My plea to fellow Muslims: you must renounce terror
Hassan Butt
Sunday July 1, 2007
The Observer
As the bombers return to Britain, Hassan Butt, who was once a member of radical group Al-Muhajiroun, raising funds for extremists and calling for attacks on British citizens, explains why he was wrong
When I was still a member of what is probably best termed the British Jihadi Network, a series of semi-autonomous British Muslim terrorist groups linked by a single ideology, I remember how we used to laugh in celebration whenever people on TV proclaimed that the sole cause for Islamic acts of terror like 9/11, the Madrid bombings and 7/7 was Western foreign policy.
By blaming the government for our actions, those who pushed the 'Blair's bombs' line did our propaganda work for us. More important, they also helped to draw away any critical examination from the real engine of our violence: Islamic theology.
Friday's attempt to cause mass destruction in London with strategically placed car bombs is so reminiscent of other recent British Islamic extremist plots that it is likely to have been carried out by my former peers.
And as with previous terror attacks, people are again articulating the line that violence carried out by Muslims is all to do with foreign policy. For example, yesterday on Radio 4's Today programme, the mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, said: 'What all our intelligence shows about the opinions of disaffected young Muslims is the main driving force is not Afghanistan, it is mainly Iraq.'
He then refused to acknowledge the role of Islamist ideology in terrorism and said that the Muslim Brotherhood and those who give a religious mandate to suicide bombings in Palestine were genuinely representative of Islam. I left the BJN in February 2006, but if I were still fighting for their cause, I'd be laughing once again.
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I know how these terrorists are inspired
By Ed Husain*
Telegraph
02/05/2007
The recent conviction of five young British Muslim men has yet again opened the debate about how Britain, famed for its plurality and tolerance, bred home-grown terrorists. And, more important, how do we heal the divisions and communal disintegration in our cities that continue to serve as an Islamist underworld in which the rhetoric of jihad and destruction goes unchallenged?
I know how these young men are inspired to wreak death and destruction because I have first-hand experience of being in one such cell. I have since seen the error of my ways.
In 1995, at college in east London, I was part of the secret cell structure of Hizb ut-Tahrir, an extremist organisation banned in most Muslim countries and rejected by most mosques in Britain. Yet the group had a free rein on university and college campuses, where it advocated that British Muslims were a community whose allegiance lay not with Queen and country, but to a coming caliph in the Middle East.
This caliph would instruct us to act as agents of the caliphate in Britain, and open a "home front" by assisting the expansionist state. We believed that all Arab governments were not sufficiently "Islamic" and were liable to removal; entire populations would submit to the army of the caliph, or face extinction.
I was part of a generation of young British Muslim teenagers who were raised in mono-cultural ghettoes, disconnected from mainstream Britain and receptive to the message of separatism preached by Arab political asylum seekers. I was indoctrinated in my cell meetings as I studied the books written by Islamist ideologues such as Taqiuddin al-Nabhani and Syed Qutb, angry men struggling in a post-colonial Middle East to find meaning in a new world.
We brought al-Nabhani's teachings to life in my secret meetings: Britain, France, America and Russia were enemies and the army of the Islamist state would "march on Downing Street and raise the Islamist flag above Westminster". All this can easily be dismissed as extremist claptrap. But the mindset and ideology that spouts this worldview - Islamism - is entrenched in certain sections of the Muslim community in Britain.
Terrorism begins with a less extreme shade of Islamism, and in many cases Saudi-inspired Wahhabism - unless we understand the root causes of the theology of terror, we will not be able to defeat it.
I recall my Islamist days when my mind was closed to an alternative argument: there was only one way - my group's way. All others, including fellow Muslims, were wrong and heading for hell. To argue that dialogue will win over extremist Islamists is a myth; theirs is a mindset that is not receptive to alternative views, and does not recognise the sacred nature of all human life.
Wahhabism and segments of Islamism are defined by their rejection of mainstream Muslim teachings and age-old spiritual practices, literalist readings of scripture devoid of scholarly guidance, and a hell-bent commitment to confronting the West. Moderate Muslims have common cause with the West to extinguish extremism in our midst.
As long as it remains legal for extremists in Britain to plan and finance Islamist attempts to mobilise the Muslim masses in the Middle East, and prepare an army for "jihad as foreign policy", there will always be a segment of this movement that will take jihad to its logical conclusion and act immediately, without leadership.
The rhetoric of jihad introduced by Hizb ut-Tahrir in my days was the preamble to 7/7 and several other attempted attacks. By proscribing Hizb ut-Tahrir, we would send a strong message to extremists that Britain will not tolerate intolerance. Yes, we are a free country with a proud tradition of liberty, but it has always had limits.
In 1991, Omar Bakri, then leader of Hizb ut-Tahrir, called for the assassination of John Major - we ignored it. In 1997, Osama bin Laden declared a jihad against the West - we ignored it.
Today, in our midst, Hizb ut-Tahrir calls for an expansionist, violent, totalitarian Islamist state - and we continue to ignore it. There is no quick fix to the problem of home-grown terrorism, but banning Hizb ut-Tahrir would be an excellent first step, sending a strong signal to aspiring terrorists that Britain has not changed the rules of game. We no longer play that game.
* author of The Islamist: Why I Joined Radical Islam in Britain, What I Saw Inside and Why I Left
6 comments:
I confess to finding Peter Hitchens peculiarly fascinating.
Like Joe I disagree with him about a whole bunch of things, but I also allow for the possibility that he may be proved right occasionally.
For example, I personally believe that free immigration leads to a more open & dynamic society and on the whole the benefits out weigh the costs.
That being said I don't think Hitchens's cultural conservative arguement is a silly one; his arguement on immigration is that shared values and respect for the institutions of a free country - free speech, community, rule of law, tradition - evolve from within a culture and are undermined by mass immigration which he believes atomises society. Like I said, I have a more optimistic view of immigration on the whole, but I don't discount Hitchens arguement, there may be something to it.
This takes me to Peter Hitchens' recent blog on the latest terrorist attempts in London and Glasgow. Some of the stuff in it I agree with, while other stuff I'm not so sure about (to say the least). Anyway, read it and make up your own mind:
The Great War Against Flannel
'I have just taken a stroll along Haymarket, outside the 'Tiger Tiger' club, and noticed that a double yellow line adorns the highway at this point. Trivial, I know, and yet the following thought occurs to me. Once upon a time, the centre of theatregoing London was patrolled by police officers on foot, day and night.
These were men who knew their beat in detail and would instantly have spotted something odd, like a car parked on a double yellow line. Yet so far as I can gather, it was ambulancemen who actually noticed something unusual about the Mercedes. I'd add here that the earliest account I read of this incident, in the London 'Evening Standard' of 29th June, contains another detail I haven't seen in other reports of the event.
It quotes a bar worker saying " I have been told there was a Mercedes driving along Haymarket at around 1.30am when the driver swerved and hit some bins outside Tiger Tiger. The driver then got out and legged it. The bouncers had a look at the car and they found gas cylinders and nails in the boot. And that's when they called the police."
Since then a rather different version, of ambulancemen seeing gas filling the car, has become the generally accepted one. But what about the car hitting the bins, and the driver running away? If these things happened, mightn't they have caused an alert constable to act?
Luckily, it doesn't matter this time. For whatever reason, the car was discovered. And for whatever reason, the planned explosion didn't happen. But remember that this place is one of the most intensively watched areas on earth, thanks to a great multitude of Closed Circuit TV cameras. When I was making my recent programme on the assault on civil liberties, I visited an underground control centre from which such cameras were controlled. There's no doubt the area is intensively monitored. But those who watch the screens will not necessarily see or hear everything as it happens. That would be physically impossible. Nor, as they are not on the streets themselves, would they have any chance of bumping into witnesses who had seen something a bit strange, not strange enough to make them call 999, but strange enough for them to tell a passing copper
Did the operators notice the car, illegally parked, or the clumsy driver running away among all the other incidents of a Central London midnight? Were these things even picked up? Comprehensive as the coverage is, it cannot catch everything that happens. I wonder what the footage shows. The other car, interestingly, was towed away from Cockspur Street by parking enforcers who had no idea how dangerous it might have been - though they did notice the smell of petrol and called the police - after they had taken it away. So, while police deserve credit for their bravery in defusing the Haymarket Bomb, they did not actually spot either car. That was left to ambulancemen and parking wardens.
Why do I stress this? Because it increasingly seems to me that a return to proper foot patrolling would, in many ways be our best safeguard against terror - far better than stupid laws abolishing English liberty, or wasting yet more millions on ridiculous self-important organisations such as MI5, who (despite their laughable fictional portrayal in 'Spooks') appear unable to penetrate a wet paper bag, let alone an Islamist organisation.
Pc Plod would have spotted both cars in central London. Pc Plod, slowly, repetitively treading the streets of urban and suburban Britain, getting to know shopkeepers, petrol station attendants, the vendors of gas cylinders, nosey neighbours and the rest, would be quite likely to hear about the funny people who have moved in at number 94, who never have a barbecue but buy a lot of gas, who are visited at odd times by unfriendly types in Islamic dress; or about the strange bloke who recently bought several cans of petrol, but hardly drives. Why would someone like that want a big SUV anyway?
That's my plan for greater security, plodding, banal, boring old police work, getting to know a place and its people, so well that you notice when something is a bit out of the ordinary, listening to gossip that at first seems trivial but may contain the decisive clue. You could be grandiose (like MI5 and the 'security' correspondents who love to belabour us with jargon) and call this 'intelligence'. But I don't care what you call it. I think it would work.
Whereas I have never understood what connection there is between the things the government wants - more intrusive security services, more restrictions on law-abiding people, identity cards, detention without trial and the rest, and serious action against terrorists. I have yet to see any proof that our new security apparatus has ever predicted a serious terrorist attack, or prevented one - though it has picked up the occasional fantasists, and grossly inflated their importance. In one recent trial, a man was jailed for 30 years (originally 40 until it was reduced on appeal) for making plans in exercise books. They were wicked plans and his intent was villainous. But that was as far as he had got and I am by no means sure he would ever have got much further. In another case, an alert shop employee had reported strangely large purchases of weedkiller. What if he hadn't bothered? It was that alert citizen, not the apparatus of 'security' that achieved the breakthrough.
As for the response to the attack on Glasgow airport, I absolutely fail to see why cancelling dozens of flights, detaining passengers on their grounded planes, and forcing thousands of wholly innocent people to queue in the rain for hours did any good at all. On the contrary, it greatly increased the disruption caused by the attack. This is just trying to look effective, long after the event.
The same goes for the restrictions on vehicles approaching airports, introduced once more too late to do any good. Had it really never occurred to anyone before that airports might be targets, and that suicide bombers might drive up to them in cars? Well, of course it had. It was a matter of proportion. It just hadn't seemed worthwhile to do much about it, any more than most of us look up as we step out of our front doors each morning, to check that an eagle is not about to drop a tortoise on our heads
If one of your neighbours were slain by such a dropped tortoise, you probably would check the sky for a few days afterwards, but you'd know as you did it that the chances of it happening again were slight. Anyway, you'd increase your risk (already much greater) of being run down by a youth riding his bike on the pavement, as you looked up. These ritual responses just make life more miserable and inconvenient, without making it safer.They can even divert you from more important vigilance.
But what I really can't bear are the 'security correspondents', propagandists for more attacks on our liberty, prosing on with their jargon about 'clean skins' and 'Al Qaeda' and 'improvised explosive devices'. I have heard and read several of them claiming that the idea of putting explosives in cars is something that British-based terrorists have learned from Iraq. What garbage. The IRA were using car bombs for decades before Anthony Blair even knew where Iraq was. People do seem to have forgotten completely that we endured years of IRA terror, with very little increased 'security' and a great deal of sensible stoicism. Worse, people have started laundering the IRA's reputation. I recently heard a senior policeman say that the IRA 'gave warnings'. Well, sort of, and sometimes, but not so as to avoid killing a large number of people, including small children.
Anyway (and let us thank heaven for it) our home-grown Islamist bombers seem to have tried to make their supposedly Baghdad-inspired car bombs without any actual explosive, perhaps because they couldn't get hold of any. This could explain why they didn't go off. I don't know, but the absence of explosive, and of competence in general, in these recent attacks seems quite significant, and casts doubt on the claims about 'Al Qaeda' which we also have to put up with.
Now, if there really were such an organisation as 'Al Qaeda ', with its terrifying reach across the world, don't you think it might have been able to find some explosive for its operatives, if they were its operatives? Listen carefully to these experts and you will often hear them qualifying their use of 'Al Qaeda'. But that's always lower down the story. Always, near the top, they will intone that such-and-such has 'all the hallmarks of Al Qaeda'. What are these 'hallmarks', by the way? So far as I can work out, simply that the incident appears to be the work of Islamists and has a terrorist character.
Carbombes_468x338_2 They know (surely?) that there is no actual centralised body plotting these attacks, that the only uniting thread is an ideology, not a chain of command or even a source of cash. But it suits them to prose on in this way because it avoids having to explain what that ideology is, and what motivates it. It also makes them sound knowledgeable when they haven't really much of a clue. I noticed one of these geniuses once again parading his standard theory of British-born Muslims being trained in Pakistan and returning here to do their dirty work. Yet the alleged culprits of the current events don't seem to fit this pattern at all.
Part of the motive of the Islamist ideology which is the only thing that actually unites these terrorists is the West's perfectly correct past support for Israel. Another part of its motive is the West's more recent reduction of that support and its decision to put pressure on Israel to make territorial concessions. This policy change was brought about by a long campaign of terror, by the PLO and others. Concessions to terrorism breed more terrorism, for they show that it works.
Which leads me to another reason for there being so much terror in this country. This stems from the encouragement our government has given to every terrorist in the world by our abject surrender to the Provisional IRA. Anyone who wishes to alter our government's policies knows that its 'tough' rhetoric dissolves into compliance and negotiation, once they have hit us hard enough. I am always amazed that people still regard this disastrous collapse, a signal to all our enemies that we are vulnerable to violent pressure, as some kind of non-partisan triumph worthy of prizes and smiles.
And then of course there is the issue of Iraq, our role in the invasion and bloody war in that country, bitterly resented by Arabs and Muslims. To a lesser extent, though it will grow, there is also resentment of what is happening in Afghanistan, where each week brings more accounts of civilians being killed, mainly in American bombing raids. Might these things possibly lead unhinged, vengeful and murderous minds to do terrorist acts in Britain, rather than in countries not associated with the Iraq and Afghan interventions? It seems at least possible. In which case, the argument that we might block up the wellsprings of terror by intervening in Iraq and Afghanistan is not merely undermined, but actually reversed. And that is why the authorities are so reluctant to discuss it. How they prefer to claim that Islamists want to destroy us because they ‘hate our way of life'. And they may well do so. I don't like our way of life much myself, and my reaction to the drunken, debauched late-night streets of a British city is not far distant from that of a devout Muslim. But I do not imagine for a moment that bloody murder and bombs would make things better. Do Muslims? In most cases, I really rather doubt it.
If people in Britain really fear the increase of Islamic influence over our society, then they should be much more concerned about reversing the multiculturalism that has encouraged and enabled Islam to extend its influence here. They should be much more concerned about the mass immigration that is establishing Islam here as a significant force. Yet many of the neo-conservatives who rail against Islam are keen supporters of open borders and mass immigration. And they should be much more concerned about the collapse of our own Christian religion, which some supporters of the Iraq and Afghan wars belittle and attack. Do they really prefer Sharia law to the Sermon on the Mount? For this may be the choice they have unwittingly made.
Just in case anyone tries to avoid the arguments above, by claiming that my words are some sort of justification or excuse for terrorist acts, I should add the following. I hate terrorism with a passion. It poisons and corrupts every cause that adopts it. Only recently I was pointing out to an Israeli friend just how much Zionism had been damaged by the terror of the Stern Gang in the 1940s, and how much Israel has been damaged by the rise to power of former terrorists there, and its continued refusal to condemn, unambiguously, such events as Deir Yassin or the murder of Lord Moyne.
The cause of Irish nationalism, with which I have much sympathy, has also been gravely damaged by the resort to terror. A British patriot and an Irish patriot actually have much in common (I think the possibility of the two getting along together is beautifully, if fancifully, portrayed in Patrick O'Brian's wonderful historical novels about the profoundly British, Protestant Captain Jack Aubrey RN, and his close friend, the profoundly Irish Roman Catholic, Dr Stephen Maturin), and an immeasurable amount of good things has been lost in the sad war between our peoples. But, once terrorism seized the leadership of the Irish cause, the British patriot had to turn away, and fight in defence of his own.
I think I was prevented for many years from appreciating the justice of the Arab complaint against Israel, because that case was made only by men who preferred death and blood to compromise.
Great harm will be done to the cause of those of us who view British intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan as wrong, by terrorist murder or attempts at it, supposedly justified (as if grief at the deaths of innocents could be assuaged by the deaths of more innocents) by 'anger' at these things.
But that does not excuse silly attempts to make terrorism into a pretext for an attack on irreplaceable liberties; nor does it excuse an intellectual laziness which keeps us from examining the real nature of the problem, by churning out flannel about 'Al Qaeda' or the 'War on Terror'.
Long but fascinating article, essential reading for anyone interested in understanding 7/7. Hassan Butt, who knew the ringleader Mohammad Sidique Khan, is mentioned several times, so I'll blog it here.
My brother the bomber
Shiv Malik
Prospect June 2007 Issue 135
I had come to Beeston in September 2005 on assignment with the BBC. Jim Booth, a producer with the Manchester news and current affairs department, had asked if I would like to help a research team and a scriptwriter put together a factual drama based on the lives of the four 7/7 bombers—three of whom came from Beeston—that the BBC was planning to air on the first anniversary of the bombings. I had lived in Leeds for many years, and so I was familiar with Beeston's shabbiness. Many journalists who landed there after 7/7 saw its poverty and assumed that there must be a direct link to the bombings. But the more we learned about Beeston and its bombers, the more this hypothesis turned out to be a red herring. Although poverty and exclusion are themes that wound their way through the lives of the Beeston bombers, it is the internal frictions within a traditional Pakistani community in Britain that best explain the radicalisation that led to the deaths of 56 people.
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For simplicity's sake, contemporary Islam can be divided into four schools: traditionalists, fundamentalists, modernists and Islamists. Unlike the split between Christian fundamentalists and other Christians, both Islamic traditionalists and fundamentalists lean towards scriptural literalism. The main difference between the groups is how they regard the 1,400 years of theological innovation since Muhammad's death.
While traditionalists will not hesitate to draw upon centuries of scholarly argument, evolution in Sharia law and changes in accepted Islamic practice, fundamentalist movements—of which the Saudi-backed Wahhabis are the most important—reject all theological innovation since the life of Muhammad and his closest companions. Muslims, they say, should pay attention only to the holy book and the collected sayings and doings of Muhammad. This is why, over the last 50 years, Wahhabi authorities in Saudi Arabia have demolished more than 300 historical structures in the holy cities of Medina and Mecca. They want to create a timeless Islam.
The third and smallest group are the theological modernisers—two figures well known in Britain are Tariq Ramadan and Ziauddin Sardar—who say that Muslims should look beyond the literalism of the Koran and seek out the meaning behind the words. What counts in the modern world is not the actions of Muhammad in 7th-century Arabia, but the principles that inspired those actions. Most liberal Muslims belong to this group, but they are a small minority, both within Muslim societies and in Europe.
The fourth school, Islamism, is a relatively recent offshoot of fundamentalism. It emerged in response to the final demise of Islamic authority with the fall of the Ottoman empire after the first world war, but harks back to the early days of the caliphate, when the Koran was the basis for law-making. It sees Islam not just as a religion, but as a socioeconomic system. The Koran is God's version of Das Kapital. Islamists pick and choose teachings from across the ages, and while they read script literally and share a religious zeal with the fundamentalists, they are more akin to an ideological movement than a religious one. Their style of work is often compared with the student far left of the 1960s and 1970s.
Butt says that the war between these schools, which has been playing out across the Muslim world for decades, has ripped into Britain's generation gap—and that the Islamists are winning.
In ten years of recruiting, Butt says that he always wanted a theological clash, but it never came. "The traditionalists and the modernisers just wanted to run their own study circles without interference." On the other hand, if the jihadi network see someone with strong Islamic tendencies, "the moment he leaves his house in the morning, they're there until he returns to his house in the evening." Butt also says that unlike the traditionalists, the network won't judge a potential recruit on his actions. "If the network see a drug dealer or someone from a gang, they will not condemn him like the traditionalists and say 'oh brother haram, haram [forbidden].' What they'll try to do is to utilise his energy."
There is also an economic dimension to the outflanking of the traditionalists. Since most of traditional Sunni Islam is devoid of an organised establishment, the money for running a mosque normally comes directly from the local Muslim community. In Britain, this means that in order to maintain community harmony, the teachings remain bland and the imam will avoid theological controversy. It also means that once there is enough money to run the mosque, there is no incentive to find new believers.
On the other side, British fundamentalists and Islamists are centrally funded. It is estimated that over the last two decades, Saudi Arabia has set aside $2-3bn a year to promote Wahhabism in other countries. It is not known how much of that money has come to Wahhabi groups in Britain, but one major recipient has been the Leeds Grand Mosque.
Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and Hizb ut-Tahrir are also centrally funded. They gather money from members, pass it to a central administration which then hands it back out again. These groups' lack of local community focus means that they have to compete harder for "market share," which has made them hungrier and more efficient.
So while traditionalist mosques carry on recruiting imams from back home, keep their sermons in Urdu and other Asian languages and neglect to publish material to engage new members, the Wahhabis and the Islamists give their sermons in English and take their recruitment on to the streets of Pakistani or Bangladeshi ghettos such as Beeston Hill. They have also encouraged the schooling of British-born imams, have learned to use the internet and have generally come to understand what makes the second generation tick. The Wahhabis and Islamists win new members by contrasting their galvanising message of world Islamic justice with the inactivity and irrationality of the first-generation traditionalists. (Among those who turn to violence, such as Khan, their beliefs are often a mix of fundamentalism and Islamism.) And by arguing that the traditionalists—with their saint worship, mysticism and forced marriages—have been corrupted by weakness and Hinduism, they provide useful arguments to those Pakistani and Bangladeshi youths who want to cling on to Islam but throw off their parents' constraints.
For all these reasons, many British Muslim youths who had drifted towards fundamentalist or Islamist organisations were susceptible to the violent global jihadism that emerged in the mid-1990s. This is plain from the anti-traditionalist rhetoric of Sidique Khan's al Qaeda-produced video suicide note. The video is 27 minutes and 29 seconds long. Most of it is filled up by a speech from senior al Qaeda member Ayman al-Zawahiri, but the central feature is Khan's address, which runs to six minutes and 11 seconds. It has two parts, but it is only the first—about British foreign policy—that ever gets played in the mainstream media. Part two, which makes up three quarters of Khan's speech, is addressed to Muslims in Britain. Here is an excerpt: "Our so-called scholars today are content with their Toyotas and semi-detached houses. They seem to think that their responsibilities lie in pleasing the kufr instead of Allah. So they tell us ludicrous things, like you must obey the law of the land. Praise be God! How did we ever conquer lands in the past if we were to obey this law?… By Allah these scholars will be brought to account, and if they fear the British government more than they fear Allah then they must desist in giving talks, lectures and passing fatwas, and they need to sit at home and leave the job to the real men, the true inheritors of the prophets."
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In the end, the BBC drama was never made. The script was finished in good time, but the commissioners decided it wouldn't work as a drama. I was also told that the script was "anti-Muslim." But as we approach the second anniversary of 7/7, Beeston's story deserves to be told.
Khan may have felt indignant about western foreign policy, as many anti-war campaigners do, but that wasn't the reason he led a cell of young men to kill themselves and 52 London commuters. At the heart of this tragedy is a conflict between the first and subsequent generations of British Pakistanis—with many young people using Islamism as a kind of liberation theology to assert their right to choose how to live. It is a conflict between tradition and individuality, culture and religion, tribalism and universalism, passivity and action.
When it is stated like this, the problem of Islamic extremism looks depressingly intractable. The government's first reaction following 7/7 was to consult with a wide range of Muslim opinion, including the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) and similar bodies. The government now argues that the MCB and some of its affiliates are as much part of the problem as of the solution, and the new initiatives to tackle radicalism stress the promotion of British values at a grassroots level and working more closely with the few liberal modernisers in Britain's Muslim community. But maybe all that we can do now is remain vigilant and wait for the tide in the battle for Islam's soul to turn in the west's favour.
According to the official account of 7/7, at around 8.30am at King's Cross station on the day of the bombings, "four men fitting their descriptions are seen hugging. They appear happy, even euphoric."
This euphoria is a well-documented phenomenon of suicide bombing. In the closing scenes of the BBC drama that never was, Jermaine Lindsay turns to Khan and says, "I want my children to be proud of me." Khan replies, "They will be." And as the four bombers move through King's Cross, Khan suddenly stops, turns to the rest of the group and says: "There are no goodbyes, only a lapse of time. We will see our families soon." The four then embrace and everyone moves off. As Khan sits on the train, the sounds of the underground fade away into silence, except for the rise and fall of a child's breath, his own child's breath, in his ear. He realises that this is a final test of his faith, and then, just before he blows the carriage apart, he sighs and smiles.
This Quilliam Foundation could be a very very good thing.
Ex-extremists call for 'Western Islam'
BBC News
22/04/08
Discussing hardline Islamist ideologies and violent extremism isn't exactly the stuff of fashionable London parties. But the British Museum is on Tuesday the surprising venue for theologians, thinkers and socialite Jemima Khan, all coming together to support the launch of a new think tank to counter Al Qaeda's world-view. And this seemingly bizarre gathering exposes the question at the heart of the whirlwind romance between the Quilliam Foundation and policymakers.
Is the launch of this campaigning organisation a step forward in the battle of ideas - or just another group with some kind of official pat on the head - but no credibility on the street? Since the London bombings of July 2005 a whole string of Muslim organisations have come forward, claiming to have the answers to violent extremism.
The Muslim Council of Britain, the main umbrella body, has been marginalised in an ongoing political row - but two others touted as significant players have had little impact. Vast sums of money are being spent on research into violent extremism, and entire government teams have sprung from nowhere to try to find answers.
Then into this mix came Ed Husain. Last year he published The Islamist, his story of a life in hardline community politics. He was a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT), a global body calling for a single Islamic state across the Middle East. Husain says the hardline rhetoric of organisations like HT took him and other British teenagers to dark places - places which are the starting point on a road that leads to suicide bombing in the name of al-Qaeda.
It's an alluring argument and the book is a compelling read. One government official e-mailed scores of colleagues inside Whitehall late last year, effectively instructing them to read it.
Now Ed Husain and another, less well-known, man, Maajid Nawaz, are launching Quilliam (named after a 19th century British convert) as the counter-argument to extremism. They say Islam in its purest universal form, as the last message of God to mankind, sits perfectly well in modern multicultural societies - providing that Muslims find the right way to express their faith. And if British Muslims rediscover the purity of the faith, they argue, they can cast off the political and cultural baggage that would see Islam as the enemy of the West. This is, however, an argument fraught with danger - which is why Quilliam's progress will be interesting to watch.
Ed Husain's book has annoyed many people who would otherwise be on his side, including serious Muslim thinkers who were once of the same radical mindset as him. Some Muslims who advise government have raised eyebrows over his links with Conservative thinkers. The author himself is a Labour supporter who says the challenge is not party-political. Supporters say he has been the victim of community sniping because he has had the guts to stand up and be counted and to reveal, warts and all, what lies beneath the surface.
This is where Maajid Nawaz comes in. For years, Essex-born Nawaz was one of the most influential figures in Islamist politics in the UK. And he paid for it by being jailed in Egypt for membership of Hizb ut-Tahrir - witnessing the torture of other prisoners and fearing for his own life. But before finding himself in a Cairo cell, he personally recruited to the cause the very men and women Quilliam is now targeting.
He is known among communities around the country and delivers talks rooted deep in Koranic theology, rather than the writings of the ideologues who provided al-Qaeda's intellectual foundations. In short, he has street credibility. The two men and Quilliam's other founders form an attractive package - effective communicators who believe they can join the dots between communities, counter-extremism strategy and young Muslims. But it's this determination to influence government which will be the most challenging issue for Quilliam.
Islamist political groups will use any kind of association between the think tank and policy makers as an attack, accusing it of doing ministers' bidding. If Quilliam is to have success with its message it will need to manage this relationship very carefully. Another organisation, the Radical Middle Way, delivers fascinating lecture tours by progressive Islamic thinkers - but it is dismissed by hardliners because it received Foreign Office funding. Other schemes involving government cash have also struggled to avoid accusations of "state-approved Islam".
So can Quilliam reach the young men and women who need most to hear the message? Quilliam's strategy is to bathe in the media and political spotlight - but to back this up with a coherent grassroots campaign of rigorous ideas. And so it hopes to become a rolling ball gathering the moss of former Islamists - and the more moss it gathers, the greater its momentum in communities.
Its founders have deliberately avoided using the difficult theological term of "reformation" - but the think tank is determined to sell the idea of a "Western Islam". The organisation initially in its sights is Hizb ut-Tahrir.
By coincidence, it sent out an e-mail on the morning of Quilliam's launch, calling on supporters to "Stand for Islam" against the onslaught of Western values. It appears to be feeling the heat.
BBC Today Program
24/03/09
0850: The government is to announce changes to its anti-terrorism strategy which will include tackling the ideology that can lead to violent extremism. Maajid Nawaz, a former member of the Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir, and now head of the counter-terrorism think tank the Quilliam Foundation, tells reporter Jack Izzard that militant Islamist groups pose a serious threat, even if they do not condone violence.
Islamic scholar Tahir ul-Qadri issues terrorism fatwa
BBC News
2 March 2010
An influential Muslim scholar has issued a global ruling against terrorism and suicide bombing. Dr Tahir ul-Qadri, from Pakistan, says his 600-page judgement, known as a fatwa, completely dismantles al-Qaeda's violent ideology.
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Interesting that Douglas Murray doesn't like Quilliam
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