society — could also have been a source of inspiration and stability to him, as it is to so many of us. Instead it turned him into an attempted murderer.

One of the questions I have heard most often recently has been ‘how could a young man in his position want to do it?’ How, given all his chances in life, when he had every opportunity to make so much of himself? These are natural questions to ask. But they are based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what drives young men to become radicals.

It is rarely, if ever, because of disadvantage. The evidence shows that you don’t normally come to believe that it is God’s will for you to murder innocent strangers because you grew up poor. Nor hungry, nor uneducated, nor generally disadvantaged. So those who wonder why a young man with such advantages could want to be a terrorist are barking up the wrong tree.

According to former CIA case officer Marc Sageman, who has conducted one of the most thorough analyses of who becomes a terrorist and why by looking at profiles of more than five hundred profiles of individual terrorists, radicals tend to be motivated by a sense of moral disgust. This is often provoked by stories of Muslim suffering around the world which the individual interprets in the context of a wider Manichaean war between Islam and the West.

But this is not normally enough by itself. It is normally bolstered by a perverted conception of Islam which justifies violence. As a Muslim, it is this which offends me most.

Part of the reason that perverted brands of Islam can be so influential is because too many high-profile figures who claim to be preachers of Islam actually have no religious qualifications, but attain their status by amassing notoriety and controversy. The most high-profile hate preachers in Britain in the last decade — Abu Hamza and Omar Bakri — are nothing more than self-appointed loudmouths, who drown out qualified imams who preach genuine Islam.

There is also a shortage of homegrown imams and teachers. Too many come from outside Britain, where different, and much older, cultural codes, are taken to be religious injunctions. These codes are out of step with modern life. For example, when people go to the Mosque for help or advice, all too often it is not given with the appropriate level of confidentiality. And advice on divorce tends not to focus enough on the wellbeing of the children.

What can we do to prevent young people like Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab from falling under the spell of these impostors and taking the same kind of path in the future?

I believe that the best answer is to expose them to an early age with an authentic understanding of Islamic scholarship in its proper context. Then, if they encounter radical narratives, dubious theology, or ignorant preaching, they will be able to see them in context, for the perversions of the religion that they really are, and dismiss them. The fact that the vast majority of extremists have not undergone this process reinforces the point.

This is what an initiative I helped set up last year — the SOLAS foundation — has begun to do in Scotland. It offers genuine, authentic Islamic teaching which puts the history of Islamic thought in its proper context. It is not devoted to counterterrorism, or to deprogramming those who have been brainwashed — there are other organisations who already do that. It is not the cure.

But it is the start of prevention. And it this invisible success — the quiet changing of minds, off the radar of a media accustomed to reporting on Islam and Islamism through the lens of fanaticism, terrorism and violence — which will mean that in the future there will be fewer like Abdulmutallab.

Azeem Ibrahim is a Research Fellow at the International Security Program at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard; World Fellow at Yale University and Strategic Adviser to the SOLAS Foundation.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/azeem-ibrahim/a-successful-way-to-preve_b_459162.html