The roots of Muslim unrest

EDINBURGH

WERE YOU to visit the Central Mosque here on Potterrow Street, you would find for sale a video of a 24-year-old movie called ''Lion of the Desert." It was produced and directed by Moustapha Akkad, a Syrian-American who is better known for the ''Halloween" series of horror movies.

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''Lion" is a rousing epic of the anticolonial struggle in Libya against Mussolini between the two world wars, with Rod Steiger as Il Duce, Oliver Reed as the ruthless General Rodolfo Graziani, and the redoubtable Anthony Quinn as the Libyan freedom fighter Omar Mukhtar, who fought a guerrilla war against colonialism for 20 years before he was caught and executed.

Graziani was the first to adapt tanks to desert warfare, and Akkad spared no effort to get the battle scenes right. Filmed on location in Libya and Rome, with financial help from Moharar Khaddafy, the movie nonetheless flopped at the box office.

I asked some young men at the Nile Valley Café near the mosque why this old movie, made before they were born, was enjoying a second life in this northern city. They compared it to Mel Gibson's ''Braveheart," beloved by Scottish nationalists, which also tells the tale of a doomed warrior defying great odds in defense of his country against foreign rule. The difference, they said, was that ''Lion" showed Muslims as heroic and brave in a noble cause.

The film opens with a gentle Quinn teaching children the Koran, but he is quick to take up the gun when the Italians come. His lecture to Graziani -- ''Libya is not your country. You have no right in it, not to the pasture of one cow" -- is not unlike anything ''Braveheart" might have said to the invading English, but the countryside and the villages being bombed, and the punishments being meted out to Muslims in ''Lion of the Desert," are similar to what can be seen on Al-Jazeera every day from Iraq.

In his death soliloquy, the Quinn-Mukhtar character says: ''We will never surrender, we will win or we die," and after that, ''you will have the next generation to fight, and after the next. As for me, I will live longer than my hangman."

The vast majority of Muslims in Europe would take ''Lion of the Desert" much as Scots would take ''Braveheart" -- or as Americans would view Mel Gibson's portrayal of the American Revolution in ''Patriot" -- for what they are: broad-brushed and simplistic Hollywood epics. But I could see how the alienated Muslim young of today, with war in Iraq and Palestinian teenagers still being shot in the streets of Gaza, might seek deeper meaning in ''Lion of the Desert" and the nobility of martyrdom that goes beyond what the film's writers intended a generation ago.

One wonders whether the young British Muslims who drifted off to Afghanistan into Al Qaeda training camps might have seen themselves as Omar Mukhtars, or whether the British youths who were caught with plans to blow up American targets ever saw themselves in the Anthony Quinn role. There is even a bit of dialogue in the film between Mussolini and Graziani about building a ''new Hadrian's Wall" to fence in the insurrectionists, written a generation before the separation wall between Palestinians and Israelis began to be built on the West Bank.

Terrorism expert Jessica Stern has identified five real or perceived grievances that inspire terrorist violence, not just among Muslims, but among Christian, Hindu, and Jewish extremists as well. They are alienation, humiliation, demographics, history, and territory.

She writes of how, for some, the hedonistic and idolatrous societies of the West can be so upsetting and unbalancing that unscrupulous leaders can ''harness alienation and anomie" to create ''killers out of lost souls."

She writes of how humiliation can drive people to ''desperation and uncontrollable rage" and of how imposing one demographic group upon another can lead to friction and violence. She describes how historical grievances are forever remembered, and even embellished upon, and how disputed land can inspire unending violence and extremism.

I am not suggesting for a moment that ''Lion" is an inspiration for violence, and I had no trouble rooting for Anthony Quinn against Mussolini, just as I rooted for Mel Gibson against Edward I and George III. But I could also see that for some of Europe's impressionable and alienated Muslim young, all of Stern's five grievances can be found in Akkad's film and that Europe and the rest of the West can ignore these grievances only at their peril.

H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe.