These activities were buttressed by an astonishingly dense network of radical Islamist groups that spread far beyond London, making Britain a key global center for the production and promotion of insurrectionist Islamist ideology of the kind that would be ruthlessly suppressed within the Arab world. The Muslim Brotherhood, for example, operates through a series of interlocking organizations of Palestinian, Syrian, Libyan, Somali, Iraqi and Egyptian origin. These include the Muslim Association of Britain, the Muslim Welfare Trust, Interpal, the Palestine Return Centre, the Institute of Islamic Political Thought, Mashreq Media Services (which publishes the Hamas newspaper Filisteen al-Muslima), the English language pro-Hamas paper Palestine Times, the Centre for International Policy Studies, and others.10
The Ahle Hadith is a smaller Wahhabi movement funded by Saudi Arabia, that runs many extremist madrassas and several terrorist organizations and training camps in Pakistan and Kashmir. It has four dozen centers in England and at least that many madrassas.11 On its website, it tells readers that their fellow citizens are “Kuffaar,” or infidels, and warns them: “Be different from the Jews and Christians. Their ways are based on sick or deviant views concerning their societies.”12
One of the world’s most radical Islamist organizations, Hizb ut-Tahrir, which is banned in many countries where it is considered a major threat, has its headquarters in Britain. HuT promotes the resurrection of the Islamic caliphate, which had been abolished in 1924 on the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, and holds that Muslims may live only in a Muslim state governed by Sharia law, a goal which takes precedence over all others.
A similar group called al-Muhajiroun—which disbanded but reformed in other guises—is now expanding its influence in other countries. Al-Muntada al-Islami, a Saudi-funded and run foundation in London, specializes in promoting Wahhabi extremism in Africa, where it has two dozen branches. Last year, Nigerian police accused al-Muntada’s local representative of transferring millions of dollars to foment religious violence and finance attacks on Christians.13 In the English Midlands town of Leicester, the Islamic Foundation was set up in 1974 to promote the ideology of the Jamaat al-Islami, which wants to spread the governance of Sharia law to both Muslims and non-Muslims. Professor Kurshid Ahmad, chairman and rector of the Islamic Foundation, is also the vice president of the Jamaat al-Islami opposition party in Pakistan, which aims to turn it into an Islamic state governed by Sharia law.
Scarcely less significant is the European headquarters of the radical proselytizing movement Tablighi Jamaat at Dewsbury in Yorkshire. The Tablighi Jamaat mosque has been flourishing in Dewsbury for almost thirty years. It was built in 1978 with funds from the World Muslim League and has since become the headquarters of the movement, which has become a major recruiter for jihad across the globe. This mosque is of such strategic importance to Islamist radicals that, every autumn, thousands of Muslim pilgrims from across Europe gather there to pray. “The mosque’s importance must not be underestimated,” one antiterrorist expert said. “Tablighi Jamaat has always adopted an extreme interpretation of Islam, but in the last two decades it has radicalized to the point where it is now a driving force of Islamic extremism.” And it was this mosque that has been linked by British intelligence to Mohammed Sidique Khan, the leader of the London bomb plot in July 2005.14
So how did this extraordinary network of terrorism and violent revolutionary insurrection with its roots in Arabia and Asia come to develop in Britain, the cradle of Western liberty? How did London, home to the mother of parliaments, turn into Londonistan?
The process started back in the 1970s, when a large influx of immigrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh and India started to arrive in Britain. They came mostly to work in the cotton mills in England’s northern industrial towns such as Bradford and Burnley, Oldham and Rotherham. They were brought in as cheap labor because these mills were floundering in the face of competition with the third world. In due course, the mills went out of business anyway and the Asian immigrants found that the land of plenty and promise had turned into the land of unemployment.
Virtually all concerns about this wave of immigration focused upon the alleged racism or discrimination with which the host community in Britain was treating these newcomers. What went almost totally unnoticed was the enormous dislocation between the Muslim immigrants and the host society. These new arrivals came overwhelmingly from desperately poor, rural villages in places like Mirpur in Pakistan and Sylhet in Bangladesh. Many never thought they would stay permanently but expected to make some money and then return after a few years (not that this happened).15 So they remained umbilically connected to the culture of southern Asia. And what no one had realized was that religious life in Pakistan was in the process of becoming deeply and dangerously radicalized.
When these Muslim immigrants arrived, the highly traditional faith they practiced was largely influenced by introspective, gentle Sufism and was thus passive and quiescent. But in the space of a few years, it became an increasingly activist faith centered on the mosques, which were transmitting a highly radicalized ideology. Groups such as the Jamaat al-Islami were supplying the mosques with imams and setting up research centers like the one in Leicester. As a result, according to Dr. Michael Nazir-Ali, the Pakistani-born bishop of Rochester, a whole generation of Muslim children was indoctrinated with a set of inflammatory ideas about the need for Islam to achieve primacy over the non-Islamic world.16
Against this backdrop of steady radicalization, a series of tumultuous developments during the 1980s and 1990s increasingly gave Muslims in Britain a new, highly politicized and deeply confrontational sense of their own religious identity. The first was the Soviet war in Afghanistan during the 1980s, in which the United States and Britain armed and trained Islamic mujahideen to fight and eventually drive out the Soviet invaders. Little did the Americans and the British realize that, in the process, they were helping sow the dragon’s teeth from which would spring the killers who would turn so spectacularly upon themselves. For they had armed and trained people who had now found their vocation: holy war. Was not that, these warriors told themselves, precisely what they had waged in Afghanistan, where the forces of Islam had driven out the godless Soviets? The belief that Islamic warriors had not only won that war but as a result caused an entire superpower to implode became a founding myth of modern Islamism and cemented the concept of the armed jihad as a contemporary pillar of the faith.17 And as a result of the steady radicalization under way in the Muslim world, the Christian West—which had armed and trained the mujahideen—itself became the next target for the jihad. As secular Afghans from the country’s exiled tribal leadership had warned the Americans during the 1980s: “For God’s sake, you’re financing your own assassins.”18
If Afghanistan was an inspiration for British Muslims, the Islamic revolution in Iran had produced another electrifying effect. When Ayatollah Khomeini came to power in 1979 and transformed Iran into an Islamic state, Islam became crystallized as a political ideology for people who felt estranged from British secular society and were looking for a cause that would cement their identity and provide something to admire. Within a few years, moreover, the trajectories of both the Iranian revolution and the identity of British Muslims were to fuse in a culturally explosive episode.
In 1989, the novelist and British citizen Salman Rushdie published his novel The Satanic Verses. A bitter satire on Islam which understandably gave serious offense, its publication provoked uproar in the Islamic world with protests in the Pakistani capital Islamabad that led to the deaths of five Muslims. Shortly afterwards, in Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa sentencing Rushdie to death for writing the book, along with “all involved in its publication who were aware of its content.”19 As a result, Rushdie was forced to go into hiding for many years and to live the life of a highly guarded fugitive, with a bounty on his head for anyone who succeeded in murdering him.
This incitement to murder a British subject and his associates in the publishing w
orld set the Muslim community in Britain alight. Literally so—they burned the book in the street, in scenes uncomfortably reminiscent of Nazi Germany. There was a positive feeding frenzy of incitement. Sayed Abdul Quddus, the secretary of the Bradford Council of Mosques, claimed that Rushdie had “tortured Islam” and deserved to pay the penalty by “hanging.” Speaking in Bradford, where the first demonstrations against the book took place, he said: “Muslims here would kill him and I would willingly sacrifice my own life and that of my children to carry out the Ayatollah’s wishes should the opportunity arise.”20 Dr. Kalim Siddiqui, director of the Iranian-backed Muslim Institute, shouted at a meeting: “I would like every Muslim to raise his hand in agreement with the death sentence on Salman Rushdie. Let the world see that every Muslim agrees that this man should be put away.”21
The importance of this episode and the no less significant reaction to it by the British establishment can hardly be overestimated. Such scenes were unprecedented in Britain. The home of freedom of speech was playing host to the burning of books and an openly homicidal witch-hunt. Yet not one person who called for Rushdie to be killed was prosecuted for incitement to murder. The most the government could bring itself to say was that such comments were “totally unacceptable.”22
On the contrary, they seemed to be not only accepted but even endorsed by certain members of the British establishment. Far from universal condemnation of this murderous expression of religious fanaticism, various people used their public position to jump prematurely upon Rushdie’s grave. The eminent historian Lord Dacre said he “would not shed a tear if some British Muslims, deploring Mr. Rushdie’s manners, were to waylay him in a dark street and seek to improve them.”23 And in Leicester, the Labour MP Keith Vaz led a three-thousand-strong demonstration intent on burning an effigy of Rushdie, and carried a banner showing Rushdie’s head, complete with horns and fangs, superimposed on a dog.24
Here in microcosm were all the key features of what would only much later be recognized as a major and systematic threat to the British state and its values. There was the murderous incitement; the flagrant defiance of both the rule of law and the cardinal value of free speech; the religious fanaticism; the emergence of British Muslims as a distinct and hostile political entity; and the supine response by the British establishment. What was also on conspicuous display was the mind-twisting, back-to-front reasoning that is routinely used by many Muslims to turn their own violent aggression into victimhood. Muslim leaders claimed that the refusal by the British government to ban The Satanic Verses showed that Muslims in Britain were under attack, with the political and literary establishment trying to destroy their most cherished values. “They are rapidly coming to the conclusion that they will have to fight to defend Islam in Britain,” said Dr. Kalim Siddiqui of his community.25
Of course, it was Britain that was under attack from an Islamism that required the British state to dump its most cherished values in order to placate the Muslim minority. Yet this was promptly inverted to claim that it was Islam that was under attack. Thus Islamist violence was justified, and its victim blamed instead for aggression—the pattern that has come to characterize the Muslim attitude to conflict worldwide.
The Rushdie affair became a rallying cause for Muslim consciousness. It was the point at which British Muslims became politicized and hitched their faith to a violent star. According to the writer Kenan Malik, Muslim radicals had until then been on the left, not religious and against the mosque. Now, fired by resentment at the apparent insult by the Rushdie book, they became transformed into religious radicals and formed the pool of discontents for militant Islamic groups like Hizb ut-Tahrir, which began organizing in Britain, particularly on campus, in the late 1980s and early 1990s.26
When Khomeini died later in 1989, British Muslims reiterated that the death sentence on Rushdie still stood. A spokesman for the Council of Mosques said: “We are talking about the Islamic revival.”27 It was at that point, therefore, that the promotion of Islam in Britain became fused with an agenda of murder.
Hard on the heels of this seismic episode came two further key developments. The Bosnian war was another major radicalizing factor for British Muslims. They watched the appalling scenes of Bosnian Muslims being massacred by their Christian neighbors. What made this carnage so much worse was that it was taking place in the middle of secular, multicultural Europe. The Muslims being wiped out were pale-skinned and clothed in jeans and track shoes. They looked and behaved like any other Europeans. And yet Britain and Europe were dragging their heels about doing anything to stop the slaughter. So British Muslims believed that it was Islam that was under attack, and that therefore they too were unsafe and threatened in a country that had so conspicuously failed to view the massacre of Muslims with any concern. With their pathological sense of victimization thus accelerating by the day, they started volunteering to fight for the jihad in Bosnia and organizing the “defense” of their own communities in Britain.
At around the same time, Arab Islamist exiles from Libya, Algeria, Egypt and elsewhere started turning up in London in large numbers. Many had fought the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. They had returned to their home countries from where, after instigating violent agitation, they were promptly thrown out. So these trained “Afghan Arab” warriors made their way instead to Britain—attracted, they said, by its “traditions of democracy and justice.”28 But they had now been trained to be killers. They had discovered jihad. And the radical ideology they brought with them found many echoes in the Islamism and seething resentments that by now were entrenched in British Muslim institutions.
Reda Hussaine, an Algerian journalist who supplied information on Algerian radicals in London to both French and British intelligence, says the Algerian connection was particularly crucial. “They came to the UK, the only country that gave asylum and didn’t ask a lot of questions,” he said. “Thousands and thousands came, wave upon wave, saying they were being repressed in Algeria.” Then they started to organize inside Britain against the West. And to provide the religious imprimatur for jihad through the instrument of the fatwa, they recruited Abu Qatada from Afghanistan and sent him to London, where he preached in the Finsbury Park mosque. “From here started the first fatwas calling for the killing of everyone who was against the ideology,” said Hussaine. “Then dozens of jihadis started to arrive every week, to raise money, make propaganda.” 29
Abu Qatada was extraordinarily important. He was not only crucial in the development of Algerian terrorism, publishing the newspaper of the Algerian terrorist group the GIA (the French acronym for Armed Islamic Group) in London in the early to mid 1990s. He was also the “spiritual head of the mujahideen in Britain,” according to the leading Spanish prosecutor Baltasar Garzón, and “Osama bin Laden’s European ambassador” according to French intelligence.30 Terrorist cells broken up in Germany, Spain, France and Italy were all found to have connections to Abu Qatada. His preaching attracted figures like Zacarias Moussaoui, who helped plan the 9/11 attacks, and videos of his speeches were found in the Hamburg flat of Mohammed Atta, the hijackers’ ringleader.31 Yet for years Britain afforded him the liberty to mastermind al-Qaeda terror.
Many other radicals found a comfortable home in London during this period. Rashid al-Ghannushi, the leader of the Tunisian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, An Nahda, lived in Britain for about fifteen years after being convicted in Tunisia of bombing an airport—one of the most important Islamic ideologues living in exile, although with a very low public profile. Abu Doha, an Algerian described by intelligence sources as Osama bin Laden’s main man in Britain, has been accused of controlling Ahmed Ressam, who plotted to bomb Los Angeles International Airport in 1999, as well as being linked to bomb plots in Strasbourg and Paris. Yasser al-Siri was convicted in Egypt for terrorism after he tried to kill the deputy prime minister and killed a small child instead. And Kamal el-Helbawy, an Egyptian sent to Pakistan as a Muslim Brotherhood point man with Jamaat al-Islami, came to London as t
he Muslim Brotherhood spokesman in the West and in 1997 established as its British voice the Muslim Association of Britain.
Much of this activity took place below the public radar. But there was also very public evidence of the violent feelings that were being stirred up. One year after the attacks on New York and Washington, a flyer distributed around London by al-Muhajiroun read: “September 11th 2001, a Towering Day in World History,” a text illustrated by the Twin Towers. This was followed the next year with a flyer celebrating “The Magnificent 19,” with portraits of the suicide attackers involved in the atrocity.
There were also Islamist demagogues who very publicly called for murder and insurrection. The Syrian expatriate Omar Bakri Mohammed, who arrived in Britain after being expelled from Saudi Arabia, founded Hizb ut-Tahrir in Britain in 1986 with another Syrian expatriate, Farid Kassim. He was allowed to call for the murder of the British prime minister with no action taken against him: in 1991, during the first Gulf War, he claimed that Prime Minister John Major was “a legitimate target; if anyone gets the opportunity to assassinate him, I don’t think they should save it. It is our Islamic duty and we will celebrate his death,”32 a point which he later clarified as “a legitimate target if he were to set foot in a Muslim country.”
After the 2005 London bombings, the Sunday Times conducted an undercover investigation in which it amassed hours of taped evidence and pages of transcripts that showed how Bakri and his acolytes promoted hatred of “nonbelievers” and incited their followers to commit acts of violence, including suicide bombings. His group, the Saviour Sect, preached a racist creed of Muslim supremacy which, in Bakri’s words, aimed at “flying the Islamic flag over Downing Street.” Followers were told that Islam was constantly under assault in Britain, and that the best form of defense was attack. One speaker claimed that the kuffar were trying to “wipe out [Muslims] from the face of the earth” and implored the group “to cover the land with our blood through martyrdom, martyrdom, martyrdom.”33
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