Ginger Jihadis: Why Redheads are Attracted to Radical Islam
Dozens of young redheaded men and women are replacing the ritual bullying of the playground with the ritual strictures of radical Islam, perhaps – at least according to some experts – as a result of the bullying and persecution they endure early in life.
You’ve likely already made the connection between ginger hair and home-grown Islamic radicals yourself. Subconsciously, perhaps, from newspaper reports showing carrot-topped wannabe jihadis from Bradford, and TV clips of auburn brothers in east London. What you probably don’t know is just how vastly over-represented redheads are in the ranks of Islamist converts.
There are no surveys of jihadis, of course. The Quilliam Foundation, a counter-extremism organisation, told us that no one keeps reliable data on white converts to Islamism. So news reports probably represent the best data set available to researchers.
We sampled national newspaper coverage of white converts to radical Islam published between 5 August 2013 and 4 August 2014, excluding cases where there was no evidence of extremism or radicalisation. For example, Lucy Vallender, the ginger-haired Territorial Army private who had a sex change and became Britain’s first transgender Muslim woman, was excluded from our results.
We discovered that 76 per cent of white British converts to radical Islam had red hair. In the Daily Mail archives, 69 per cent of white Brits lured into jihadism or the orbit of an extremist preacher were ginger. The number was similar for the Mirror and the Telegraph. The Guardian yielded a full 100 per cent redhead rate for the stories we sampled.
These are extraordinary numbers when you consider that in northern and western Europe, the average incidence of red hair in the general population is 5 per cent. In other words, Islamic extremists reported on by the media are fifteen times more likely than the general population to have red hair.
Unless you think there’s a Fleet Street conspiracy to single out and report on ginger jihadis – and that the Guardian is leading the charge – the data clearly demonstrate that white people who convert to radical Islam are overwhelmingly likely to be ginger.
Of course, leading Muslims in public life and senior police officers have known about this for years, though they’re understandably reluctant to discuss it in public – until now. Fiyaz Mughal, founder of Tell MAMA, an advocacy organisation that tracks islamophobia, says: “For whatever reason, there does seem to be a number of people with ginger hair that are present in extremist activities. In no way do I suggest that the gene for ginger hair is a factor, but bizarre it is.”
“I’m glad someone is finally tackling this thorny topic,” says the director of a leading Muslim think-tank, who preferred to remain anonymous. “I can remember having a conversation with a counter-terrorism police officer in 2008 about this and he claimed most of the converts he dealt with are ginger.”
Another prominent Muslim in public life who appears regularly in the media adds: “Though there are no reliable statistics on this, ginger people do tend to be over-represented in extremist circles.”
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Beauty magazine insiders will tell you that naturally red-headed celebrities are airbrushed even more brutally than their peers to ensure an even skin tone. And a nightclub experiment reported in Psychological Studies in 2012 showed that red-headed men were much more likely to be rebuffed, and red-headed women less likely to be approached, all else being equal. (The researchers used wigs to exclude other variables.)
Why are people so mean? Some scientists think it’s genetic: they say we’re wired to be attracted to rich genetic mixes – hence, perhaps, the near-universal attractiveness of Italians and Spaniards. The relative genetic purity of ginger-haired people – too much of anything else and the recessive gene won’t assert itself – isn’t what we’re programmed to appreciate.
They also draw attention to the frequent coexistence of freckles with red hair. Freckles are mini-cancer factories; people with lots of these naturally-occurring circles of brown skin are far more likely to get skin cancer. In other words, it could be an evolved, adapted response to avoid mates with a lack of genetic mixing.
But if those theories told the whole story, Britain wouldn’t be home to such uniquely virulent ginger prejudice. Bullying experts agree that we lead the world in vindictive cruelty toward redheads. “I was never aware of redheads being so vulnerable to name-calling and bullying until I came to the UK,” says Claude Knights, the strawberry blonde Belgian chief executive of anti-bullying charity Kidscape.
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Red facial hair of the kind sported by Bradford Islamist convert and former rapper MC Chippy, who now goes by the name of Brother Adam (look him up on YouTube), has at various times in history been considered a symbol of divinity. One of the Roman emperor Nero’s family names was Ahenobarbus, or “bronze-bearded,” and Mohammed is, in some Muslim traditions, said to have had reddish facial hair.
Do jihadis see in the recessive ginger gene, so much more commonly expressed in northern Europe than the Middle East, a hint of the divine? Anjem Choudary hadn’t returned a request for comment as we went to press. But it’s certainly plausible that redheads, through a combination of physical appearance and the concomitant emotional problems it can bring, are singled out by extremists as ripe for the picking.
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Several recent studies have demonstrated that redheads react to pain differently to the rest of us. Scientists say ginger-haired people are less responsive to subcutaneously administered anaesthetics, but suffer more from toothaches. They’re also more susceptible to the cold.
We’re a long way from establishing that there might be psychological differences, rooted in genetics, that explain why redheads are more vulnerable to dangerous ideologies. But, if there’s one uncomfortable truth that the relatively new science of genomics is repeatedly surfacing, it’s that observable characteristics do indeed correlate with different kinds of behaviours. So who knows? After all, redheads do have a reputation for being feisty…
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