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 India, 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]
Some of these so-called imams, dubbed the “lords of Londonistan,” exploited the alienation of Muslim youth by falsely offering “modern solutions for post-migrant Muslim predicaments” while presenting themselves as Islamic authorities. These figures included Omar Bakri Mohammed, a Syrian-born cleric who founded al-Muhajiroun and was known for his inflammatory speeches before being barred from returning to the UK; Abu Qatada, a Jordanian cleric considered a spiritual leader for extremist groups, who faced terrorism-related charges and extradition; Muhammad Sūrur Zain al-ʿAbidīn, a Syrian scholar whose writings blended Salafi theology with political activism; Abu Hamza al-Masri, an Egyptian cleric and former imam of Finsbury Park Mosque in London, known for his incendiary sermons before being extradited to the U.S. for terrorism charges; Abdullah el Faisal, a Jamaican preacher who promoted violent jihad and was deported from the UK after serving a prison sentence for incitement; and Anwar al-Awlaki,[4] a Yemeni-American cleric and propagandist for al-Qaeda, linked to several terror attacks and killed in a U.S. drone strike. Some of these figures also had ties to the GIA, al-Qaeda, and later ISIS.[5]
[1] Scantlebury (2012), cited in Leiken 2012:155.
[2] Leiken 2012:151.
[3] Leiken 2012:155.
[4] Whilst Anwar al-Awlaki himself did not operate or reside in the UK; his radicalisation efforts were conducted remotely through digital media, making him a significant propagandist for extremist ideologies worldwide.
[5] Abdul-Wāhid 2013a.
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