Meanwhile, as Muslim identity politics began to manifest itself in the assertive mobilisation and ‘increasingly confident participation of Muslims in student politics,’[1] it was fortunate that jihadism was not the only movement on the campus scene. Another group that would become significant to the eventual formation of OASIS and was very influential in mobilising British Muslim youth was Jamʿiat Ihyaa Minhaaj al-Sunnah (JIMAS)—an Islamic youth movement founded in 1984 by Munawar Ali, a computer science graduate from London. The son of Bangladeshi immigrants, Munawar Ali—better known as Abu Muntasir, was influenced in his early years by the teachings of his Deobandi father. [2] By the time he was a teenager, he began to search for a more authentic version of Islam—one that deferred less to traditional folk Islam and took only the Qur’an and Prophetic Narrations (Sunnah) as its primary sources of authority.[3] Within a few years Abu Muntasir would go on to tour mosques, Islamic centres and university Islamic societies around the country. Of them, the University of Essex ISoc in the ‘squaddie’ town of Colchester—Britain’s oldest garrison town—would become a platform and regular pit-stop for JIMAS’s circuits, most likely because of its proximity to his hometown of Ipswich, a factor which likely contributed to it becoming a springboard for Islamic daʿwah activity in years to come.
Although some studies have mistakenly heralded Abu Muntasir as the ‘father of the Salafi Daʿwah in the UK’,[1] what he should be credited with is helping with the deculturisation of Islam in the UK. As affirmed by Abu Muntasir himself, what led to JIMAS’s success as an organisation was the fact that its membership consisted of ‘modern young men with beards and modern young women in hijāb [who] were Western-educated but regarded themselves as more authentically Islamic than the older generation of Muslim immigrants’.[2] Even former JIMAS ‘members’ who later went on to form OASIS have acknowledged that Abu Muntasir was instrumental in the initial mobilisation of British youth towards a more authentic and decultured version of Islam at a grassroots level during the late 1980s and early 1990s.
[1] Hamid 2009:386, cited in Meijer 2009.
[2] Bowen 2014:60.
[1] Tyrer 2014:304, cited in Peter and Ortega 2014.
[2] Bowen 2014:60.
[3] Ibid.
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