Radical Origins by Azeem Ibrahim

Author:Azeem Ibrahim
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2017-04-05T04:00:00+00:00

HATE PREACHING IN BRITAIN

If we are to deal with the Salafist challenge, it is essential to understand the complex links between authorized (i.e., Saudi-funded) and unauthorized Salafist teachers and their impact in spreading the belief in violent jihad. So far there have been relatively few homegrown Salafist hate preachers in the United States, but this has become a major issue in Britain. The discussion that follows concentrates on the UK, but the implications are global. Any person with an Internet connection can access their sermons and come to accept their arguments and worldview.

What is particularly regrettable is how long it took us to understand that indoctrinating generations of young people into bigotry and hatred of humanity would pose a threat to our societies. In this sense Britain forms an interesting test case. It has more of a problem with self-radicalization than the United States, and so far there is only limited evidence that the various Islamist attacks within the country since 2005 have been directly organized and controlled externally by either Al-Qaeda or ISIS. Historically there has been a degree of tolerance of foreign radicals—as long as the individual is not actively and directly posing a threat to the British state, British citizens, and some key British interests, individuals used to be largely free to do or say as they pleased. And in keeping with this liberal attitude, Britain has over the decades provided a safe haven to a very diverse and eclectic mixture of political refugees from other countries: from Karl Marx6 to Augusto Pinochet, to the Muslim Brotherhood7 and many radical Islamist preachers.

One critical question is whether this history of relative tolerance can be sustained, given the new threat posed. After all, in the 19th century London provided refuge to a range of radicals, from those who tried to assassinate Louis Napoleon to Karl Marx (who was described as no threat to the British state when Prussia tried to have him deported).8 The only real rule was that exiles should not engage in active politics that affected the United Kingdom. Underlying this was an assumption that their beliefs could not gain wider support among the population.

This underlying assumption may well have influenced British policy in the 1980s and the 1990s. It was not as if Britain was not aware of radical Islam. Throughout the ’90s, radical Islamist “hate preachers,” as they were called, made tabloid headlines with what were considered strident and deliberately eccentric claims. But while in the ’90s many of their pronouncements were happily dismissed as the ravings of lunatics, what was happening ran far deeper than just deliberately ostentatious media performances.9

As in many countries around the world, some British Muslim institutions had been readily accepting Saudi funding for decades, and subsequently facilitating the propagation of Salafi doctrines within the local Muslim populations. As this process developed, we have even witnessed a number of established Western academic publishing houses publishing historical accounts of Wahhabism that present it as a tolerant tradition. These effectively whitewash the dubious

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