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A leading British Arab Muslim, Anas Altikriti, told me that he noted that two stations where bombs exploded were Edgeware Road, towards the west of the city, and Aldgate East, in the East End. The former is home to London's Arab community, the latter to the mainly Bangladeshi Muslim community. Al Qaeda often regards Western Muslims as apostates, and Bin Laden stated after 9/11 that Shari'ah forbids permanent residence in the land of the Infidel. These bombs seem to have been as much directed at British Arabs and Muslims as the rest of us. If Al Qaeda thinks this will divide us from our Arab and Muslim fellow Britons, they have grossly misread our national character.

Even though we had all been expecting an attack, Prime Minister Blair looked shaken when he responded to the bombings. The question many Britons will be asking is why we were attacked, and the Iraq war will probably be the conventional wisdom's answer. The war is incredibly unpopular here, and Blair was punished on this issue in our recent election. Indeded, a purported Al Qaeda statement taking credit for the attacks said they were "vengeance against the Zionist crusader government of Britain in response to the massacres Britain committed in Iraq and Afghanistan."

But two other factors were probably in play. Al Qaeda undoubtedly borrowed its strategy from the Madrid train bombing. There was another symmetry. Just as President Bush was absent from the U.S. capital during 9/11, so Blair was absent from the U.K. capital during (what may now be called) 7/7. Moreover, happening at the same time as the G8 summit, with Bush, Blair, and Putin present, it humiliated world leaders. The message being that they were trying to solve the world's problems, and they can't even solve this one. Moreover, Blair's argument for invading and staying in Iraq—to give us security from terrorists—will look very hollow as the dust settles.

Britons are traditionally stoical and defiant when it comes to bombings. When the Luftwaffe devastated much of the East End in 1940 and 1941, the people exclaimed, "We can take it." King George VI—arguably our greatest king—refused all suggestions that the Royal Family be evacuated to Canada, and His Majesty refused to leave London.

That same defiance has been in evidence today. A young woman who emerged from one of the tube trains with blackened face and scarred legs said, "This is nothing." People, as far as possible, are determined to go about their normal business. As one of our patriotic songs Rule Britannia declares, "Britons never, never, never shall be slaves," and "Thee haughty tyrants ne'er shall tame: All their attempts to bend thee down … Will but arouse thy … generous flame." Al Qaeda needs to learn what we taught Hitler—Britons don't do cowardice.

Dr. Anthony McRoy is Lecturer in Islamics at the Evangelical Theological College of Wales, a regular contributor to Muslim periodicals such as Q-News and Muslim Weekly, and a frequent guest on Iranian TV. He is presently writing a book about Islamic radicalism in the UK, and is an expert on jihad and martyrdom, recently lecturing at a university on 'The Jihad of Al-Qaida'.

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July (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49