On July 7, 2005, Britain awoke to the grim reality that our killers walk among us. When, just under two months after his self-obliterating action, ringleader Mohammed Siddique Khan’s martyrdom video surfaced on Al Jazeera AND we heard exactly how similar the perpetrators of the attack on London’s public transport were to average citizens.

In a distinctly northern-English accent, Khan declared war upon the British public, announcing that “our words have no impact upon you, therefore I’m going to talk to you in language that you understand.”

This vivid realization of the government’s worst fears was something the British public had long been told to expect. Nevertheless, when it happened, it still left most Britons asking what had gone so wrong that four cricket playing, distinctly “British boys” had found the motivation and reasoning to destroy themselves and as many of their fellow countrymen as possible.

While some people turned to the bombers’ own words that cited their “democratically elected governments’….atrocities against [his] people all over the world,” more in-depth assessments instead sought to understand what societal issues had laid the groundwork for these actions by these young men.

Both responses are fundamentally correct, and marrying the two together reflects the highly complex nature of the problem faced by the British government. As then-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government Ruth Kelly (a member of Parliament) put it: “Success will be as much about winning hearts and minds as a security response.”

But, as the United States is discovering to its chagrin around the world, “winning hearts and minds” is not easy. And for the United Kingdom, the “hearts and minds” being fought for are our own. As one Muslim community leader put it to HSToday, “Certain citizens are fighting other citizens. …” Treading the fine balance between exacerbating the problem and fixing it is something that, in the words of new Prime Minister Gordon Brown, will be a “generational struggle.”

CONTEST

The British government’s homeland response to Sept. 11, 2001, was a complete overhaul of counter-terrorism policy, encapsulated by a Home Office strategy called CONTEST. Made up of four strands described as the “4Ps”—prevent, pursue, protect, prepare—the strategy attempts to take a holistic approach to counterterrorism that encompasses both reactive and pre-emptive elements. (For a more complete description of the “4Ps,” see “Britain Blinks Red” from HSToday, May 2007.

Thus far, the assessment among security analysts is that three of the four Ps—the “Pursue” strand, “disrupting terrorists and their operations”; the “Protect” strand, “reducing the vulnerability of the UK”; and the “Prepare” strand, “ensuring that the United Kingdom is as ready as it can be”—are being completed with relative success. However, the “Prevent” strand, “tackling the radicalization of individuals,” has proven a tougher nut to crack and is the focus of the government’s current “hearts and minds” strategy.

According to Lindsay Clutterbuck, formerly a detective officer at New Scotland Yard working on all aspects of counterterrorism and now a research leader at RAND Europe, the first three strands all dealt with “preparation and response” and needed to be addressed most immediately. “Prevent” “was recognized early on as being important—but figuring out what to do was hard. The scale of how to make an impact [on “Prevent”] has only come into focus now,” he told HSToday. Security services are recognizing that they “are facing an almost Cold War-esque counter-ideology fight.”

Preventing extremism together

It took the July 7, 2005, attack and subsequent July 21, 2005, attempt to really concentrate minds on the issue. In the immediate aftermath, the Home Office established a series of seven working groups made up of Muslim community leaders to look within their community in detail at: youth; education; women’s issues; regional, local and community projects; training, accreditation and the roles of mosques and imams; community security and police relations; and tackling extremism and radicalization. All seven were grouped under the overarching title Preventing Extremism Together (PET) in an October 2005 report of 64 detailed recommendations.

The recommendations varied from “developing a British Muslim citizenship,” to establishing a “British ‘Islam Online’ website,” envisioned as a “‘one-stop shop’ style website and information portal particularly aimed at young British Muslims,” to creating a traveling “Islamic Way of Life” exhibition, to harder security elements. A key overarching theme was that the response to the Islamist terrorist threat must be rooted in Muslim communities. As a result, most of the work strands that emerged from the report were moved from the Home Office to the newly established Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG).

However, just over two years since the PET report and a year after DCLG’s establishment, only one of the recommendations (to establish Islamic Way of Life roadshows) has been implemented, with most others being rejected or remaining “works in progress.” One prominent Labour peer, Lord Nazir Ahmed, put it most scathingly in an interview with The Times of London when he said that the taskforce had “achieved virtually nothing” and dismissed the roadshows as “preaching to the converted.”

Community engagement

DCLG has not been deaf to these problems, and the regular trickle of arrests and foiled plots increasingly pointed to the fact that the strategy was not working. Finally, on March 18, 2007, DCLG Secretary of State Ruth Kelly penned a confessional op-ed in The Observer newspaper titled “We have been wrong on how to tackle home-grown terrorism.”

The article detailed “areas where we need to refocus our approach” and went on to recognize some of the accusations that had been leveled at the government policy, including failing to talk to a representative cross-section of the Muslim community, appearing to be meddling in religious affairs and attempting to “try to provide all the solutions. …Local people who know those issues best … can find the best solutions,” she wrote.

The crucial element that the government recognized is that “the challenge cannot be met from Whitehall,” and that any long-term solution will be community based. With this realization came a new four-point plan aimed at “promot[ing] shared values; supporting strong community and national leadership; strengthening the role of faith institutions and leaders; supporting local solutions.” The emphasis is clearly upon the government supporting faith and community-based groups to help them calm their own communities.

From a policing perspective, this is a highly frustrating state of affairs. As Clutterbuck put it: “When fighting the [Irish Republican Army], it was an external threat coming into the homeland that we would set ‘trip-wires’ for. We knew that individuals coming from the outside would need a very specific list of things to carry out a terrorist action and a clear escape route. The new terrorist threat is self-starting, self-obliterating and local, meaning that old trip-wires are obsolete.”

For example, the terrorists would need a small rental unit, “and so we would bombard all small rental unit landlords with information to be vigilant.” Now, however, the threat is already in the homeland among settled communities and the “trip-wires” have moved into people’s heads. Since Britain is not about to establish an Orwellian thought police, either communities must be able to identify and point out the dangerous individuals or their pool of radicalizing influences must be dried up.

Politicizing Islam

As a result of these factors, the government has now turned to communities to help handle both of these issues—to look out for what one community leader described as “markers” or “red lines” toward radicalization, and also to help dull the influence of radicalizing elements. The problem for the British government is to ensure that the groups it is empowering present a truly representative cross-section of British Muslim communities.

When the government first reached out to Muslim communities in the wake of 9/11 and then the 7/7 bombings, the main body that appeared to get their attention was the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), a group established in 1997 as an umbrella organization to marshal some sort of leadership among Britain’s Muslim communities. Its founder and leader (until 2006, when he stepped aside), Sir Iqbal Sacranie—a man previously better known for his comments in the wake of the Satanic Verses affair as saying that “death, perhaps, is a bit too easy for” author Salman Rushdie—was regularly photographed alongside Prime Minister Tony Blair and then-Chancellor Brown.

However, many critics have questioned the MCB’s true intentions and origins. In a policy paper for the right-wing Policy Exchange think tank, prominent left-wing journalist Martin Bright described “the leadership of the MCB [as taking] its inspiration from political Islamism associated with reactionary movements in the Middle East and South Asia.”

In his widely covered report, When Progressives Treat with Reactionaries, Bright goes on to catalogue in some detail a strong connection, both physical and ideological, between the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the MCB, the Muslim Brotherhood in the Middle East and the Jamaat-e-Islami group in Pakistan that is “committed to the establishment of an Islamic state ruled by Sharia law.” While admittedly inconclusive, at a recent meeting of community leaders attended by HSToday, known former Muslim Brotherhood members sided with MCB leaders on a variety of issues—it should be clarified, however, that at this same meeting the MCB sounded a more moderate tone, typical of their new leadership.

De-radicalization

Haras Rafiq, executive director of the Sufi Muslim Council (SMC), is reticent about the exact details of “de-radicalization” programs that the SMC runs, fearing that too wide an exposure of their specifics will stunt their effectiveness. However, he said that a major component of their work is trying to “understand the radicalization process and understand the fact that this sort of radicalization is by no means new.”

In an interview with HSToday, Rafiq said that most of the SMC’s work is targeted at the “sub-30s” and trying to reach out to them. In order to stem rising anti-Semitism, they run events in which survivors of Auschwitz and Bosnian Muslims who fled Serb massacres in the 1990s speak at community centers, comparing experiences. “The emphasis is on establishing the common humanity of all people,” he said. Workshops are run to help parents develop the tools to engage with their children and steer them away from, or see when they are veering toward, Islamist influences.

Among the tools deployed are a lifestyle magazine called Crescent Life aimed at young British Muslims that “focuses on issues for Muslims in Britain on how people can be Muslims in Britain.” Ultimately, however, “the grand mufti of the UK is the Internet, Sheikh Google,” as Rafiq put it, and so they have also set up a parallel website for the magazine and have plans for an Internet television station. (According to Rafiq they already have some 1,000 hours of shows filmed, covering a wide range of topics.)

While it is unlikely that any of the Muslim community groups would frown upon many of the methods that the SMC employs, they would dispute the SMC’s fundamental message that Islam and politics are two very separate things. For groups like MCB or HT (Hizb Ut Tahrir, a global Islamic movement that seeks to restore the caliphate “through peaceful means”), the root of the problem is the British and American invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. For Rafiq on the other hand, foreign policy issues are “merely the catalyst. Foreign policy is not the problem; it merely provides fuel for individuals who would have done something anyway.”

It is this view, and the government support it attracts, that makes the SMC the focus of much suspicion and anger from other Muslim community groups in the United Kingdom, which paint the group as a government stooge. In one particularly extreme instance, the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan and now an all-round anti-establishmentarianist, Craig Murray, published an article on his weblog that connected the SMC to both the suppressive regime of Islam Karimov in Uzbekistan and the neo-conservative movement in the United States. Rafiq refutes all the charges leveled against his group and instead accused groups like the MCB of having political agendas dictated from the Middle East.

Analysis

All individuals interviewed for this article were in agreement that the Internet is a deeply problematic aspect of the radicalization process. (One security source spoke of individuals radicalizing to an operational state within the space of one and a half weeks, thanks to the Internet.) While community leaders interviewed berated the media for stoking the fires of Islamophobia, and thereby the problem, there was a sense that there was some control and an agenda behind it, although, as one put it, “We don’t know how it happens.”

The Internet, on the other hand, is seen as an uncontrollable radicalizing element, and a key reason for this is the endless stream of footage that comes out of places like Iraq and Afghanistan. The impact of this footage is immeasurable. As one prominent community leader put it, “Muslim kids are demonized by British media and then come home and see that Muslims around the world are under attack,” making them prime targets for radicalizers preaching about a unified global umma (the community of Muslims).

This is an element whose solution has so far eluded the British government. While observers of all stripes have praised the government’s decision to rephrase the terms employed when talking about the “war on terrorism” (a term which is no longer used by British officials)—Jacqui Smith, the new Home secretary, was applauded for the reasoned approach she took in addressing the London and Glasgow attempts in July (she carefully did not accuse Muslims in her early public statements)—the truth remains that foreign policy is clearly an issue. One need merely consider Mohammed Siddique Khan’s words in his martyrdom video: “Your democratically elected governments continuously perpetuate atrocities against my people all over the world.”

Ultimately, there are “no easy wins,” as Clutterbuck put it, and the British government is recognizing that it is in this struggle for the long haul. While foreign policy may feed the problem, radicalization is not new and, therefore, a complete solution must dig deeper than this. However, government stands in a precarious position, unable to meddle too much in religious and community affairs, yet obliged to try to do something to fulfill its role as security guarantor of the people.  HST

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Inside Britain’s Muslim community

In researching this article, I attended a number of community meetings that provided insights into the internal politics of the British Muslim communities and illuminated the confusing dynamics that the British government is struggling with in determining who speaks for the Muslim community.

On one extreme side of the spectrum sit groups like Hizb Ut Tahrir (HT), a global Islamic movement that seeks to restore the caliphate, “through peaceful means.”

In the words of its spokesman, Taji Mustafa: “Islam has never separated religion from politics.”

On the other side of the spectrum sit rigidly apolitical groups like the Sufi Muslim Council (SMC), which instead espouse an ideology that seeks to detach Islam from politics. They claim to speak for the “silent majority of British Muslims,” and have recently trumped the MCB as the British government’s most visible conduit to the Muslim communities in its battle to counter radicalization.

Hizb Ut Tahrir

The double attempt on London and Glasgow dictated that the opening issue of new Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s reign in the United Kingdom would be terrorism. Highlighting this, during his first parliamentary face-off with the new leader, opposition Conservative leader David Cameron immediately tried to pin the prime minister down, demanding to know why HT had not yet been banned, citing it as an “organization that says that Jews should be killed wherever they are found.”

This is an accusation that Mustafa completely rejected in an interview with me, stating that this was merely another instance in which “politics is being played with security.” He went on to rebut some of the other allegations leveled against the group—for example, that it provides a “conveyor belt for extremism.” He declared such accusations as “baseless” and said he “knew of no one who had funded or had anything to do with any terrorist attacks.”

It seems that the British government would agree with this perspective. Soon after Cameron asked his question in parliament, former Home Office Secretary John Reid stood up and pointed out that his former department had conducted two in-depth reviews of the group and had come to the conclusion that there was no evidence that the group should be added to the “proscribed terror lists.”

HT identifies itself as “a global Islamic political party that was established in 1953” by Palestinian thinker and Judge Taqiuddin An Nabhani. Its rhetoric is focused around bringing “Muslims back to living an Islamic way of life under the shade of the Khalifah [Caliphate] State following an exclusively political method.” This does not extend to the West, where the party “does not work to change the system of government,” a position Mustafa repeated frequently during his discussion with me.

A great many of the accusations leveled at the group come from a recently published book called The Islamist by a young British Muslim named Ed Husain. The autobiographical tale describes his journey through Islam and in and out of the ranks of HT. The book details the pernicious nature of the Islamist extremism that groups like HT preach—claiming the group is spiritually devoid and mostly a political organization with political aims. He further throws some skepticism on the group’s claims that its aims are squarely in the Middle East, reflecting an accusation heard elsewhere that HT is seeking to consolidate Muslim support in the West to achieve some critical mass and then to advance the Caliphate here.

 Mustafa was quick to dismiss Husain as a “poster boy for the neoconservative movement” and pointed out that he was never actually a member of HT (this was confirmed by a number of sources). Furthermore, he claims that HT has changed since the time when Husain was writing (the late 1990s); according to Mustafa, HT is now a peaceful movement seeking only to help Muslims in Britain to live as good Muslims, “counter propaganda against Islam” and “project a positive image of Islam to Western society.”

Nonetheless, one of the major problems that people have with HT is its unrepentant desire to blend politics and Islam—according to Mustafa, the two are “inseparable.” He was also skeptical of the British government’s current counter-radicalization efforts, dismissing the changes that the Brown government is undertaking as “merely a change in presentation.” He lay most of the blame for the current problem on foreign policy and expressed the belief that, once the United Kingdom pulls out of Iraq and Afghanistan, domestic British problems will melt away.

Few security sources or analysts would necessarily agree with this perspective.

The Sufi Muslim Council

Haras Rafiq’s decision to establish the SMC was borne from a conversation he had with his daughter five years ago. One day, she returned home from school and said “she didn’t want to be a Muslim any more.” It turned out that she had seen images of furious Muslims on television burning effigies of the prime minister and didn’t want to have anything to do with the angry ideology any longer.

This sparked off a great deal of introspection in Rafiq, who started to re-examine his own religious beliefs in light of a personal religious re-awakening. He decided to try to understand exactly what Britain’s Muslim community was thinking, and he set up the Crescent Network, which conducted in-depth polling to establish who Britain’s Muslim communities felt represented them and what their views were.

In the process, he uncovered what he saw as the “growing trend toward radicalization,” and started to regularly warn the government of the threat. He also discovered that the “root cause of this extremism is Wahhabbism” and that “at least 80 to 85 percent of official [Muslim] groups were of this strain.” Even more worrying, it seemed as though these “self-appointed leaders” had the government’s ear at the time.

Eventually, against his wishes, Rafiq said, he “was pushed forwards to establish the Sufi Muslim Council,” to speak out for the “silent majority of Muslims in Britain” who were not being represented properly at the table. Unlike other groups, the SMC does not blame foreign policy for current British problems. “If it wasn’t foreign policy, it would be something else,” he said, taking a stand that has since helped win SMC a special place of favor with the British government.

At its opening inauguration ceremony, held at the House of Commons on July 19, 2006, Ruth Kelly, a member of Parliament and secretary of state for Communities and Local Government, provided the keynote address and praised the SMC’s “core principles condemning terrorism in all its forms and its partnership approach to taking forward joint initiatives and activities.”

Rafiq was understandably coy about some of the details concerning the deradicalization projects that the SMC runs, stating that its excessive disclosure will stunt effectiveness. However, he was proud of the workshops designed to help parents deal with radicalization in their children and to take some of the fire out of the growing anti-Semitism he sees in the United Kingdom. He was also eager to promote the magazine, the website (www.crescentlife.co.uk), and the future Internet television station that all reinforce the SMC’s “faith-based,” rather than political, agenda.

Fundamentally, according to Rafiq, the SMC’s work is to “create more resilient communities that can ward off extremists.” Other Muslim community groups, however, are broadly skeptical of the SMC’s aims and believe that the government’s support of it is merely an attempt to sow dissent among members of the British Muslim community.