Evidently, Abu Muntasir favoured the ideology of preachers such as Ali Tamīmī[1] who would eventually receive a life sentence for inciting his congregation in the United States to fight in Afghanistan on the side of the Taliban.[2] In fact, he went as far as inviting Ali Tamīmī to London to deliver a lecture to a large audience of youth, which Shaykh Abu Khadeejah Abdul-Wāhid describes as an attempt to ‘hijack’ the Salafi Daʿwah in the UK:
Ali Tamīmī was invited by Abu Muntasir in the spring of 1996. He delivered a lecture in East London that really drew the line in the sand entitled: A Word of Advice to the Salafis in the UK. In this lecture he spoke of ‘Tawheed al-Hākimiyyah’ as a distinct fourth category of Tawheed (regarded by the Salafi scholars to be a doctrinal innovation), parliamentary elections, Jihad and political agitation.[3] Moreover, although Abu Muntasir called others to jihad and has been portrayed as a ‘godfather’ of jihad—a title he wilfully affirms in a BAFTA-nominated documentary[4]—his claims were more bravado than reality, as being seen as a fervent mercenary only enhanced his image as a repentant jihadist. In fact, former members of JIMAS clearly recall that while Abu Muntasir frequented various jihadi training camps—and photographs of him dressed in militant-looking apparel were taken to raise his ‘jihadi’ status in the UK, he never actually partook in any combat, rendering his claim to have ‘spent time on the frontline against communists in the 1990s’[5] to be false. What is true, however, is that JIMAS’s shift towards political activism and theatres of jihadist combat served as an impetus for the founders of OASIS to form a corrective counter-narrative and disseminate the Salafi Daʿwah in universities and Islamic centres across Britain.
[1] Abdul-Wāhid 2013a.
[2] Bowen 2014:78,79.
[3] Abdul-Wāhid 2013a.
[4] Khan 2015.
[5] Bowen 2014:61.
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