Strategic Essentialism
Prevent’s success rested on finding reliable Muslim partner organizations that could deliver the government’s counterextremism message. With unprecedented intensity, the question of who was to speak for Britain’s Muslim population was raised. On the one hand, Muslims were pictured as a monolithic bloc appropriately represented by a single, unelected organization whose officials could sit in private meetings with government ministers and negotiate an agreement on the position of Muslims in British society. On the other hand, that such a form of leadership was even necessary betrayed the anxiety that Muslims were not really a monolith at all but divided about who they were and where their interests lay. It was not that community leaders were being asked to represent a preexisting community so much as to create and sustain the fiction that one existed. What was really being asked was who was to speak to Britain’s Muslims, not for them.
In the early 1990s, the government had welcomed the formation of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), seeing it as a suitable candidate for this job: a body of moderate Muslims that, in return for official patronage, could channel political discontent within Muslim communities in a manageable form. That a number of MCB activists were linked to the Jamaat-i-Islami—the oldest organization representing political Islam in South Asia—was less important than its willingness to do the government’s bidding. With the launch of wars on Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11, the MCB’s position became more fraught. Grassroots pressure forced it to refrain from any acquiescence in the Afghan occupation, and it argued forcefully that the war on Iraq would increase terrorism. The MCB was increasingly criticized as an extremist organization, and in the summer of 2006, ministers announced it would no longer be favored as the leading representative of Muslims in Britain.
Over the following years, two organizations stepped forward to attempt to fill the gap, both strongly guided by powerful outside networks, both seeking to become actively involved in the government’s surveillance apparatus, and both declaring their support for the official analysis that ideology was driving radicalization and foreign policy was of little relevance. The first, the Sufi Muslim Council (SMC), received at least £203,000 of Prevent funding in 2008 and 2009 to establish itself as a community leadership organization.42 Road shows and conferences were organized, a television channel launched, and a leading public relations consultancy, Blue Rubicon, hired to coordinate a marketing strategy. Prince Charles and government ministers publicly backed the group. A US-based neoconservative activist, Hedieh Mirahmadi, who was involved in setting up SMC along with a small network of British Muslims, said the organization was part of an attempt, supported by the government, to promote Sufism as a preferable form of Islam. “We deliberately saw Sufism as more moderate than Salafism,” she says.43 The RAND Corporation, the leading US think tank on military affairs, had argued the year before that Western governments should fight a “battle of ideas” against “Islamist extremism” in Europe by empowering traditionalists and Sufis, who it said were the “natural allies of the West.”44 In Washington, Mirahmadi has since been actively pushing for a more forceful US counterradicalization policy that would increase demands on American Muslims for ideological conformity: “The community needs to be pressured to challenge ideology—like Prevent did in Britain. We need to bug the community to get active on this.45
Among the projects linked to SMC was a youth center aimed at Muslims in the Longsight area of Manchester, for which a Prevent funding application of half a million pounds was submitted. The center was to provide sports facilities and offer career advice, as well as religious guidance aimed at providing a counterextremism narrative. “Some of the centre’s activity will be diversionary,” stated the funding application. “However the real focus will be on counter/de-radicalising people.” For these people, “spiritual, theological and ideological training” would be used to challenge their views. The bid also recommended the inclusion of free IT facilities, as it was “good for monitoring which websites people were visiting,” and “intelligence gathering” was stated as one of the rationales for the center. Asking people to register as members to use the center would help “to collect data and build a database.” And “two-way sharing of information with local (policing) agencies” would take place, including in order to identify young people in the neighborhood who would be “targeted and then sought out to bring them into the programme.”46
It became clear fairly quickly that the SMC lacked any credibility with young Muslims and would be unable to perform the leadership and surveillance roles expected of it by the government.
A second attempt at creating an astroturf Muslim organization was the Quilliam Foundation. It was established in April 2008 by Ed Husain (author of the best-selling The Islamist published a year earlier) and Maajid Nawaz, both of whom had been activists in Hizb ut-Tahrir before becoming disillusioned and embracing the government’s Prevent agenda. The foundation was hugely effective in legitimizing the official narrative of radicalization. For a while Husain and Nawaz—young, articulate, and always sharply dressed—were ubiquitous in the media and on the conference circuit, arguing that political issues such as the Iraq war were not all that relevant in explaining terrorist attacks in Britain. Rather, they said, the root problem was the politicization of Islam, and the best way to prevent terrorism was for states to create a Western Islam that was reliably apolitical. The foundation launched an extensive program of radicalization awareness training sessions for thousands of police officers and officials working in local authorities around the country, promoting their good Muslim–bad Muslim message.47 With backing from government ministers, it advised schools on the behaviors that “could indicate a young person is being influenced by extremists and developing a mindset that could lead them to accept and undertake violent acts.” The indicators its training listed included expressions of political ideology, such as support for “the Islamic political system”; a focus on scripture as an exclusive moral source; a “conspiratorial mindset”; seeing the West as a source of evil in the world; and literalism in the reading of Muslim texts.48
The Quilliam Foundation received over £1 million of government Prevent funding in its first two years.49 But things came unstuck in late 2009 after Ed Husain gave an interview to the Guardian in which he acknowledged Prevent was “gathering intelligence on people not committing terrorist offences” and said that to do so was “good” and “right.”50 This proved somewhat embarrassing at a time when ministers were trying to reassure the public that Prevent did not involve intelligence gathering but was a form of community engagement and assistance. The government was forced to distance itself from the foundation. The following year, Husain and Nawaz hoped they might return to favor with the new Conservative-led coalition government that came to power in May 2010. Their chances looked good, given that the neoconservative MP Michael Gove, who was education minister in the new government, was on the foundation’s board. Gove’s cranky 2006 book, Celsius 7/7, had called for a new cold war against “Islamism,” recommended Britain carry out assassinations of terrorist suspects to send “a vital signal of resolution,” and said a “temporary curtailment of liberties” would be needed to prevent “Islamism” from destroying Western civilization.51 Among fellow Tories, Gove was seen as a veritable expert on Muslims in Britain. Were Gove’s recommendations to be implemented, the Quilliam Foundation could certainly be of use to the new government. Husain and Nawaz decided to advertise their services by producing a blueprint for how Prevent policy might be taken in a more hardline direction. The document, meant only for private discussion by ministers and senior advisers, argued for tackling “a broader Islamist ideology,” and included a list they had drawn up of groups to be banned from public funding and government engagement, including most of the major Muslim organizations in the UK. The idea of such a list had first been mooted by Charles Moore, the chairman of the Policy Exchange think tank, in a speech in March 2008 on a “possible conservative approach to
the question of Islam in Britain.” The government, he argued, should maintain a list of Muslim organizations that, while not actually inciting violence, “nevertheless advocate such antisocial attitudes that they should not receive public money or official recognition.” In this category would fall any groups with links to the Muslim Brotherhood or the Jamaati-i-Islami, as well as individuals such as Tariq Ramadan.52 But the Quilliam Foundation’s blueprint was leaked, and the plan had to be dropped. By the end of 2010 the foundation’s credibility with the government was in shreds, and it lacked any grassroots community base to fall back on. Funding had dwindled to a trickle, and most of its staff had to go. With the US government increasingly interested in importing British thinking on countering radicalization, Ed Husain left the UK to take up a fellowship at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in Washington, while Maajid Nawaz began to work with Google’s think tank, Google Ideas, on its counterradicalization program, also in partnership with the CFR.
Multiagency Surveillance
It is entirely appropriate for the police and MI5 to place Muslims under surveillance if there is a reasonable suspicion of their active involvement in terrorism. It is also right that channels are available for other professionals, such as youth workers and teachers, to provide information to the police if there are reasons to believe an individual is involved in criminality. But, as noted above, Prevent sought to draw professionals providing nonpolicing local services into routinely providing information to the counterterrorist police not just on individuals who might be about to commit a criminal offense, but also on the political and religious opinions and behaviors of young people. A major part of Prevent was the fostering of much closer relationships between the counterterrorist policing system and providers of nonpolicing local services to facilitate these kinds of flows of information on individuals considered at risk of extremism.
The attempt to integrate policing with agencies of local government can be traced back to the early 1980s, with the reorganization of policing under Metropolitan Police Commissioner Kenneth Newman (who had previously served as chief constable of the Royal Ulster Constabulary in Northern Ireland). New legislation sought to incorporate social and welfare agencies into the policing process. This was presented as a supportive form of “community policing,” but its purpose was to embed police surveillance in schools and other agencies providing public services. This new approach, of coordinating police work with social agencies, was reflected in the 1982 Police and Criminal Evidence Bill, which in its original version, proposed a power to search confidential records held by professionals.53 Civil rights lawyer Paul Boateng noted that the bill raised the prospect of civil liberties abuses as “the proper professional distinctions between the roles of social workers, probation officers, local government workers, teachers and policemen, become confused.”54 Grassroots campaigns for police accountability in the early 1980s led to some diminution of these dangers, and the power to search records was dropped by the time the bill became the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984. Nevertheless, the idea that social agencies should coordinate their work with the police took hold, and it led to these multiagency partnerships becoming common practice.
After 7/7, security officials in Britain studied how their Dutch counterparts had responded to the murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a Dutch Muslim radical the year before. The Amsterdam municipal authority had been influenced by Wiktorowicz’s model of radicalization and begun a comprehensive counterradicalization program that was subsequently replicated in other Dutch and Scandinavian cities. Its starting point was the idea of embedding surveillance in a range of formal and informal agencies, in the hope of creating an early warning system to detect radicalization.55 Not just the police but social workers, teachers, and community activists were recruited into the web of counterterrorism intelligence gathering. In Amsterdam an agency named the Information House was the hub where nonpolicing professionals could be briefed on the indicators of extremism and the resulting flows of information were collated and, where necessary, shared with the security services. Since most of the would-be extremists identified were law-abiding, the interventions that followed could not normally involve criminal prosecution. Instead, mentoring, counseling, religious instruction, or various forms of disruption were applied. The Channel project, which is the part of Prevent aimed at individual interventions, was the same idea adapted for the British context. The structures of informal surveillance that already existed as multiagency partnerships to tackle gangs, antisocial behavior, and so on, were for the first time appropriated for counterterrorism purposes. In doing so, their potential as tools for monitoring and influencing the political opinions of young people in a suspect community was realized.
The Channel project is shrouded in secrecy. The official guidance documents are vague on how individuals are identified and referred to the project, and exactly what actions are taken thereafter. One states that “expressed opinions” are one of the potential indicators of radicalization and notes that among the kinds of opinion that might indicate a risk are the “rejection of the principle of the rule of law and of the authority of any elected Government in this country.” Home Office officials say a key indicator of radicalization is the opinion that the West is at war with Islam. Prevent training sessions provide further guidance on how to spot an extremist; about fifteen thousand local authority staff have received Workshop to Raise Awareness of Prevent (WRAP) training on indicators of radicalization.56
Those working on the Channel project are bound by confidentiality agreements that prevent them from speaking openly. Nevertheless, based on interviews with five youth workers who have participated in providing Channel interventions across four English cities, and with four other youth workers who have been asked to participate in identifying young people at risk in various locations, it has been possible to sketch the kinds of behaviors that lead the Channel project to certain young people, and what kinds of actions follow. One youth worker, who says he has been asked to work with the most hard-core cases identified in his city, found no cases in which there was any chance of the young person heading toward terrorism. It was rather that they had strong political opinions about Muslims in Britain or other parts of the world. The youngest person he worked with was nine years old. He felt referrals were coming because teaching staff nowadays were less likely to handle racism and interethnic conflict in the classroom, and instead sent them to the Channel project for management; in the past teachers would have engaged students to resolve such issues. In one case a young person was referred because he had accused the teacher of racism in the treatment of Muslims in the classroom. None of the young people referred to this youth worker had adopted anything like a systematic ideology, nor was there any real interest in or knowledge of Islam—just conspiracy theories mixed with a Manichean identity politics.
Another youth worker spoke of a case in which a young person was referred to Channel for handing out a Hizb ut-Tahrir leaflet, which he had done in response to other students handing out far Right British National Party leaflets. In other cases young people were reportedly referred for expressing strong views on Palestine, against British forces in Afghanistan, or for visiting radical Web sites. One youth worker told me he
had a host of requests from the police to collude with them; for example, asking us for names of people at meetings, and [calling us with requests] like, “Oh, can you just have a conversation with …”. When we refuse, we have been told by the police that “you are standing in our way,” and they have tried to undermine our organization. We have been threatened, but we have refused to share the beliefs, views, and opinions of people we work with.57
Another youth worker said:
You’re supposed to report back information to the Prevent Board, such as mapping movements of individuals. You have to provide information if an individual is at risk. But you also need to give information about the general picture, right down to which street corners young people from different backgrounds
are hanging around on, what mosques they go to, and so on. There is probably a perception that these are benign procedures, and [that] it is an extension of a general attitude that already exists, for example, in the mapping of antisocial behavior.58
In 2008, the government published a tool kit to encourage schoolteachers to contribute to the Prevent program. It requested that they monitor pupils for the warning signs of extremism, offered guidance on detecting trigger points in vulnerable children, and recommended that schools “form good links with police and other partners to share information.”59 Police officers working on Prevent compiled lists of primary and secondary schools in their neighborhoods, sorted by the level of risk they were thought to present, and sought to recruit teachers as sources of intelligence. An e-mail sent by the West Midlands Police CTU in 2009 about the Channel project asked its recipients, who included schoolteachers and youth workers:
The Muslims Are Coming! Page 21