However, the seeming ‘radicalisation’ of Muslim youth—either on, or off, college and university campuses cannot be attributed to demographic trends alone. Rather, as Scantelbury (2012) notes, British authorities had left the door ‘wide open for an authority from the Muslim world… preferably an Arab’, to take the place of failing imams imported from the Indian, Pakistan and Bangladesh—ones who could ‘speak persuasively in English to a second generation already rejecting the institutions that their parents struggled to implant in Britain’.[1]
During the early 1990s, London hosted and subsidized extremist preachers holding forth in mosques, cultural centers, bookstores, assemblies, and colloquia as well as in journals, magazines, and newspapers. Under what the extremists called ‘a covenant of security’, security officials allowed them to incite freely… if they refrained from terrorist acts inside Britain.[2]
Significantly, some of these so-called imams—who have also been dubbed the ‘lords of Londonistan’, were able to snare a number of alienated Muslim youth by falsely offering them ‘modern solutions for post-migrant Muslim predicaments’, whilst still managing to ‘present themselves as bearers of Islamic authority’.[3] These ‘lords’ included Omar Bakri, Abu Qatada, Muhammad Sūrur Zain al-ʿAbidīn, Abu Musʿab al-Suri, Abu Hamza al-Masri, Abdullah el Faisal and Anwar al-Awlaki, some of whom also had connections to the GIA, al-Qaeda and subsequently ISIS.[4]
[1] Scantlebury (2012), cited in Leiken 2012:155.
[2] Leiken 2012:151.
[3] Leiken 2012:155.
[4] Abdul-Wāhid 2013a.
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