Second-generation Muslim students splitting from JIMAS illustrates an important point: not all Muslims in Europe at this time were ‘angry’ and seeking recourse in the form of violence or revolution as suggested by Leiken (2012) in his book Europe’s Angry Muslims. It also serves as a rebuttal of the claim made by a senior member of the JIMAS executive at the time, who believed that divisions occurred because ‘JIMAS had become too successful and so large, that diverse currents which were pursuing their own interests would have broken away sooner or later’.[1] Moreover, it is evidence against claims that JIMAS was a ‘Saudi-backed Salafist group’,[2] and that violent extremism is somehow implicit in Salafism. This is because the Salafis who formed OASIS (and, later, Salafi Publications) clearly fought hard to resist the extremist ideologues of the era, despite concerted attempts on the part of those who claimed to be ‘Salafis’ [such as Abu Muntasir and his JIMAS followers] to indoctrinate the minds of many young people who were searching for a pure and authentic understanding of Islam, both pre- and post-9/11.
Thus, while other youth organisations, mosques and university Islamic societies welcomed extremists such as Ali Tamīmī, Anwar Awlakī, Idris Palmer, Omar Bakrī, Omar Abdur-Rahman, Muhammad al-Masʿarī, Muhammad Surūr and Faisal Abdullah—even after they had made their ideologies abundantly clear, OASIS was working hard to oppose them all.[3] For instance, the Federation of Student Islamic Societies (FOSIS),[4] a politically active student movement and influenced by the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood was another prominent group that was very vocal on campuses throughout the UK at the time. Salafis determined that FOSIS was using a ‘soft power’ approach, under the guise of ‘moderation’, to coax the youth into the extremist ideologies of Qutb, Banna and Maududi.[5] Before long most JIMAS members realised what was taking place within the other Islamic groups and decided to affiliate themselves with OASIS instead. As a result, what began with mainly second-generation Muslim students searching for a shared and meaningful identity based upon the religion of their migrant parents, resulted in the religious revival in Britain that was beginning to identify strongly with Salafi scholars in Arab lands.
[1] Hamid, cited in Meijer 2009:394.
[2] Leiken 2012:158,159.
[3] Abdul-Wāhid 2013a: 3.
[4] See Abdul-Wāhid (2013) for a first-hand personal account of the Salafi Daʿwah that was spread with the dissolution of OASIS, and the formation of SALAFIPUBS.
[5] Ibid.
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