CONTRARY TO COMMON WISDOM, Muslim radicalism in the United Kingdom is not rooted in grievance against British, American, Israeli, or other Western policies. Nor is it a reaction to fear or prejudice by non-Muslims. It originates in a specific ideology imported to the country by two generations of Sunni Muslim radicals from Pakistan. The domination of British Islam by that ideology, generally known as Deobandism, produced the 7/7 bombings and the trans-Atlantic airline terror plot, and has made Britain the epicenter of jihadist violence in Europe.

Deobandism is not an ancient Islamic tradition. It began in India after the 1857 mutiny against the British raj, and was originally a fundamentalist, but peaceful, movement, convinced that the failure of the mutiny made religious teaching and cultivation a preferable alternative to violent combat against foreign rule.

In the aftermath of the Afghan war of the 1980s, Deobandi students ("Talibs") in Pakistani madrasas, being already fundamentalist, were noticed by Saudi agents in the Pakistani military and intelligence services. They were trained in totalitarian and terrorist methods and took over Afghanistan as the governing Taliban. From Pakistan and Afghanistan their message disseminated through mosques and madrasas where Pakistani Sunnis congregate--especially in Britain, America, and Canada. Because of their financial resources, proselytizing, and intimidation, they came to dominate Pakistani Sunni communities abroad.

THUS Rashid Rauf, the alleged trans-Atlantic airline plotter arrested in Pakistan, is the son-in-law of Ghulam Mustafa, founder of the Dar Ul-Uloom Madina madrasa, a hard-line Deobandi school. Rashid Rauf is also

AFTER THE DESTRUCTION of the Deobandi Taliban regime, the Pakistani jihadis moved their theater of operations from Afghanistan to Kashmir, the Muslim-majority territory joined to India. Fighting against India got the radicals a pass from the West since their strategy of terror was there viewed as an international border problem, rather than an Islamofascist offensive. Pakistan's President Musharraf has praised those who fight for Kashmir as virtuous patriots.

On both sides of the Atlantic, the Kashmir pretext has unfortunate staying power. Peter Bergin and Paul Cruickshank recently wrote in the New Republic, "how to explain the lure of militancy for [British Asian Muslims] who travel to Pakistan to become terrorists? The answer, in many cases, is Kashmir. A disproportionate number of Pakistanis living in Great Britain trace their lineage back to Kashmir." Yet such apologetics face a double-edged reality test: First, Britain plays no significant role in the Kashmir debate and therefore has no reason to be targeted on that grievance. Second, if Anglo-Pakistani Muslims, who go for terrorist training in Pakistan, want to blow themselves up, why not do so in Kashmir? The real problem remains global and not local; that of jihadist Deobandism, not of the Pakistan-India border.