ISLAM VS EXTREMISM:

How Religion Can Inoculate Against Radicalism: The lesson of my retreat from a London university's Islamic Society. (RUSSELL RAZZAQUE, 9/02/11, WSJ)

Why did I leave the Islamic Society while others stayed--and even, in some cases, wound up in Pakistan networking with fellow Islamists? What was the difference between us? The answer may be found somewhere in our earlier lives.

Those men who were the most opposed to the perverted messages being peddled by the Islamic Society were those who had been brought up by religious parents. One friend, who had been steeped in mainstream Islam as a child, used to tell me that the doctrine being preached at the Islamic Society was, in his view, so aberrant that it risked becoming toxic. He firmly believed that MI5 (British domestic intelligence) ought to be keeping an eye on these guys, and that was 10 years before 9/11. Those who had no exposure to Islam prior to the encounter with extremist recruiters seemed more likely to follow them.

Now there is a growing body of research explaining why that was. Caitlin Spaulding of Trinity University in Texas studied the religious experiences of 84 first-year university students in her home state. She found that the students tended to retain the core faith beliefs instilled in them during their childhood--and that this helped their transition to university life. They appeared to be more confident and better equipped to adapt to their new environment.

In a study by Lorelie J. Farmer of Gordon College in Massachusetts, adult subjects discussed their religious experiences as children. The study found that childhood religious experience tended to give individuals increased compassion for others, as measured in psychological rating scales. This helps explain why it would be harder for such people to follow a supremacist ideology that by definition is uncompassionate towards the "out" group.

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