Why conventional wisdom on
radicalization fails: the persistence
of a failed discourse
JONATHAN GITHENS-MAZER AND ROBERT LAMBERT *
Radicalization is a research topic plagued by assumption and intuition, unhappily dominated by ‘conventional wisdom’ rather than systematic scientific and
empirically based research. In the aftermath of 7/7, there was a marked growth in
academic interest in ‘radicalization’ in both the UK and the US. There was a clear
switch away from the study of Al-Qaeda as an international terrorist organization
threatening western stability to work which sought to understand ‘home-grown
terrorism’ in the UK and what some researchers called Europe’s ‘Salafi jihadist
network’.1 To a significant extent, this shift in focus away from international to
‘home-grown’ terrorism reflected the need of politicians and the media for easyto-understand narratives that explained how a ‘good Muslim boy’ (or ‘a good
Asian boy’) became a suicide bomber.
In their search for easy stories about how an individual departed from point a
to arrive at point b, policy-makers and the media have come to rely increasingly on
a ‘conventional wisdom’ of radicalization. Media and government reports have, at
various times, posited variations on factors such as ideology, alienation, influence
and the internet as the causes of radicalization (while vehemently rejecting foreign
policy as a causal factor in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq). At the same time,
the media and policy-makers have sought out research that supports an uncomplicated ‘conventional wisdom’ about radicalization to deliver easily understandable soundbites and finite answers that justify their ideas about how radicalization
happens—and to facilitate straightforward policy responses (often couched as
counter-radicalization) that are meant to address definitively any threat posed by
‘home-grown’ terrorist threats in the post-7/7 environment.2
The ‘conventional wisdom’ of radicalization boils down largely to an assertion that a sense of Islamic difference (variously explained in terms of a lack
of integration, a lack of secularism, the existential threat posed by Islam to the
*
The support of the Economic and Social Research Council is gratefully acknowledged, under the auspices of
the programme ‘New Security Challenges’, and the article reflects research that has been conducted on ESRC
Grant RES-181-25-0017.
1
Aidan Kirby, ‘The London bombers as “self-starters”: a case study in indigenous radicalization and the emergence of autonomous cliques’, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 30: 5, 2007, pp. 000–00; Peter R. Neumann,
‘Europe’s jihadist dilemma’, Survival 48: 2, 2006, pp. 415–28.
2
Here we are using the term ‘conventional wisdom’ to designate ‘ideal types’ of theoretical approaches to
radicalization, rather than to unpack explicit nuances in different specific theoretical approaches.
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West, or external Islamic influences from Saudi Arabia and the wider Middle
East) among Muslim communities has the dangerous potential to mutate issues of
differing identities into support for violent ‘Islamo-fascism’. In this conventional
wisdom, exploitation of these differences culminates in terrorism, either passively
by contextualizing and rationalizing this violence, or by explicitly and actively
supporting this violence.3 These themes are apparent in Ed Husain’s popular
book The Islamist, in which a repentant ‘Islamist’ renounces his previous engagement with the non-violent extremist group Hizb-ut-Tahrir. In the book, Husain
posits that radicalization occurs when groups like Hizb-ut-Tahrir exploit Muslim
feelings of marginalization and alienation and recruit naive followers through
stories of glorious Jihad, the sanctity of martyrdom and anti-Americanism,
thereby provoking and nurturing the existing sense of separation among British
Muslims.4 Shiv Malik’s influential article in Prospect on Mohammed Siddique
Khan echoes this conventional wisdom by emphasizing that Khan’s radicalization
was ultimately a function of the clash between traditional small village Pakistani
and Kashmiri culture and a modern British lifestyle.5 Malik portrays a claustrophobic life in Beeston Hill, where he says the community has imported traditional tribal ways of life which ignore modern British society and state, leading to
splits between ‘out of touch’ community elders and the semi-integrated younger
generation.6 The apparent differences in how far British cultural practices have
been adopted are most visible in these splits that have emerged between older
generations of immigrants and their children, born in Britain, who now believe
that they ‘belong’.7
For some of the commentators mentioned above, this reinforces the perception of an inherent and intractable ‘war’ (whether violent or cultural) between
Islam and the West.8 In the British media, and among some policy-makers, this
fits with a conventional wisdom notion that Islamists specifically, and Muslims
more broadly, ‘don’t get Western liberal freedoms and lifestyles’, a cultural narrative which has come increasingly to form part of UK popular political discourse.9
Pipes summed up this degree of concern when he asserted in his 1990 National
Review article that British society was unprepared for Muslim immigration because
it thought about this issue as one of ‘the massive immigration of brown-skinned
peoples cooking strange foods and not exactly maintaining Germanic standards
of hygiene. Muslim immigrants bring with them a chauvinism that augurs badly
3
Michael Gove, Celsius 7/7 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006); Melanie Phillips, Londonistan: how Britain
is creating a terror state within (London: Gibson Square, 2006); Martin Bright, When progressives treat with reactionaries (London: Policy Exchange, 2006); Daniel Pipes, Miniatures: views of Islamic and Middle Eastern politics
(Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2003).
4
Ed Husain, The Islamist (London: Penguin, 2007), p. 119.
5
Shiv Malik, ‘My brother the bomber’, Prospect, 135, 30 June 2007.
6
Malik, ‘My brother the bomber’, p. 31.
7
Yasmin Hussain and Paul Bagguley, ‘Citizenship, ethnicity and identity: British Pakistanis after the 2001
“riots”’, Sociology 39: 3, 2005, p. 420.
8
Pipes, Miniatures.
9
Richard Jackson, Writing the war on terrorism: language, politics and counter-terrorism (Manchester: University
of Manchester Press, 2005); Vicki Squire, ‘“Integration with diversity in modern Britain”: New Labour on
nationality, immigration and asylum’, Journal of Political Ideologies 10: 1, 2005, pp. 51–74.
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for their integration into the mainstream of the European societies. The signs all
point to continued clashes between the two sides.’10
For policy-makers, like the former Communities and Local Government Secretary Hazel Blears, these themes have created a basis for analysing radicalization as
a function of Muslim communities not demonstrating a commitment to ‘shared
values and beliefs’ that both underpin British society and provide ‘resilience’
against messages that support and encourage Islamically inspired violence against
Britain and British interests.11 In the UK this has created a debate in which violent
radicalization has become bound up with concerns over ‘community cohesion’,
that is, what constitutes ‘reasonable behaviour’ among British Muslims. ‘Muslim
culture’ is perceived as a threat to ‘traditional British values’, and immigration
itself has become symbolically associated with issues of security.12 Taken as whole,
popular media and political discourses now routinely juxtapose issues more
usually associated with integration and immigration than with terrorism, such
as the wearing of the hijab, arranged marriage, and the fundamental (lack of )
compatibility of Islamic religious ideology and practice with liberal democracy.
This then creates a feedback loop between policy-makers, the media and scholars
such as Gilles Kepel, who asserts that British Islamic ‘home-grown’ terrorism is
a result of a failed policy of multiculturalism, in which political, cultural and
social differences in British Muslim communities were overly tolerated at a cost
to wider British society. For Kepel, the clear solution is the wholesale adoption of
the French model of ‘radical secularism’, which has, he claims, by a programme of
social control including, most notably, a ban on all religious symbols in schools,
conscious integration and a preventive security policy, led to ‘France being spared
from terror attacks for the past decade’.13
This ‘conventional wisdom’ raises two questions. First, is it provable in fact?
Second, what does it say about the way in which the media, policy-makers
and academics are currently engaged in using labels such as ‘radicalization’ and
‘radicalized’? This article will set out two cases which seem to run contrary
to these ‘conventional wisdom’ accounts of radicalization. In the first case, by
examining and unpacking the differences between two brothers associated with
the Crevice Cell case, it will demonstrate how ‘prediction’ of violence on the
basis of the holding of ideas that are by ‘conventional wisdom’ standards radical,
differentiating and completely contrary to ‘shared values and beliefs’ is systematically impossible. The second case will show how a British Muslim community that is culturally and socially different from other sections of both Muslim
10
11
Daniel Pipes, ‘The Muslims are coming! The Muslims are coming!’, National Review, 19 Nov. 1990.
Speech by Hazel Blears, 3 June 2008, http://www.communities.gov.uk/news/corporate/827570, accessed 20
April 2010; Alan Travis, ‘Hazel Blears’ standoff with Muslim Council overshadows new anti-terror launch’,
Guardian, 25 March 2009.
12
Harb Zahera and Bessaiso Ehab, ‘British Arab Muslim audiences and television after September 11’, Journal
of Ethnic and Migration Studies 32: 6, 2006, pp. 1063–76; E. Poole, Reporting Islam: media representations of British
Muslims (London: I. B. Tauris, 2002); Pnina Werbner, ‘Divided loyalties, empowered citizenship? Muslims
in Britain’, Citizenship Studies 4: 3, 2000, pp. 307–24; Lauren McLaren and Mark Johnson, ‘Resources, group
conflict and symbols: explaining anti-immigration hostility in Britain’, Political Studies 55: 4, 2007, pp. 709–32.
13
Gilles Kepel, The roots of radical Islam (London: Saqi, 2005).
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and non-Muslim British society, the Brixton Salafi community, has been at the
heart of some of the most effective efforts to intervene against Islamically inspired
terrorism in contemporary Britain.
The case of the Adam brothers
How can the dangers of the conventional wisdom be demonstrated here? Take the
examples of the three Benouis (Adam) brothers: Rahman (aka Anthony Garcia),
Lamine and Ibrahim. The brothers were born in Algeria, but spent much of their
youth in the UK, settling in Ilford, east London; their father eventually changed
the family’s surname from Benouis to Adam because ‘it sounded more English’.14
Rahman Adam changed his name once more to Anthony Garcia in order to further
his ambitions to become a male model. Rahman was not particularly observant
when a young man, dropping out of college at age 16, smoking, drinking and
holding a string of brief jobs, including one as a security guard. In his Garcia
inclination, Rahman Adam seemed to embrace western secular values entirely,
and there was little indication that he seemed alienated or inclined to violence—
let alone Islamically inspired violence against non-Muslims. So how was it that
Rahman Adam was arrested in March 2004 as part of Operation Crevice, and
convicted in April 2007 for conspiracy to cause explosions?
In a simplistic narrative of radicalization of the kind widely promulgated by the
media and policy-makers, Rahman Adam seemed to transform—to ‘radicalize’—
from someone who was completely secular and non-violent one moment into a
radical, Islamically inspired terrorist the next. The process, in media accounts,
hinged on his being ‘exposed’ to ‘radicalizing’ videos. Rahman Adam himself
recalled the impact of these videos during his Old Bailey trial, stating: ‘It was the
worst thing anyone could have seen. Little children sexually abused and women
… and I still remember it quite clearly.’ The videos which Rahman was understood to have been watching concerned the treatment of Muslims in Kashmir
by Indian military and security forces. According to this narrative, the exposure
to the videos led directly to his fundraising on the part of Kashmiri militant
groups—and this fundraising crystallized into a desire to travel to Pakistan to
train with Kashmiri-inspired mujahedin. When he first tried to travel to Pakistan
to attend a training camp he was initially rejected for being ‘too white’, because
this would make him stand out in this environment. However, by November
2002 he had met Omar Khyam, who said he would arrange his placement in a
training camp if Rahman Adam was able to raise enough money. During this
period, Rahman Adam also spent a great deal of time on the internet, e-mailing
fellow sympathizers. By 2003 he was working night shifts at Tesco but spending
much of his time daydreaming about becoming either a model or a jihadi fighter.
To this extent, some might suggest that this case supports conventional wisdom
on radicalization.
14
BBC News, ‘Profile: Anthony Garcia’, BBC News Online, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6149798.stm, 30
April 2007, accessed 26 May 2010.
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While ‘exposure’ to ‘radicalizing’ videos and network membership are familiar
components of stories about individuals who go on to become potential terrorists, this story of the Adam family is significant because it indicates the inherent
unpredictability of who becomes violent and who doesn’t. An interviewee who
was close to all three brothers by virtue of his role as a voluntary Islamic community worker in north London states: ‘The media reports suggest that he went
from no religion to embracing extremism. That is very misleading and completely
omits the period of his young adolescence when I first got to know him and his
brothers.’ According to this community worker, Rahman was about the age of
12 or 13 when he and his two brothers attended a Salafi-inspired religious circle in
east London that combined religious education with playing football in the afternoon. There was little doubt that Lamine Adam, the eldest, was the leader of the
three, with Rahman and younger brother Ibrahim tagging along. The brothers
were strongly encouraged to attend this religious education ‘circle’ by their father,
but it was in fact Lamine who began to help organize and teach the circle, being
particularly inspired by Salafi teachings of Islam. According to our interviewee:
‘Lamine took the greatest interest in the teaching. He was more intelligent than
Rahman. Rahman followed Lamine in most things. They all enjoyed the football.’
From this research and subsequent accounts, it becomes increasingly clear that
Rahman looked up to his elder brother, and as Lamine began to become increasingly observant, so did he. And so it was that Rahman followed Lamine when
Lamine decided that he could no longer attend ‘non-action’-oriented religious
circles, but instead came increasingly to follow Abu Hamza at the Finsbury
Park mosque. Our interviewee said that the three brothers and their father were
attracted to this centre because of their concern over issues in Algeria, and that
‘Abu Hamza was developing a reputation for caring about the corruption there
too … [he] built up a reputation for helping young Algerians arriving in the
UK—often illegally and destitute after escaping violence in Algeria.’
Being part of the Finsbury Park mosque scene had a huge influence on Lamine,
and subsequently Rahman, because here they were thrown into a heady mix of
stories of atrocities and rhetoric about the heroism and obligations of Islamically
inspired violent action. Our interviewee stated that
Lamine and Rahman therefore got to mix with young people newly arrived from Algeria
and heard their stories of escape first hand. They also got to hear Abu Hamza’s talks about
why Muslims were being treated so badly by corrupt regimes throughout the Muslim
world. What was happening to Muslims in Algeria was happening in Egypt, Tunisia, Saudi
Arabia, all across the Muslim world.
Initially, it was Lamine who picked up on Abu Hamza’s messages, and he who
started echoing Abu Hamza’s speeches and attempting to emulate his actions.
Lamine started to try to proselytize this ‘jihadi’ message, on occasions returning
to his old east London religious circle and trying to ‘practise’ this new religious
understanding on others. On those occasions when he was joined by Rahman,
the only notable thing about his brother’s demeanour was his silence and lack of
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dynamism. Our interviewee observed that when both attended the old religious
circle, Lamine was committed and vociferous, that ‘he was not able to win the
arguments against us but he kept trying. Rahman was far less vocal and articulate
but seemed to be influenced by Lamine, his older brother … Rahman was less
articulate than his brother and seemingly less fluent in Abu Hamza’s politics, [but]
he was also more passionate.’ This notion of passion is lacking in theorectical
approaches to violent radicalization. If one concentrates on exposure to and/or
espousal of key ideas or concepts, or political mobilization, it appears that Lamine
posed the greater threat; yet it wasn’t Lamine who would go on to attempt to
commit a terrorist attack. In understanding what is actually causing an individual
to participate in high-risk, potentially deadly activity in the name of Islam—or, as
this individual might perceive it, to defend Islam against western intervention—it
is necessary not to trace group membership or ‘exposure’ to certain ideas, but to
understand fundamentally why these ideas have a traction with this individual. In
this case, our interviewee stated: ‘It seemed as though [Rahman] was making more
of an emotional connection to what he was hearing about injustice to Muslims
by corrupt Muslim dictatorships than Lamine. Lamine was becoming full of the
new ideology he was learning. It was like he was learning a new theory and was
spending a great deal of time studying Abu Hamza’s approach.’ Lamine could be
drawn into lengthy discussions about Islamic practice and belief, whereas Rahman
was drawn instead to ‘doing’, not ‘talking’ or ‘thinking’.
Despite a superficial fit with the ‘conventional wisdom’ on radicalization,
then, the case of the Adam brothers raises significant problems for the application
of such thinking in the real world. On the one hand, it is fairly easy to recognize patterns, to varying degrees, in how people come to participate in violence.
On the other, conventional wisdom fails to explain how one brother became a
terrorist and the other did not. If identity issues and exposure to ‘extremist’ ideas
are causal factors in the one case, why wasn’t this combination equally causal for
both brothers? Both were exposed to horrific videos of atrocities against Muslim
communities, triangulated and made even more real by the daily reporting of
horrific and bloody events in Palestine, the Caucasus, Iraq and Afghanistan, and to
interaction with violent radical elites who not only provided an enabling message
of an obligation to participate in terrorism, but also offered the technical, tactical
and social knowhow in how to become a terrorist.15 According to the influential
‘conventional wisdom’ analyses presented at the beginning of the article, these
are the root causes of terrorism. According to the likes of Neumann, Gove and
Phillips, causation here is the presence of ideology—especially, according to
Neumann and others such as Wiktorowicz and Slootman and Tillie, the presence
of ‘Salafi-jihadi’ ideology.16 However, ideology, whether defined rather broadly
15
Jonathan Githens-Mazer, ‘Mobilisation, recruitment, violence and the street: radical violent takfiri Islamism in
early 21st century Britain’, in Roger Eatwell and Matthew J. Goodwin, eds, Political extremism in the 21st century
(Abingdon: Routledge, 2010).
16
Peter R. Neumann, ‘Europe’s jihadist dilemma’, in Peter R. Neumann, Joining Al-Qaida: jihadist recruitment in
Europe, Adelphi Paper 399 (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2009); Peter R. Neumann
and Brooke Rogers, ‘Recruitment and mobilisation for the Islamist militant movement in Europe’, in Freedom and Security of the European Commission Directorate General for Justice, ed. (London: International
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as one of ‘Islam under threat’ or more specifically as a ‘Salafi-jihadi’ orientation, is
present in a variety of cases where individuals don’t become terrorists. It is therefore illogical and dangerous to assume that identity issues and/or ideology in and
of themselves are causing terrorism. At the very least, these approaches do little
to explain differences between siblings. If conventional wisdom cannot properly
explain the differences between the Adam brothers, then what explanatory value
does conventional wisdom have in understanding terrorist violence?
The role of Salafi difference in Britain
One potential interpretation of Rahman Adam’s participation in a terrorist plot
could involve an analysis that emphasizes the combination of an ‘Islamically
inspired grievance’ with exposure to a Salafi theological orientation.17 Salafism is
distinct from other Islamic religious orientations. It is based, in its essence, on a
belief that Islam must return to its two key sources—the Qur’an and the Hadith—
and reorientate their faith, belief and practice in order to be like the ‘Companions
of the Prophets’. To this extent, Salafis perceive any form of religious tradition
outside the immediate textual boundaries of these sources as deviations from those
tenets mandated by God through his Prophet, Muhammad. While the application of a Salafi orientation, whether in Britain or globally, is multifaceted, this
orientation is often interpreted as a significant challenge by non-Salafi-oriented
Muslims, who see Salafism’s rigid adherence to these clearly defined boundaries
as in direct confrontation to their interpretations of the same works, and to other
forms of Islamic religious practice and traditions that have grown over time. A
rigid Salafi theological interpretation that Shi’i practices are theologically heretical
has also served to create and maintain extreme (and sometimes violent) tensions
between these communities, both globally and more specifically in the UK. The
adoption of a Salafi orientation in a British context often serves to differentiate
adherents, symbolically and physically, from other Muslim communities—potentially through specific practices of observance and/or dress—thus heightening the
sense that they are ‘different’.
But does Salafism plus the holding of an Islamically inspired ‘grievance’ equate
to a terrorist threat? The fact that it was Rahman, the quiet, ‘engaged’ brother,
who went on to be convicted of committing a terrorist act, rather than his vociferous and politically committed brother, is significant when considering this
kind of issue. What might this suggest about the causal role played by specific
Centre for the Study of Radicalization and Political Violence, King’s College London, 2007), http://ec.europa.
eu/justice_home/fsj/terrorism/prevention/docs/ec_radicalisation_study_on_mobilisation_tactics_en.pdf;
Marieke Slootman and Jean Tillie, Processes of radicalization: why some Amsterdam Muslims become radicals (Amsterdam: Institute for Migration and Ethnic Studies, University of Amsterdam, 2006); Quintan Wiktorowicz, The
management of Islamic activism: Salafis, the Muslim Brotherhood and state power in Jordan (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001);
Quintan Wiktorowicz, Radical Islam rising: Muslim extremism in the West (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield,
2005); Quintin Wiktorowicz, ‘Anatomy of the Salafi movement’, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 29: 4, 2006,
pp. 207–39.
17
It must be stated unequivocally that almost all Salafis would reject terrorist violence as being inherently nonIslamic (or takfiri—literally, un-Muslim).
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tenets of belief or ideology as opposed to micro-level psychological causes and
personal experiences? If we truly seek to understand the difference between an
individual who will and one who will not commit terrorism, might it in fact
be more apposite to start to address the difference between ‘doers’ and ‘sayers’,
rather than engage in normative debates about the existential threats of Islamic
ideas? And how does such an assertion relate to the evidence that there are, in fact,
many individual Salafis who hold these other characteristics who are empirically
demonstrably involved in activities to prevent terrorist recruitment and activities
in the UK and beyond?
Take, for example, the understanding of the ideological context provided by
interviewee A. He portrays Lamine Adam’s engagement with the violent ‘jihadi’
scene as part of a wider trend in London during the second half of the 1990s:
Throughout the second half of the 1990s a small number of young Muslims in my
neighbourhood [London Borough of Redbridge and adjoining east London boroughs]
were becoming involved in a kind of street culture of Muslim politics. Bosnia played an
important part. But many fringe groups were busy trying to recruit young Muslims into
their way of thinking … [for example] take Omar Bakri Mohammed. When he left Hizbut-Tahrir to form Al Muhajiroun he attracted a small number of followers who were
impressed to be part of an active street-based group that challenged the complacency of
their parents and elders.
But for this interviewee, and many others, the key bulwark against the Abu
Hamza/Omar Bakri Mohammed/Al Muhajiroun projects was stronger religious
knowledge and ideology. Rather than viewing the Salafist tradition as being one
that was encouraging violence, this interviewee actually suggests that it was only
the Salafis who were legitimately empowered to critique this takfiri (un-Muslim)
demand to participate in direct action against non-Muslims:
Salafis were part of the same street scene but there was always confrontation between Salafi
circles like mine and the fringe extremist groups that sought to take the law into their own
hands. We always had a chance to win the arguments because we had Salafi scholars to
quote to them whereas other scholars didn’t have that same weight—they were outsiders.
(Interviewee A)
For this interviewee, non-Salafi scholars provided easy targets for those seeking
to criticize western interventions in Islam and the wider Muslim world. Where
religious authorities appeared to be ‘dollar scholars’, it seemed as though this simply
strengthened the assertions by individuals such as Abu Hamza and Omar Bakri
Mohammed that ‘Britain was a place where Muslims had to isolate themselves from
day to day corruption to maintain the purity of their religion’. From the perspectives of our interviewees, the structure and theological rigidity of Salafis provided
a key bulwark against the moral relativism of Al-Qaeda-inspired recruiters, who
twisted religious argumentation to justify murder and criminal enterprise in one
context, but condemned the same behaviour as haram (forbidden) in another. That
this context changed not in terms of geography, but in terms of the religious
traits of humanity, seemed an even greater anathema to these Salafis attempting to
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repudiate these takfiri approaches. The strength to do this was perceived as being
a direct result of holding core Salafi interpretations and values:
Because our study circle was concerned to prevent exactly the kind of approach advocated
by Abu Hamza (and Omar Bakri) we were in the front line of a battle for the hearts and
minds of young Muslims like Lamine and Rahman. With hindsight I think Rahman may
have been more prone to get involved in a reckless plot like the fertilizer bomb plot than
his brother Lamine because he was always drawn to excitement and risk whereas Lamine
was far more drawn to intellectual debate. Rahman would have been easily persuaded that
a poorly planned ‘martyrdom operation’ was in fact a major operation that would make
him both famous and highly rewarded after his ‘martyrdom’. (Interviewee A)
For another example, take the Salafi-run STREET (Strategy to Re-Empower
and Educate Teenagers) project in Brixton, south London. The STREET project
predates British government sponsorship of ‘Prevent’ programmes under its
counterterrorism strategy. STREET emerged from previous efforts among the
Brixton Salafi community to confront those who were seeking to recruit young
Brixton Muslims, mainly those who were returning to observance of the faith
or those who were becoming more observant, to an Islamic orientation which
potentially condoned crime and encouraged terrorist activity. The Brixton Salafi
community confronted attempts by figures such as Abu Qatada and Abdullah
el-Faisal, as well as Omar Bakri Mohammed and Al-Muhajiroun (later under
the guise of Anjem Choudury’s Islam 4 the UK), to coopt the Brixton Masjid
and recruit Brixton Muslims for their aims, on occasion forcibly ejecting these
individuals. Abdullah el-Faisal was the Jamaican-born preacher who was eventually convicted in 2003 on three charges of soliciting murder and two charges of
racial hatred and sentenced to nine years in prison. He was deported to Jamaica
in 2007. El-Faisal was a regular fixture in Brixton, where at various points he
tried to take over and/or coopt the Brixton Salafi community—often attempting
to combine Islamic theology with wider messages about racial discrimination
and marginalization. Our interviewees often recalled sermons in which el-Faisal
would juxtapose quotations from the Qur’an with the writings of thinkers such
as Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X—using them in specific ways to buttress his
claims.
The STREET programme is substantially different from projects initiated
under the government’s Preventing Violent Extremism—Pathfinder (PVE-PF)
scheme, as it is not solely focused on an agenda that encourages community development, cohesion or developing wider community resilience to terrorist recruitment, but rather finds purpose in confronting terrorist threats through direct
street-level intervention.18 STREET relies on established local social networks
where trust and reputation are crucial. For instance, it appeals not to Muslims’
sense of Britishness but rather to their sense of being Londoners, and to a common
possession of ‘London roots’.
What emerges with striking clarity is that the Brixton Salafi leadership,
whether formally in the STREET project or more informally through social
18
See esp. the STREET website: http://www.streetonline.org/our-aims, accessed 26 May 2010.
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contacts and interaction, is understood on the streets of Brixton to be so resolutely
committed to a particular rendition of Islam as to be capable of withstanding
and overcoming attacks from persistent detractors like Abdullah el-Faisal. As an
interviewee from the local community stated, ‘the Brixton Salafis have stood up to
their enemies, taken them on and won, and that’s why they have respect’. Therefore, it follows, the street skills and the religious integrity of the Brixton Salafis
are mutually reinforcing and present their opponents with a very proactive form
of defence. Nonetheless, they are faced with equally resolute antagonists who seek
to undermine them as ‘sell-outs’. Here is a typical example from Abdullah el-Faisal
(responses and comments by the Brixton Salafis, published at Salafimanhaj.com,
are included in italics):
Now the worse Salafis in this country my brothers, sorry to be specific, but I have to be
specific, the worse Salafis in this country are those in south London, more specifically those
in Brixton Mosque because they are coming from very poor backgrounds and they are
hungry, so they will kill for Fahd, they break noses in Brixton Mosque on three occasions
for the love of Fahd, one of them was even crying on the minbaar! [Faysal reiterates the thing
about ‘noses being broken’, yet as even the likes of Aboo Hamza al-Misree have stated he only states
this as it was Faysal himself who had his nose broken!!] He was giving a khutbah on a Friday and
he was crying tears his shirt was soaked with tears (saying) ‘why do you speak bad about
Fahd? [The individual who Faysal is accusing here is not clear as Faysal does not mention the name
of the accused so it is very difficult to affirm this claim of Faysal, due to Faysal’s fear of mentioning the
name. However, it has been suggested that it refers to an individual who himself was later banned from
the office of Masjid Ibn Taymiyyah (Brixton Mosque) for his exaggerations!] If you were rich like
him you would do the same thing, keep quiet about him so he loves him so much that on
the minbaar he cried hoping that the news will reach in their report, they write reports to
Saudi on the da’wah they do every month [do they?], so in his report he can write ‘I cried
for you so increase my salary.’ [At this, the ignorant audience of blind followers burst into laughter
as if they are being entertained by a comedian at a comedy club!]19
Ironically, considering that the Brixton mosque does indeed impart an account
of Islam that the Saudi regime would find tolerable, it should be stressed that it
has always been self-funding and, unlike some non-Salafi mosques in London, has
never received a penny from the Saudi government. Indeed, at the London Central
Mosque and Islamic Cultural Centre in Regent’s Park where Saudi patronage is
much in evidence, it became commonplace to refer to the Brixton Salafis as ‘superSalafis’ in an affectionate manner so as to highlight their separate status. So, for
example, when Saudi scholars came to the London Central Mosque they would
receive VIP treatment, whereas when different Saudi and Jordanian scholars came
to the Brixton mosque they would travel by tube and in modest cars owned by
the Brixton Salafis themselves (interviewee N). Nonetheless, the Brixton Salafis
took the view that if they ceased constantly to refute the claims of el-Faisal and
others, that would be interpreted as a sign of weakness both by their supporters
and by the audience for whom they and their opponents were competing. All of
19
Salafimanhaj.com, ‘The devil’s deception of Abdullaah Faysal’, 2006, http://www.salafimanhaj.com/ebook.
php?ebook=45, accessed 26 May 2009.
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Why conventional wisdom on radicalization fails
this has the mark of a turf war that retained components of Brixton street culture
overlaid with Islamic protocols.
According to interviewee D, personal enmity—of the kind that is illustrated
in the previous and following extracts—had built up over a long period between
Abdullah el-Faisal and his supporters on the one hand and the Brixton Salafis on
the other. From the police perspective, it seemed that the Brixton Salafis were
engaged in a direct competition for recruits with those who wished to promote
a violent terrorist agenda. As one Metropolitan Police Counter-Terrorism
Command officer explained:
By the end of 2003 we had visited over one hundred and fifty mosques in London and
attended over two hundred meetings with Muslim groups around London and the kind of
expert knowledge we found at Brixton was in very short supply. We drew up a short list
of ten mosques and centres where we had found expertise in understanding and refuting
al-Qaida propaganda and recruitment in the capital and Brixton was number one.20
It follows that if the Brixton Salafis had posed no threat to Abdullah el-Faisal’s
recruitment programme he would almost certainly have ignored them—as he
ignored all other Muslim groups in the area. The fact that it mattered to Al-Qaeda
supporters to ridicule their most effective opponents on the streets and in the
cafés where they competed for recruits served as a valuable performance indicator.
Abdullah el-Faisal attacked the Brixton Salafis for being subservient to the Saudi
king and the Saudi authorities generally as part of a concerted strategy to undermine their credibility. Had he been able to back that up with some evidence of
physical success in terms of confrontation with his opponents, then it might have
counted for more. This was the same tactic employed by Abu Hamza and Abu
Qatada.
Conclusions
The first case discussed in this article suggests that the meer presence of ideology,
or even specific political attachment to an ideology, is not enough to explain
why an individual commits a terrorist act. The differences between Rahman
and Lamine Adam help to shed light on the complexity of actual commitment
to and engagement in terrorist activities, as opposed to trying to look tough
without acting. Approaches that emphasize specific forms of Islamic ideology or
theology as causal ‘mood music’ for terrorism are, at best, existentializing red
herrings that are prone to miss the point, no matter how politically faddish. The
point is relevant more widely: take, for example, the expulsion of Omar Bakri
Mohammed from Hizb-ut-Tahrir on the grounds that he was too extreme in his
call for participation in Islamically inspired violence against Britain and the West.
Yet conventional wisdom suggests that it is the very presence of Hizb-ut-Tahrir
that is causing violence.
Furthermore, it was Rahman Adam, as Anthony Garcia, who apparently
demonstrated a higher commitment to and participation in culturally integrative
20
Confidential interviewee, Metropolitan Police.
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Jonathan Githens-Mazer and Robert Lambert
activities than his brother. If, as the conventional wisdom suggests, radicalization is a function of marginalization, alienation and disaffection, why should it
have been someone who was apparently more assimilated to non-Muslim British
social practices (or more actively engaged in the process of assimilation) who was
directly implicated in a terrorist plot, rather than his overtly ideological sibling?
Similar questions arise when studying the apparently highly integrated terrorists
such as Mohammed Siddique Khan, the leader of the 7/7 bombers.
The second case here is also problematic for conventional wisdom. How is it that
a community set apart from other Muslim and non-Muslim communities by virtue
of its adherence to a very particular religious orientation and practice should come
to be a key bulwark against individuals and movements that were subsequently
convicted of activities such as soliciting murder and inciting racial hatred? Do both
cases not suggest that combating radicalization is not just about integration, and
that aiming at community cohesion is not necessarily a relevant response?
‘Conventional wisdom’ on Islamic cultural difference (specifically Salafism) and
radicalization is muddled at best, and appears to fail at the first empirical hurdle.
In these two cases, there is little evidence to show that cultural or social difference among Muslims is causing violent radicalization. Furthermore, the narrower
application of conventional wisdom, according to which it is the combination
of Salafi or other specific political/theological Islamic outlooks with an Islamically inspired grievance that somehow generates Islamically inspired terrorism,
also fails. These reflections suggest that, at the very least, simplicity is not a word
that can be associated with understanding (violent) radicalization. It is clear even
from the brief examination of these cases that approaches to counterterrorism
and/or counter-radicalization that assume the existence of simple ‘root causes’ or
‘pathways’ that, when addressed, will systematically stem terrorism’s occurrence
are not only naive but may actually be counterproductive.
In fact, an emphasis on Islamic social, cultural and/or political difference in
conventional wisdom betrays a normative obsession with an ‘existential threat’
posed by Islam to the ‘liberal secular’ and/or ‘Judeo-Christian’ West—a core
belief that Islam causes insecurity. In some cases, it may even betray a normative
obsession with Salafism as an existential threat to other forms of Islam (particularly for those of Sufi or Shi’i orientation). This would suggest that Hazel Blears’s
insistence that ‘shared values and beliefs’ are an inherent part of understanding
and countering terrorist threats is a political claim rather than one driven by realworld security concerns. In fact, an unwavering commitment to failed ‘conventional wisdom’ in the face of contradictory empirical data seems to mark a clear
difference between current British policy-makers and security practitioners. For
example, in August 2008 the Guardian newspaper quoted a leaked MI5 study of
violent radicalization that cautioned against the ‘logical fallacy’ of ‘assuming that
all those who share a common experience of dislocating episodes will become
terrorists’.21 It is fact-based insights of this kind that will help us to make further
clear distinctions between non-violent and violent ‘radicalization’.
21
Alan Travis, ‘The making of an extremist’, Guardian, 20 Aug. 2008.
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Why conventional wisdom on radicalization fails
Why do we feel it is important to counter the conventional wisdom about
radicalization? Why swim against the policy-making and media tides? At its
most basic, the answer is so that we can more accurately observe the true nature
of an existing terrorist threat. As Marc Sageman notes, a diversity of terrorist
backgrounds undermines stereotyping as a predictor of terrorism: ‘The inability
of specific factors, singly or in combination, to distinguish future mujahedin from
nonmujahedin limits our ability to make statements that are specific to terrorists. Identification of variables specific to the creation, maintenance and demise of
terrorists requires comparison with a relevant control group of nonterrorists.’22
Without a clear definition of terms and ideas—of what we are trying to observe
and understand, a ‘we know it when we see it’ approach to understanding radicalization becomes lackadaisical and promotes stereotyping. It justifies a policy-making
and media approach to radicalization that promotes emotional or politically driven
feelings about who poses a security threat over a scientific, empirically derived
form of knowledge and understanding about what this threat actually is or is
not. It is, in our opinion, telling that the insistence on a discourse reliant on an
undefined ‘conventional wisdom’ on radicalization stems from both policy-makers
and the media. Both have much at stake—the one to make the general public
feel more secure and therefore re-elect them, the other to sell newspapers and
airtime. Together with academics who support the conventional wisdom, they
create a feedback loop: politicians point to media and commentator support for
their views, the media point to policy-makers and academics, and academics seek
funding and ‘impact’ by toeing the line of conventional wisdom. Deviation from
conventional wisdom requires one group of participants to break this cycle—at
the tangible risk, variously, of livelihood, of not being re-elected, of losing sales,
and of losing research funding.
To this extent, radicalization, as concept and as industry, has become an
extremely powerful and destructive political label in twenty-first-century Britain.
It not only allows the stigmatization of certain Muslim groups and individuals
and their exclusion from British political processes; it also allows the government
and media commentators to engage in a process of differentiating ‘good Muslims’
from ‘bad Muslims’, thereby supporting those who support the government’s
political projects at home or abroad, and punishing those who critically engage
with policies that affect Muslim communities either in Britain or beyond. Even
where government has recognized the popularly resonant power and ability of
communities such as the Brixton Salafis to directly confront the threat of radicalization, it has come under substantial pressure from commentators and the media
for ‘treating with reactionaries’, risking loss of reputation for communities and
government alike.
Conventional wisdom on radicalization has sapped this term of scientific value,
so that the label of ‘radicalization’ has become instead a tool of power exercised by
the state and non-Muslim communities against, and to control, Muslim communities in the twenty-first century.
22
Marc Sageman, Understanding terror networks (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), p. 69.
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