Writing about British Muslims bombing their own country, Dr Anthony McRoy - an expert on Islam in the UK (although it from his writings, I believe him to be a liberal-progressive type and a bit of an Islamist-apologist)wrote:

Like most Britons, I was shocked that the London bombers were British-born - but not entirely surprised. It is not the first time that British Muslims have engaged in jihad or sacrificed their lives in what are called "martyrdom operations"; the innovation is that they did it in the UK, against their fellow-Britons. What drives young Britons to attack their compatriots?

To understand this, we must recognize that people in all religions have trans-national confessional allegiances - Christians, Hindus, Jews, Sikhs, and of course Muslims. Muslims belong to the Ummah - the global Islamic community. Muhammad's migration from Mecca to Medina on 20th June, 622, is known as al-Hijra and, being the turning point in Muhammad's career, was declared to be the beginning of the Muslim era. In the Declaration of Medina, effectively the constitution of the Islamic city-state, Muhammad stated that the Meccan migrants and the people of Yathrib (Medina) together:

... constitute one nation (Ummah) in distinction from the rest of the people.

This Ummah is the primary community to which Muslims in Britain belong, and it can be seen from this that the strongest communal links for any Muslim - according to Islam - will be those with the Ummah, rather than with fellows of his race, ethnicity or nationality. As a British Muslim student declared about the American action against Afghanistan in 2001 [Q-News, No. 337, "Ready for jihad: Young, Muslim and angry", (October 2001), p. 15]:

I've always believed that I am Muslim first, then British...

Hence, the tendency for second- and third-generation Muslims to regard their Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Yemeni, etc., ethnic origins as secondary to their faith, and to identify their distinction from the rest of the British population as being essentially their membership of the Ummah, is not only natural, but actually "scriptural".

The Ummah concept has influenced British Muslims to be actively concerned with the Gulf war and Bosnia and to feel directly affected by these events. It explains why British lads would turn on their compatriots. Sir Thomas More, in his execution speech stated:

I die the King's good servant, but God's first.

If there is a cleavage between Caesar and God for any devout religious believer, God wins out every time. The difference in Islam is that God is Caesar, and temporal Caesars are false gods, to use the concept of Sayyid Qutb, the Islamic thinker who influenced Bin Laden. If there is a tension between loyalty to Britain and loyalty to the Ummah, for the kind of Muslim who carried out 7/7, the latter has the greatest demand.

Islamic ethics, unlike Christianity, eschews turning the other cheek. Rather the Qur'an tells Muslims (Surah 2:190):

Fight in the cause of God those who fight you.

Because of the Ummah concept, Muslims in Britain view themselves as part of the oppressed - when Muslims in Palestine or Iraq suffer, British Muslims see it as though they themselves are suffering. Since the British government is a close ally of America, it follows that the British Caesar is at war with God, so it is clear where the loyalties of the Ummah's residents in Britain should lie.

Al-Qaida have argued, against the tradition of Islamic jurisprudence, that anyone in a country occupying Muslim lands who pays taxes and votes for the government engaged in "aggression" shares its guilt, and is a legitimate target. If any Muslims are killed, they are simply collateral damage. Hence, killing their compatriots - and even their co-religionists - presented no ethical problems for the bombers.

Another casualty of the bombings is politically correct sociological explanations for the attacks. One bomber was a teacher, another was a student - scarcely the "wretched of the earth" to borrow from Fanon. Moreover, neither Sikhs nor Hindus carried out the bombing, so one cannot blame anti-Asian racism as the cause. Further, it cannot be asserted that domestic Islamophobia was the progenitor; the government was pledged to introduce a law against Religious Hatred. The bombers were "cleanskins", people with no previous history of terrorist or extremist involvement, so one cannot blame "extremist preachers"; after all, if at least two bombers were well-educated, how could they be influenced by mullahs often barely literate in English?

Islam explicitly demands total submission to Allah, the Koran and Mohammad and teaches Muslims that they are part of a world-wide Islamic nation or "ummah". Time and again Muslim preachers openly and with impunity claim that the role of western Muslims is to foster an Islamic culture in their host countries and little by little to force concessions from western governments so that Islam survives in the West yet untouched by Western political and cultural forces. Therefore, Britons and other Europeans should not be shocked when radical western born Muslims deny allegiance to their host countries. That loyalty always belonged to Islam and its is European complacency and ignorance that caused them to believe otherwise.

Is there any bond as strong as Islam and can western political traditions and culture ever hope to claim the loyalty of young western Muslims? These are the critical question for all western governments with sizeable Muslim minorities. If western governments are not prepared to fight for their secular values and the loyalty of Muslims to western values, a permanently alienated and dangerous group of Muslims in their midst will be created. If the west somehow finds the courage to assert its values, it must morally, intellectually and politically challenge Islam's fanatical demand for loyalty made on Muslims.

Related: Not all muslims are Islamists, and moderate Muslims (truly moderate Muslims), have different opinions from the Islamists.