Mark Steyn on the the sharia we are importing Pakistan

Article - Opinion - Mark Steyn: Sticky wicket of creeping sharia

If you had to draw one of those organizational charts of the world's problems, Pakistan would be at the center of them. We speak of the northwestern tribal lands as some of the most remote places on Earth. But, in fact, when they wanted to, the Saudis had no problem getting to them, spreading a ton of walking-around money, and utterly transforming those villages. From the North-West Frontier Province, the Saudi money and Wahhabist ideology seeped through the country, into the mosques of the cities, radicalizing a generation of young Muslim men. From there it moved on to new outposts of the jihad, to Indonesia, Thailand and beyond. The flight routes from Pakistan to the United Kingdom are now the most important ideological conduit for radical Islam. The London bombers last summer were British subjects of Pakistani origin. Last week, two more were arrested in connection with the Tube bombings at Manchester Airport as they prepared to board a plane to Karachi.

Meanwhile, flying back from Karachi and Islamabad to Heathrow and Manchester are cousins, lots and lots of them. In his detailed study of the Mirpur district in Pakistan, Roger Ballard estimates that at least half and maybe up to two-thirds of those living in Britain of Mirpuri descent marry first cousins. This is a critical tool of reverse-assimilation: instead of being diluted over the generations, tribal identity is reinforced; in effect, Pakistani tribal lands are now being established in parts of northern England.

Which brings us back to the cricket World Cup, and a freakish murder after a bizarre Ireland victory and stories about a "match-fixing mafia." The civilized world sometimes forgets how thin the veneer of that civilization is: Many venerable, respectable institutions can be hollowed out from within by predators and opportunists. Outwardly, nothing much has changed. But underneath all kinds of other forces are at play, and, by the time you notice, it requires enormous will to reverse it.

Pakistan was never the most placid and stable polity but it's now riddled from top to toe, its worst pathologies amplified by Arab cash and ideology and the nuclear equivalent of a desktop-publishing boom: mysterious Sino-Pakistani technological transfers have recently been noticed through Kashmir.

Pakistan exports the fruit of its radical madrassahs in ideology and personnel to Britain and beyond. The mother country, like an elderly spinster, doesn't like to think ill of those nice young men in Manchester and Leeds and Oldham. We're all inclined to be deferential to multiculturalism these days: When imams get tossed off a flight in Minneapolis, it's easiest to tut-tut and demand sensitivity training for the cabin crew. The Quebec government, which mandates verifiable picture ID in order to vote, has just waived the requirement for Muslims: show up at the polls in a burqa or niqab and no one will be so insensitive as to insist on checking whether your face matches that on the driver's license.

And so it goes – creeping sharia, day by day, further insulating communities already prone to self-segregation, but nothing too big or startling to ruffle the scene. In Britain, the authorities can tell you (roughly) the number of jihadist cells and the support they command in the Muslim community. But doing anything about it is far more problematic. Wouldn't be cricket, old boy.