It’s a bad day for Anjem Choudary – and a good day for secular law

So farewell then Anjem Choudary.  At least for a few years.  Britain’s biggest loudmouth Islamist has finally been convicted in the UK for encouraging support for Isis.  He now faces up to ten years in prison.

There have been reporting restrictions on his conviction for several weeks now, as we waited for the conclusion of the trial of his associate Mohammed Mizanur Rahman.  But now it’s over.  At least for a while.  There is much to say, but allow me one particular reflection for now.

Like his mentor and predecessor Omar Bakri Mohammed, Anjem Choudary was always a subject of enormous interest in Britain and abroad.  Indeed you could argue that for some years now he has been Britain’s most famous Muslim.  Most Muslims understandably hated this, but so did everybody else.  I once ground my teeth hearing him introduced by a foreign interviewer as ‘leading British Imam Anjem Choudary.’  He was regularly invited onto television and gave other media interviews liberally, as it were.

Which was understandable because he was the perfect go-to guy.  Where others ‘ummed’, ‘ah-ed’ and talked of ‘context’ Choudary could be relied upon to give his fundamentalist views straight up.  Yet as a trained solicitor he knew where the lines were and carefully stepped away when he felt you encouraging him over them.  This was always done in the mutual awareness that his views lay a long way over that line. Whenever people – especially Muslims – assured me that Choudary was merely a joker I always reminded them that in that case he was a joker with a particularly unfunny contacts book.

But all of this presented a problem for the media.  You couldn’t avoid him – as some people insisted the media do – not least because (as with the murderers of Lee Rigby) he had a tendency to know the terrorists who were the story.