Abdul Haqq Baker says extremists target the Brixton Mosque
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At Finsbury Park, people are still paranoid six months after Sept. 11. The mosque has a small store that sells Islamic books, radical audio and video tapes (featuring lots of throat slitting), hats, prayer mats, Aab-e-Zamzam (the holy water from Mecca) and other knick-knacks. A big Pakistani man stands guard. Can I ask a few questions about the mosque? "No." He shows me the door. I relate this to Abu Hamza and ask him for a small favor. Could he please help persuade some of his mosque associates and regulars to talk to me, even if it is off-the-record? He apologizes. "You are free to talk to anyone inside or outside the mosque, but at your own risk. People here are fed up with Muslims being used by secret services to spy on the mosque and their own brothers."
Finsbury Park and other radical mosques are Salafist, or puritanical. About 200-years-old, the Salafist movement is a newer version of what is described by many Muslim scholars as neo-Wahhabism. The main Salafist ideological principle is Takfir, the perception that secular Muslim society is heretical. Saudi Arabia is mostly Wahhabi, while the rest of the Middle East and North Africa has conformed to other branches of Sunni Islam. The new Salafists have brought Wahhabi principles together with the idea of holy struggles against the internal and external enemies of Islam. Saudi-born Osama bin Laden is not only a Wahhabi but also a Salafist. His Salafist credentials have helped him reach out far beyond the Gulf to other disaffected Sunni Muslim believers who hold grudges against the West or their own secular Muslim governments. Salafism is appealing to some, dangerous to many. I also wanted to see what Muslim life was like outside London, so I headed north. In Leicester, where there had been an al-Qaeda cell, the mosques are flourishing. "Young second-generation Muslims who were born here are increasingly turning toward religion because they need an identity, and the faith gives them that," says Ataullah Siddiqui, a research fellow at the Islamic Foundation in Leicester. Farther north is the town of Oldham, the scene last year of one of Britain's worst race riots in recent history. Some 12% of Oldham's 220,000 inhabitants are Muslim, one of the highest percentages of any British city. Three-quarters of Muslim youth in Oldham are estimated to be early school leavers. Low education levels and rising unemployment — about 20% among Muslim youth — has implications for crime, violence and gang culture in Oldham. It is a perfect recruiting ground for radicals. There is a Salafist mosque in Oldham now, and it is growing fast.
Shamim Mia, 27, leads a Muslim self-help group, Alternatives. Born and bred in Oldham of Bangladeshi parents, Mia began organizing young people in his community after the riots because, he says, "We didn't want them to be used by extremists." He has reason to be concerned. "In Oldham, we not only have racial discrimination, we have low education levels, low income levels and now, since Sept. 11, we have Islamophobia," he says. "Before, we were just Asians who were victimized. After Sept. 11, we suddenly became part of the same bunch of Islamic terrorists." Mia, a moderate, believes that young Muslims in Oldham haven't yet been "radicalized" by Salafists or other groups, but he concedes that the attraction of extremism is always present in a community that sees itself as under siege.
Another group making waves in Britain and around Europe is Hizb ut-Tahrir (Islamic Liberation Party). In a makeshift hall atop a factory in the North London district of Tottenham, Sheikh Omar Bakri, 44, a large man with a flowing beard, is surrounded by computers connected to websites of dissident groups across the Middle East. Syrian-born Bakri revels in publicity. As head of Al-Muhajiroon (the Migrant's Movement) and of Hizb ut-Tahrir, he organizes demonstrations against dictatorial regimes in the Arab world and has supported fringe anti-gay, anti-pornography and anti-Semitic groups. "I am no friend of jihadist Imams like Abu Hamza," he says. Bakri's Al-Muhajiroun and other groups have been banned from British campuses, but his new group — Hizb ut-Tahrir — is not yet restricted. "I have kept one step ahead of the law," he says.
Bakri's groups champion the return of a Caliphate — which ruled Muslims for either three decades or 600 years after the Prophet Muhammad's death, depending on which caliphs are being counted — for the 1.2-billion-strong global Muslim ummah. Though Hizb ut-Tahrir has not caught on among mainstream Muslims in the Middle East, it is fairly influential in Central Asia. Omar Bakri keeps a large red plastic tumbler on his table labeled Donations for jihad. When I ask him where he was going to send his jihadis, he nervously turns it over and says he doesn't have any money to send anyone anywhere.
Not everyone is convinced that Britain's mosques are important recruiting grounds for extremists. "I don't believe [Finsbury Park] played any role in making these guys radical," says Abdel Bari Atwan, editor of the pan-Arabic newspaper Al-Quds. The terror suspects "were radical before they got to the mosque." The majority of Muslims are not radicals, he points out. They don't go to Finsbury Park every Friday, and they are not calling for jihad.
There is a growing middle-class, educated professional group of Muslims who want both to be good British citizens and to transform society. Then there are the working class, unemployed and often uneducated Muslims, who are dissatisfied, haven't integrated well into British society and see Islam as the only alternative to the despair and racism they confront every day. They are prime targets for Abu Hamza or Omar Bakri. "They question their own identity: who they are, where they are and why everyone else is not like them," says Ziauddin Sardar. "For them, moderate Islam is a problem because Britain is a problem." In becoming radicals, he says, the young Muslims are rebelling against British society. "Our problem as Muslims is that only when we are at ease with ourselves will we be at ease with society in general."
So what now? "Ignore these radicals," Sardar says. "As the Muslim community in Britain moves to the next generation, the radicals will be increasingly marginalized. The problem is, there are too many people trying to demonize them. As they get more attention, they will only grow bigger." I wish it were so simple. One evening I watched a steady stream of young Muslim men enter the Finsbury Park mosque to spend the night. Even if they were just looking for a roof over their heads or a place to pray, they would find more than that: fellow Muslims of similar backgrounds with extreme views and eager to proselytize. Lacking education, encouragement or a feeling of belonging, these young men will continue the holy war, in Afghanistan, Europe, the U.S. — or in their own back yard. It could be said, for them jihad is not a means to an end, but an end in itself.