I had a Muslim friend in Oxford who went all fundamentalist after she split from her non-Muslim husband. There had been 'issues' before in the sense that she was very sensitive to perceived insults and what she interpreted as racism. Her family had suffered from some racism so it was understandable. She'd grown up in England, benefited from an education she wouldn't have received in the country her family migrated from and really, I always felt, had no real grievance when I knew her. She would, of course, have disagreed with me, and did, and I defended her position many times even when I didn't agree that what she regarded as racism was in fact racism. For instance, she thought a mentor was being racist when the mentor at work asked her to tidy herself up. My friend wore a mixture of western clothes and her culture's traditional clothes and quite often looked untidy, to put it mildly. I thought the mentor had a professional point and that it wasn't the 'style' she was objecting to but the scruffiness at work. I think the mentor would have said the same thing to any of her interns whom she thought were not dressed smartly enough for the job (school teaching). My friend thought the mentor was being racist.
In the end I felt very sorry for my friend because I had come to think that her problem was caused by her feeling deeply torn between wanting to be 'Western' in a Western country but not wanting to let go of her family's culture. Things like the fact that her mother, who had lived in England for more than twenty-five years but had not learned any English (or, if she had, was not letting on) must have influenced my friend, I thought.
The friendship ended when she became an apologist for a terrorist act in Britain. She was no longer willing to talk to me when I disagreed with her 'justification' of a crime against innocent people.
