Richard Beeston

The voice of moderation

Abu Suleiman looks back on his time in al-Qaeda as a reformed drug addict in Britain might consider his past life as a junkie. Speaking English, learnt from his American jailers at Guantanamo Bay, the young Saudi is now a respectable member of society and has a wife and a job as a stock market analyst in Riyadh to prove it.

Like other Muslim men recruited by militant Islam to the cause of jihad, he knows that he is lucky to be alive, and fortunate to be given a second chance. Most others who made the trek to join Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan or his associates in Iraq have been captured, killed or ended their lives as suicide bombers.

The story of what happened to his generation of young Muslim men across the world over the past decade and a half is only now being told. Their experiences may span continents, from the southern Philippines to Yorkshire, but the pattern is the same. Inflamed by abuses against brethren in Bosnia and Palestine and frustrated by the failure of their own governments to act, they made easy recruits for militant Muslim preachers advocating violence against the infidel.

Ed Husain may never have taken up arms in the name of religion, but he embarked on the same ideological journey as Abu Suleiman and thousands of others. Beginning as a shy East London teenager with an interest in Islam, he was transformed in a matter of a few years into a leading activist for Hizb ut-Tahrir, one of Britain’s most extreme Muslim movements.

At times, the campaign to turn Britain into part of a grand Islamic empire appears more comical than sinister. Muslim youths, often with a poor grasp of Islamic teachings, wage clumsy battles in university common rooms, where socialist workers and Marxists would once have fought.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in