1st Sister Convicted Under Terrorism Act

**Yasir** · 22nd December 2007

Muslim thought crime

This year, Britain has witnessed the convictions of what human rights advocates have, not without justification, labelled ‘thought crimes’. These convictions would be the very first of their kind in the history of the modern liberal democracy. According to George Orwell’s critically acclaimed novel 1984, in which the term was first coined, a thought crime is simply the process of thinking about a crime, as opposed to actually committing or even planning to commit it. As it is impossible to read someone’s mind, the next best thing would be to find some other indicator of what someone may be thinking, preferably the tangible possession of material that could be used to commit a crime. We all know very well that this can amount to just about anything, so prosecutors have to use a bit of additional reasoning.

Despite the overwhelming media attention given to the recent case of Samina Malik, partly because she’s the first woman to be convicted under Section 58 of the Terrorism Act 2000, as well as numerous other ironic and inchoate reasons why the media creates disproportionate hysteria, she was by no means the first thought criminal in our Orwellian post-9/11 world. In the furore over her case, people have forgotten the less media-friendly case of Muhammed Atif Siqque, the 21-year-old from Clackmannanshire, who was found guilty in September this year of the “possession of articles connected with the commission, preparation or instigation of an act of terrorism.”

Siddique was in the possession of material similar to Malik’s stock: technical information regarding the assembling of weaponry, calls for and fatwas on jihad, all of which are available to just about anyone via the World Wide Web. Furthermore, in the case of Siddique, where one key piece of information which corroborated his conviction was knowledge of how to strip down and reassemble weapons including Kalashnikov rifles and Uzi submachine guns, far more detailed instructions on the use of the weapons can be found in legal defence journals, and fully illustrated manuals have been available for purchase from retail websites.

There is no doubt that the cases of Siddique and Malik are very similar - minus one key factor: Siddique, unlike Malik, never expressed a ‘desire for martydom’. Even if such a vague poetic utterance was a possible contributory factor in the arrest of Malik, that still doesn’t explain why a young man can be found guilty under anti-terror legislation for merely possessing literature.

Siddique was a young man who had a morbid fascination with ‘jihadi’ videos. He was also found to have surfed pornography and gaming sites, like most young men. There were many circumstantial indicators that could have corroborated Siddique’s arrest and conviction, that could never be upheld in a court of law. For instance, if Siddique was another young man, of non-Asian or non-Muslim background, would his possession of such material be even remotely suspicious, let alone enough to convict him?

Source: The Muslim News