Salafi & Islamist Londoners

[Abu wakee]

Salafi and Islamist Londoners

By Robert Lambert MBE

THIS PAPER HIGHLIGHTS the paradoxical position of certain Salafi and Islamist communities in London who have consistently demonstrated skill, courage and commitment in countering al-Qaida propaganda and recruitment activity while simultaneously facing ill-founded criticism from other Muslim communities and secular political lobbyists for creating the conditions that gave rise to the al-Qaida phenomenon.

MUSLIM LONDON

Muslim communities are more richly diverse in London than in almost any other European city. Heterogeneous not just in terms of ethnic and geographic backgrounds, but also in respect of allegiances to different strands of Islamic beliefs and practices. Nonetheless, in the aftermath of 7/7 the myriad components of Muslim London were united as one in shock and incomprehension in response to an appalling terrorist attack in the capital, carried out by Muslims from outside London in the name of al- Qaida. Only in small pockets of Muslim London was any comprehension to be found. For Salafis and Islamists – two minority communities in Muslim London, comprehension of 7/7 was sharpened by the experience of countering the adverse impact of al-Qaida propaganda and recruitment activity over a sustained period in London. While ethnic, cultural and political diversity also flourishes within Salafi and Islamist communities, it is pertinent to highlight the common features of Salafi communities and the common features of Islamist communities in London. Firstly, in religious terms, London Salafi communities adhere to a universal model where stripped of pejorative usage, the term “Salafi” is simply “a name derived from salaf, ‘pious predecessors,’ given to a reform movement that emphasizes the restoration of Islamic doctrines to pure form, adherence to the Qur'an and Sunnah, rejection of the authority of later interpretations, and maintenance of the unity of ummah”1 — that is, a Muslim fraternity. Similarly, London Islamist communities adhere to a universal model where ‘‘Islamist’’ is merely a term ‘‘used to describe an Islamic political or social activist’’2 Although minority status applies particularly to London Salafi communities, it may also be ascribed to London Islamist communities. There is, of course, interplay and cross-pollination between Salafi and Islamist identities within burgeoning multiethnic Muslim communities in the capital. Nonetheless, more traditional, quietist strands of Deobandi, Barelvi and Sufi oriented Islamic practice eclipse both groupings numerically and in terms of influence in the capital as elsewhere in the UK. For their part, Sufi Londoners are as diverse as Salafi Londoners, yet their defining allegiance to individual religious practice and quietist politics has led to many being courted by politicians and political lobbyists as role models and bulwarks against the influence of violent extremism and “radicalisation”.
As the same politicians and lobbyists generally conflate violent extremism with Salafi (often pejoratively referred to as “Wahhabi”) communities and Islamist communities, this approach has exacerbated preexisting intra-communal tensions. Indeed, some Sufis have been involved in local turf wars with Salafis and Islamists for significant periods over the last two decades in the capital as elsewhere in the UK. Prominent Sufi spokespersons in the US and UK had issued regular warnings about the dangers posed by Salafi and Islamist communities for many years before finding receptive audiences in Washington and Westminster post 9/11. Thus, the Sufi scholar Abdul-Hakim Murad (otherwise Tim Winter, a lecturer at Cambridge University) was concerned to ensure that Islamophobia generated by 9/11 was directed at “Wahhabis” and not “traditional” Islam: The lava-stream that flows from Ibn Taymiyya3 …has a habit of closing minds and hardening hearts..... The movement for traditional Islam will, we hope, become enormously strengthened in the aftermath of the recent events4, accompanied by a mass exodus from Wahhabism, leaving behind only a merciless hardcore of well-financed zealots . …Only a radical amputation of this kind will save Islam’s name, and the physical safety of Muslims, particularly women, as they live and work in Western cities.5 If 9/11 opened doors for aggrieved Sufis to meet US and UK policy-makers, 7/7 allowed them unprecedented access to mainstream UK media increasingly fixated with “homegrown terrorism” and the “radicalisation” process. Thus, in January 2007, Abdul- Hakim Murad explained his concerns about “Wahhabism” in the alarmist television programme Undercover Mosque: [Wahhabism’s] principle is totalitarian; it’s highly judgemental; it has no track record of dealing with other sorts of Islam or unbelievers with any kind of respect. If you are outside the small circle of the true believer you are going to hell and, therefore, you should be treated with contempt.6 One small part of London policing, the Muslim Contact Unit (MCU) in the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) has found the exact opposite to be the reality on the streets of Brixton in South London where a Salafi (“Wahhabi”) community has been at the hub of pro-active partnership work aimed at tackling the influence of violent extremism since 2002. According to police, courtesy and respect, not “contempt” has been the defining characteristic of Salafi attitudes towards non-Muslim partners in this crucial endeavour. Interestingly, the doyen of the BBC media school of uncompromising interviews, Jeremy Paxman, failed to expose the same kind of Sufi bias behind a Policy Exchange anti-Salafi report The Hijacking of British Islam when interviewing Dean Godson, the right-wing think-tank’s research director, on BBC Newsnight. Rather, the fact that the report’s researchers were described as being Sufi Muslims was taken as proof positive of its sensitivity to the report’s Salafi victims. However, if Salafi communities bore the brunt of that particular expose, Islamist communities can point to as much pejorative research attention from the same think-tank and like-minded lobbyists. The publication and promotion of When Progressives Meet Reactionaries in 2006 was part of a successful campaign by lobbyists to present UK Islamist groups as a subversive threat to the UK and democracy generally. Taken in conjunction with a plethora of best-selling books on the topic, Londoners searching for an explanation for 7/7 were left in no doubt that Islamists bore a heavy responsibility for fomenting the conditions that created it. “Reformed Islamist radicals” led by Muslim Londoner Ed Hussein have been at the forefront of this media campaign describing Islamism as posing a threat to Western stability in much the same way that Communism was understood to do during the Cold War. In consequence, a significant number of non- Muslim Londoners have gained their first and only insight into Muslim London through the lens of Ed Hussein’s best selling autobiographical account in The Islamist. Again, an astonishing suspension of critical analysis allows experienced journalists and commentators to attach unwarranted significance to Hussein’s minor role in fringe student politics in early 1990s Muslim London when assessing the causes of 7/7. In the UK, Hizb ut-Tahrir campaigns for Islamic rule (a caliphate or khilafa) in the Muslim world without recourse to terrorism. It is a fringe, extremist Muslim group that struggles to sustain the interest of its young student members who get easily bored with its relentless, repetitive political campaigning. It, therefore, has a high turnover of young students like Ed Hussein, the overwhelming majority of whom do not subsequently become terrorists or neo-conservative media pundits. To describe Hizb ut-
Tahrir as a radicalising conveyor belt for terrorism, as Hussein does, is hardly warranted and discloses a lack of knowledge of terrorism: Home-grown British suicide bombers are a direct result of Hizb ut-Tahrir disseminating ideas of jihad, martyrdom, confrontation, and anti-Americanism, and nurturing a sense of separation among British Muslims.7 Instead, in important respects, Hizb ut- Tahrir (HT) resembles the secular Socialist Workers Party (SWP) who for many years faced the same difficulty in maintaining the initial interest of UK students in a vanguard movement with no credible strategy for achieving its revolutionary goals. Just as left wing terrorist groups ridiculed the SWP as timid ‘armchair revolutionaries’ or ‘weekend activists’, so too al-Qaida propagandists dismiss HT on exactly the same basis. Interestingly, the slavish media promotion of Hussein’s opportunistic account fails to acknowledge the significance of his conversion to the same Sufi school as Abdal-Hakim Murad8. It is worth
reflecting whether experienced journalists investigating Provisional IRA terrorism during the Troubles would ever have placed the same credence on the memoirs of a former armchair Irish republican activist with no experience of terrorism, the zeal of a convert to Loyalist Protestantism and the lure of celebrity status clouding his judgment.

(continued...)

[Abu wakee]

Stigmatizing London’s Minority Faith Communities

Unlike their Muslim detractors, Salafi andIslamist communities refuse to offer concessions to the tastes of secular London’s elite. However, in standing by their religious principles in the face of powerful opposition, Salafi and Islamist communities are following a little regarded London tradition. Just as London has played host over many centuries to a plethora of vibrant, divergent and competing strands of Judaism and Christianity, the capital is now offering the same hospitality to diverse believers in the third and concluding Abrahamic faith. In the same way
that popularist9 politicians and opinion formers dangerously conflated minority sections of London’s Jewish communities and minority sections of London’s Christian communities with terrorism in the past, so too do their latter day counterparts describe the capital’s Salafi and Islamist communities as being intrinsically linked to al-Qaida terrorism. Significantly, the reasons for each pejorative conflation are comparable in each of the three cases. By the same token, reference to the two earlier cases helps illuminate the position of Salafi and Islamist communities in contemporary London. “Minority” is, therefore, used to describe particular subsections of religious communities in London. This is to take the term away from its familiar application to ethnic and cultural minorities. In doing so this paper challenges an established academic and practitioner bias in favour of secularism and against faith-based identity. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, terrorist attacks against the capital by a
small group of London-based Jewish anarchists was used by popularist politicians and commentators to invoke and incite anti- Semitism towards peaceful, hardworkingLondon Jewish immigrants. While all sections of contemporary, diverse Jewish London faced anti-Semitic ‘guilt by association’, it was minority, anarchist and politically radical Jewish communities in the capital that faced the greatest risk of stigmatization, disapprobation and suspicion both from other London Jewish communities and in
wider London society. Then, as now, the capital’s guardians of public tranquility, the Metropolitan Police Force (only now a Service) had the task of protecting all sections of the capital’s diverse citizenship from terrorism and the fear terrorists intend to generate and which popularist politicians often amplify by overeacting.10 On that basis,
newly-arrived London Jewish immigrant communities had as much right as any other majority or minority section of London society to expect fair and impartial policing. Such an expectation would have been warranted given the notion of policing by consent first established in the capital by Sir Richard Mayne in 1829. The extent to which
this policing model took root in the capital is highlighted in a Times editorial in 1908 which noted: The policeman in London is not merely guardian of the peace; he is the best friend of a mass of people who have no other counselor or protector. It is not hard to imagine how such an avuncular approach to community engagement might appear attractive to new immigrant Jewish Londoners familiar with more oppressive and intrusive policing models in Russia and elsewhere in contemporary Europe. However, then, as now, policing in London owed more to the consent of powerful, majority interests than the consent of stigmatized communities that lacked influence. Moreover, immigrant London Jews who were politically active in pursuit of international socialist causes at the end of the nineteenth century faced far greater risks of stigmatisation than their non-Jewish socialist comrades who were regarded as belonging to indigenous London communities. Similarly, for three decades since 1970), Irish Catholic communities in London, as well as in Northern Ireland, were regularly stigmatised and conflated with the terrorism of the Provisional IRA. Just as Irish Protestant loyalists were only rarely and mistakenly
conflated with Provisional IRA terrorists (and a consequent threat to Londoners) during that period, so too are
most Deobandi, Barelvi, Sufi, Shi’a, “cultural” or “secular” London Muslims increasingly less likely to be stigmatised as terrorists and subversives (and then only mistakenly) than Salafis and Islamists, minority Muslim Londoners who are routinely conflated with terrorism, extremism and violent radicalism by influential commentators. While the events of 9/11 and 7/7 inevitably put all London Muslims under the spotlight, it is increasingly apparent that London’s Salafi and Islamist communities (like London’s Irish Catholic nationalist and republican communities in the recent past) face the greatest risk of being cast in the role of ‘suspect communities’. Moreover, just as London Irish Catholic communities faced this very same stigmatisation, it must also be noted that their young community members were often at high risk from Provisional IRA propaganda and recruitment strategies as well. So too have young members of Salafi and Islamist communities in the UK been at risk from highly developed al-Qaida propaganda and recruitment strategies since 9/11. The adverse impact of these instances of parallel stigmatisation of minority communities as terrorists and susceptibility to terrorist recruitment is noteworthy. Salafism and Islamism, as causal or predictive factors, are no more significant to the profile of an al- Qaida terrorist than Catholicism was to the profile of a Provsional IRA terrorist. On the contrary, the fact that al-Qaida spokespersons often invoke and subvert Salafi and Islamist approaches to Islam in an attempt to legitimise their violence helps illustrate why it is that Salafi and Islamist community groups (in London as elsewhere) often have the best tools with which to undermine al-Qaida propaganda within their own youth communities.

[Abu wakee]

SALAFIS AND ISLAMISTS – POLICE
PARTNERS OR SUSPECTS?

To date, there has been scant academic interest in whether Salafi and Islamist communities might be as deserving of equal treatment as other Muslims. Instead, prevailing media wisdom acknowledges a counter-terrorism need for police to talk to “extremists” but with the caveat that such unsavory business be done “in a dark alley”. Elsewhere, comment is confined to the need for police to treat ethnic groups — especially UK Asians (principally Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs) — fairly so as to avoid alienating large sections of the community. Indeed, many Muslim groups have been quick to support the view that Salafis and Islamists are part and parcel of the extremist problem of which al-Qaeda is but one violent manifestation. Thus, when the Sufi Muslim Council (as approved by the Department of Communities and Local Government in 2006) attacked UK Salafis and Islamists as dangerous extremists, it was reminiscent of loyalist Protestant condemnation of Catholic communities as terrorist sympathisers in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. Interestingly, both the Sufi Muslim Council and the Quilliam Foundation set themselves up as being in the business of “counter radicalisation” that is, presumably, preventing young Muslims from becoming Salafi or Islamist. Those few Salafi and Islamist groups who engage proactively with police to help tackle the adverse influence of al-Qaeda propaganda feel dismayed at this development. They complain that the authorities refused to take heed when they sought to highlight the extremist problem posed by influential al- Qaida propagandists in London throughout much of the 1990s. Groups like the Sufi Muslim Council, they argue, have little knowledge of al-Qaida activity and even less street credibility to be able to tackle it. Significantly, in interviews, specialist police officers with firsthand experience of Provisional IRA community support activity in London acknowledge that one of the major lessons of that long campaign was UK counter-terrorism’s failure to adequately distinguish terrorists from the Republican Catholic communities where they sought support. Counter-terrorism had no yardstick for measuring adverse community impact, the extent of the alienation it causes, and the potential for terrorist support and recruitment it creates. Then, as now, a Catch 22 situation arises in which the absence of measurement inhibits an awareness of the problem within counter-terrorism. It is also likely that an awareness of the connectivity between terrorism and counter-terrorism is harder to envisage in the major parts of counter-terrorism that operate in isolation from communities. Indeed, a key motivational factor for the specialist officers running the MCU has been to reassure Muslim communities that they ought not to be conflated with the terrorists in the way Irish Catholics often were. . Certainly, the stereotyping, profiling, and conflating of Salafis and Islamists with al- Qaida terrorism is misleading and counterproductive. The fact that al-Qaida terrorists adapt and distort Salafi and Islamist approaches to Islam does not mean that Salafis and Islamists are implicitly linked to
terrorism or extremism — nor does it mean that individual Salafis and Islamists are likely to be terrorists or extremists. Equally, it is true that UK recruits to al-Qaida have a range of backgrounds that will sometimes
include prior affiliation to, or family associations with Deobandi, Sufi or Barelvi traditions. However, it is axiomatic that by the time they become al-Qaida suicide bombers (or other active terrorists), UK Muslim recruits have bought into an ideology that distorts strands of Salafi and Islamist thinking. Salafis and Islamists often have the best antidotes to al-Qaida propaganda… To conflate them with the problem is, to inhibit their willingness to immunise their communities against it. This does not make the additional error of conflating Salafis with Islamists since important differences exist between the communities. Instead, it acknowledges what they have in common —
effectiveness against al-Qaida propaganda and recruitment. In both Salafi and Islamist London communities, expertise arose from close ‘’street level’’ observation of al-Qaida propaganda and recruitment strategies and methodologies from as early as 1994. Many Salafis candidly admit that they were nearly won over by the extremists’ blandishments before they acquired the knowledge and skill to countermand them. Essentially insiders, these observers have witnessed and interpreted the social, religious, and political imperatives that terrorist propagandists and recruiters have employed to win support within Muslim communities. Such a vantage point has enabled them to discern three key terrorist objectives — the recruitment of foot soldiers, the recruitment of operational support members, and the encouragement of wider tacit community support. Of special value to researchers seeking to locate the trigger point at which susceptible young Muslims become radicalised is an insider observation that, in the real world, an alienated young Muslim recruited by a high mcalibre al-Qaida strategist is far more likely to become a suicide bomber than his twin brother who is recruited by Hizb ut-Tahrir.

COUNTERING AL-QAIDA

According to al-Qaida propagandist Saif al-Adl, 9/11 was intended to provoke the U.S. to “lash out militarily against the ummah” in the manner if not the scale of “the War on Terror”. “The Americans took the bait,” he continues, “and fell into our trap” Doubtless, he using hindsight to describe al-Qaida’s ability to predict the massive scale and range of the response to 9/11. Apart from falling for a familiar terrorist ploy (and thereby boosting al-Qaida’s propaganda and recruitment strategy), the war on terror failed to distinguish between inveterate al-Qaida ideologists (such as Saif al-Adl) who may well be beyond the scope of immediate negotiation and young recruits who may be susceptible to skillful intervention strategies. More importantly, the war on terror failed to take account of the extent to which young recruits to al-Qaida might easily be rehabilitated to non-violent politics if credible figures in their communities were encouraged or facilitated to undertake negotiations to that end. Such negotiations form the cornerstone of pioneering police and Muslim community interventions in
London. These initiatives have achieved modest success at the local, grassroots level in countering al-Qaida propaganda and recruitment strategies among sections of Muslim youth in London who have been targeted by recruiters and propagandists. Unlike the war on terror itself, which adopted a coercive approach to Muslim communities, these London-based police and Muslim community initiatives have adopted a non-judgmental approach and utilised negotiating skills to persuade young Muslims that al-Qaida propaganda is wrong to sanction suicide bomb attacks like 7/7. While this Muslim community outreach work took place for many years in London prior to 9/11 without police support, since 9/11 the MCU has facilitated it. . The chief characteristic of MCU support for Salafi and Islamist engagement activity with youth vulnerable to al-Qaida recruitment is empowerment and facilitation of community expertise. In the case of the Brixton Salafi community, for instance, the MCU supported effective community outreach work against the influence of al-Qaida propagandists that had been undertaken voluntarily and in isolation since 1994. Had such close partnership engagement been forged before 9/11, it may well have brought future terrorists like Richard Reid and Zacarius Mousawi to the attention of counter- terrorism policing. Nonetheless, the application of a partnership approach to countering terrorist propaganda and recruitment
is pioneering, and, therefore, in need of assessment. London policing is at its best when it supports minority groups in Christian, Jewish and Muslim communities – to isolate or alienate them is to risk playing into the hands of terrorist propagandists like Saif al-Adl.

LINK: http://www.thecordobafoundation.com/attach/Arches_issue_02x_Web.pdf

[Hamza]

In the case of the Brixton Salafi community, for instance, the MCU supported effective community outreach work against the influence of al-Qaida propagandists that had been undertaken voluntarily and in isolation since 1994. Had such close partnership engagement been forged before 9/11, it may well have brought future terrorists like Richard Reid and Zacarius Mousawi to the attention of counter- terrorism policing. Nonetheless, the application of a partnership approach to countering terrorist propaganda and recruitment

Ofcourse they didnt mention the youth who were reported to the authorities and locked up for God knows how long (without charge or trial) simply because the "salafis" thought they would get rid of ikhwanis and qutubis at the same time.

Isnt it great for Salafeeyah now that it has freed itself from all Jihad. These people dont care if you dont support the murder of non-combatants - to them anybody calling to Jihad is a terrorist.