32 1 Religious extremism in Britain and British Muslims: threatened citizenship and the role of religion Maria Sobolewska Introduction 1 After September 11 th 2001 a largely ignorant British public was thrown into the complex world of Islamic extremism and its animosity towards Western values and societies. Through many subsequent attacks on Western societies culminating in the bombing of London’s transport system on 7 th July 2005, the Islamic threat was growing and coming closer to home in the eyes of the British public and the government. In the process, many myths and confusions rose to the status of accepted wisdom. One of the most powerful of those is the question of the role of Islam as a religion and a value system in the actual and potential support of Muslims for political extremism. The growing fear of Islamic religious radicalization feeds fears of Muslim religiosity per se, and its perception as a first stepping stone towards hostile anti-Western attitudes. In Britain, but also in most of the Western world today, the public debate is hindered by such confusion about the link between the religious and the political and the assumed connection between religiosity with political extremism, including terrorism. It has been argued before that Islamic extremism, especially in its violent form, has been historically a political rather than a religious phenomenon (Giuriato and Molinario 2002, Pargeter 2008). Today, in the British context, this political character of extremism is being largely ignored both in the media and in most of the academic