The World's Most Dangerous Place (38 page)

We kick down doors and break laws

We don’t care about police we live by Allah’s laws

For the cause I clap down niggaz that test me

I’m a Muslim, I can’t let nothing oppress me

For the cause I won’t stop until I reach my garden

I beg your pardon, I ride with bin Laden

Times had changed and bin Laden was dead, but the ‘al-Qaida chic’ which underpinned gangs like SMS was as strong as ever; and as the police realized, it was a very short hop indeed from belonging to a gang like the Soldiers of Allah to signing up with an actual terrorist organization.

‘It’s just another form of belonging,’ said Abid Raja of the Muslim Contact Unit, a part of SO15, the Metropolitan Police’s Counter Terrorism Command. ‘Radicalization is a subtle progression. The kids sometimes don’t notice the massive steps they’re taking. And Somalia is such a cause célèbre now . . . Certainly, some of them aspire to go there.’

Raja and his colleague, Detective Sergeant Paul Birch, worked from a semi-fortified office block in Earl’s Court. They took me for a coffee in their canteen on the thirtieth floor, from where there was a stupendous easterly view across central London to the cranes and offices of the City, rising like a crystal bar-chart through the urban haze. Five minutes after we had sat down, I glanced back through the window to find that the city had vanished, and that the horizon’s centre point was now Windsor Castle, 18 miles to the west. The policemen had neglected to mention that the entire thirtieth floor was slowly revolving – an apt metaphor, no doubt, for those critics who thought the government’s Prevent strategy was also going round in circles.

The Muslim Contact Unit was set up in 2002 by Bob Lambert, a former professor of Islamic Studies at Exeter University, with the aim of forging partnerships with Muslim community groups in order to fight extremist ideologies from the inside. His idea was to recruit the relative moderates among the Islamist community because they were best placed to understand, and thus counter, the twisted Salafist theology deployed by al-Qaida.

‘Lambertism’, as the MCU’s doctrine was known, had many early successes, notably in helping to turn the community of Finsbury Mosque against the country’s most infamous radical preacher, the hook-handed Abu Hamza.

The doctrine had since fallen out of political fashion, however. Critics charged that some of the MCU’s local partners were too close, ideologically speaking, to the very radicalism that SO15 was supposed to be countering. When the Prevent programme was relaunched in 2011, dozens of the MCU’s former partners found themselves reclassified as ‘non-violent extremists’, and their funding was withdrawn on the grounds that they were opposed to ‘fundamental and universal’ British values. Lambert himself remained a right-wing hate figure, even though he retired from the MCU in 2007. One blogger recently called him ‘the last beacon of hope for Islamists in the remnants of Londonistan’.
⁸
These were difficult times, therefore, for the MCU.

‘The political agenda has slid to the right, and the funding cuts are interfering with practical solutions,’ Abid Raja said.

And yet in its quiet way, the MCU remained at the spear-tip of the fight against radicalization. Birch and Raja insisted they still had the support of London’s communities, and had little time for the vicissitudes of Whitehall and its unhelpful ‘labels’. Meaningful community relations depended on trust that took years to build up. Raja, who had been in the Met for seventeen years, explained that the MCU’s ‘street cred’ was crucial. This was partly why six of its eleven most senior officers were Muslim, including the Pakistanborn Abid, who wore a turban and a very substantial beard. ‘To be frank, it’s taken years to get to where I am now,’ he smiled.

He explained how as a younger man he had been a non-practising Muslim, a ‘Jack-the-Lad Londoner into girls and
nightclubbing’, but that a personal tragedy, the death of a daughter, had turned him towards Islam. He flirted with fundamentalism, but 9/11 forced him to question the direction of his faith. Eventually, under the tutelage of a religious scholar called Shafi Malik, he evolved his own Muslim
modus vivendi
based on tolerance of others.

‘It was a very personal, individualized journey, as I think it has to be for all Muslims. But I am convinced that it
is
possible to live by Sharia and to live in the West.’

It was easy to see how the MCU had been misunderstood in its work. Abid Raja the Pakistani philosopher-copper did not fit the public’s image of counter-terrorism authorities, and nor did his Lambertist prescriptions.

‘Give ’em Islam: conservative Islam,’ he said at one point with a stroke of his beard when I asked what he thought should be done about the Somali gangs. ‘The
Daily Mail
doesn’t like it, but Sharia is the saviour of law and order. It is the opposite of an attack on Western values.’

The Home Office did in fact try to ‘give Islam’ to Muslim miscreants, notably through its network of prison imams. But these individuals went through such a strict government vetting procedure before they were appointed that, as Amil Khan pointed out, they often lacked vital credibility with the hardliner prisoners that the government most needed to reach – for who among them was going to listen to an imam bearing a stamp marked ‘UK government-approved’?

The MCU’s task, according to Raja, had not changed in ten years: they were on constant lookout for people with religious credibility who enjoyed the respect of their community, and who might work alongside the MCU as ‘local partners’. Such
relationships, however, had to be handled ‘incredibly carefully’ if the credibility of the partner was not to be tainted by association. Paul Birch admitted that the MCU was ‘still playing catch-up’ with the Somali community in this regard.

‘There are some Somali imams out there with the right level of credibility, but they are very low profile. The only way they can reach an audience of any size is to use the media, but if they do that, then their credibility is destroyed . . . It’s catch-22.’

The media organization most deeply involved in the Somali community fight against extremism, and which continues to enjoy Home Office funding for their vital hearts and minds work, is the privately owned Universal TV, a Somali television channel that has broadcast from London since 2004. I went to meet one of UTV’s star producer-presenters, Abdi Jama, at the Jump in Jack café near his home in Acton Town. Until recently, he explained, UTV was the only UK-based Somali broadcaster, although these days there were as many as seven. It sounded a lot for one ethnic minority, but UTV’s audience was genuinely global, and its ratings appeared not to have been dented at all: Abdi Jama said that his Saturday night show,
Social Issues
, was regularly watched by 2.7 million viewers. As the
New York Times
’s veteran Somalia correspondent Jeffrey Gettleman pointed out, UTV plays a unique role in the wider community, like a guardian of nationhood in exile: ‘If there is any nucleus of the Somali diaspora, any glue holding together a people who have been scattered by war and settled everywhere from Sydney to Minneapolis, it is Universal TV.’
⁹

Jama saw the battle against religious extremism as a ‘moral obligation’, and a lot of UTV’s programming, such as Sunday night’s
Young Perspective
or
YP Show
, was overtly organized around this principle and directly aimed at Somali youth.

‘We can’t afford another 7/7,’ he said. ‘It could have been my own kids on that bus.’

His speciality was the phone-in programme. He employed a roster of seven imams who answered questions from young viewers seeking guidance on how to live as good Muslims in the West. The resultant discussions covered everything from the reporting of crime to female circumcision and the age of consent.

‘The imams get a lot of abuse from people accusing them of working for MI5 and stuff, and we don’t pay them, but they still do it.’

Jama recalled a debate on wearing the jilbab, where an imam patiently explained to a young female viewer that wearing the veil was not, in fact, an obligation under the Koran.

‘And this girl says, “Oooh! So you’re with the kuffars!” It was an outrageous way to speak to a sheikh. But that is what we are up against.’

Jama’s method of dealing with al-Shabaab was not to demonize them, as the West tended to do, but to engage with their arguments, including through textual exegesis if necessary. He had recently hosted a debate in which not one but two imams agreed that nowhere in the Koran did it say that suicide bombing was ever justified. The viewer phone lines rang hot after that, followed by an al-Shabaab declaration of a fatwa on all things UTV, forcing the temporary closure of the channel’s Mogadishu office for the safety of its staff.

The danger from extremists was not confined to Somalia. On Ealing Common in 2010, where an estimated 50,000 Somalis gathered to celebrate Eid, the Muslim holiday that marks the end of Ramadan, Jama was threatened by a group of young Somalis simply for filming.

‘They had this attitude that television was an infidel thing; one of them accused me of working for the CIA, and said it was haram even to watch TV. I was shocked.’

The source of this antediluvian thinking, he discovered, was a well-known maverick called Mohamed Mahmoud, a self-styled sheikh unaffiliated to any mosque but who preached regularly anyway, mainly in the Southall area.

‘This guy has fifteen young Somalis among his followers, they’ve all failed their GCSEs, yet he tells them that university is haram because British students have to pay interest on their loans . . . It’s a disgrace! And I think Tony Blair was right when he said the government’s three top priorities should be education, education and education.’

He told the story of Mohamed, a 24-year-old Somali he had interviewed on his show recently, who had been brought up in a care home, began drinking at twelve, had been in prison twice by the age of fifteen, and had grown up with no qualifications at all. He had straightened himself out by attaching himself to a mosque in Shepherd’s Bush. There was, however, a problem with this mosque, which propagated a potent ideological blend of Salafism and Wahhabism.

‘The people there won’t even say salaam to me because I don’t have short trousers and a beard. And now Mohamed thinks everyone else is a “bad” Muslim, including me. He says it’s haram to look at women, but really that’s just an excuse for not looking for work. Western society is not segregated. It is not possible to function as a citizen here without mingling with the opposite sex.’

In Whitehall-speak, Mohamed’s group at the Shepherd’s Bush mosque were ‘non-violent extremists’ whose faith was already far beyond the reach of UTV’s voice of moderation. As Detective
Sergeant Birch understood, the fact that the channel’s counter-radicalization programming was funded by the British government automatically made its message suspect in the eyes of many conservative Muslims, and damaged its credibility on the street. He was convinced that the better way to influence people like Mohamed – perhaps the only way – was through his ideological peers.

For jihadist street cred, it was hard to beat the founder of the Active Change Foundation, a youth outreach programme in the north-east London borough of Waltham Forest. Hanif Qadir, a middle-aged Pakistani born in the North Yorkshire town of Thornaby, had not just sympathized with the jihad as a younger man. In 2002, after the American invasion of Afghanistan, he had actually travelled there and volunteered to fight for the Taliban. What happened next turned him into one of the most valuable assets that the Met’s Counter Terrorism Command has ever had.

‘My perceptions of jihad were shattered the moment I arrived,’ he explained in his bluff Teesside accent. ‘I went there with this vision of standing shoulder to shoulder against the infidel with my brother Muslims, but I quickly discovered that if you weren’t Arab or Afghan, you were nobody. What I saw was a lot of poor, humble people being manipulated. It was made quite clear that we had no hope for the future except martyrdom. We were cannon fodder. The volunteers had noble Islamic motives, but the Talibs had no respect for that. They wouldn’t give me the time of day when I challenged them on this, and when I insisted they became aggressive.’

By the time he had travelled through the Khyber Pass and reached the Afghan border town of Torkham, he was so thoroughly disillusioned that he turned round and came straight
back to Britain. He set up the Active Change Foundation soon afterwards, and had spent most of the last decade warning young Muslims that the path to paradise in Afghanistan was a dud.

‘Looking back, I’m glad God guided me in the way he did,’ he said. ‘He helped me escape death, or Guantanamo . . . who knows.’

He had set up his headquarters in a youth centre on the Lea Bridge Road next door to the Jamia Masjid Ghosia, the largest mosque in Waltham Forest. His chosen area was one of the most multicultural in the city, with a populace very different from the Victorian and Edwardian office workers for whom it was first built. The mock-Tudor gables above the shops around the mosque recalled Olde Englande, but the goods and services on offer were all about travel and escape: the Grill ‘n’ Spice takeaway, a travel agency specializing in Hajj and Umrah package tours, a hairdressing salon called Paradise. It was hard to avoid a feeling that the Lea Bridge Road, with its chip shops and betting shops and buses whizzing too fast along the route between Clapton and Whipp’s Cross, was a neighbourhood tolerated rather than loved by its inhabitants.

Stocky and avuncular, Hanif exuded a kind of calm wisdom that reminded me immediately of the beard-stroking SO15 officer Abid Raja. They were two British Pakistanis of the same sort of age, who had embarked on very similar journeys of Islamic self-discovery as young men. The routes they had taken were certainly different, but they had arrived at the same destination in the end. Hanif explained how he had been brought up a moderate Barelvi Muslim, as the majority of British Pakistanis were, but had been drawn to the more conservative Deobandis when he moved to London. The untimely death of a sister deepened his interest in Islam, just as the loss of a daughter had for Abid Raja. He
experimented with Sufi mysticism, Wahhabism and Salafism, but eventually rejected all of these in favour of a bespoke faith rooted, as the SO15 man’s was, in tolerance of others.