The grieving father talks to the New Statesman about tougher sentencing, his Islamist past and his memories of his son.
In this week’s New Statesman, on the newsstands tomorrow, Tariq Jahan — the grieving father whose son Haroon was killed during the violence in Birmingham last week — speaks to me about tougher sentencing for criminals and looters, David Cameron and the “broken society”, his own surprising Islamist past and, of course, how he is coping with the loss of his young son.
Here are some extracts from the interview (and it was probably the most difficult and heartbreaking interview I’ve ever had to do):
On tougher laws and sentencing
In a rebuke to the Prime Minister’s call for a “fightback” and “crackdown” against the antisocial elements of British society, Jahan says there is no need for “more stringent” laws:
To David Cameron, to parliament, I say: don’t make the laws any more stringent. Don’t make the laws any tighter. It doesn’t help. Joe Public hates authority. Don’t make yourselves out to be tyrants, oppressing the people. We don’t need to be pushed back against the wall.
Later in the interview, he again remarks:
I don’t think tougher action will make any difference . . . We’ve had enough tough laws as it is.
Jahan is particularly concerned that the police will overreact in future.
What I don’t want to see are the stop-and-search seizures all over again.
Nor is he interested in harsher sentencing — for the looters or for the killer of his son:
Don’t change the law just because my son was killed. Changing the law to make the punishment even greater does not bring my son back. It doesn’t bring those two brothers back.
On the “Broken Society”
He rejects David Cameron’s rhetoric about society being “sick” or “broken”:
I don’t see a broken society. I see a minority of people who took advantage of the country when the country was in crisis. They didn’t think of the country and only thought about themselves, their own personal greed and satisfaction.
And Jahan says he will “never, never blame England for what happened to my son. It wasn’t the country’s fault. Was the whole country after my son? No.”
He is scathing about the conservative historian David Starkey’s recent attempt on BBC Newsnight to blame the rioting and looting on black gang culture.
Nonsense. Why blame the black community? Why point fingers? I totally disagree.
On his Islamist past
In a surprising admission, Jahan tells me that, as a teenager growing up in Slough, he was a “miscreant” who started moving in Islamic religious circles that grew increasingly extremist. He ended up attending events held by Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT), the radical Islamist organisation that has been accused of being part of the ideological “conveyor belt” of violent extremism and terrorism.
He wasn’t ever, he says, a card-carrying member of Hizb ut-Tahrir but he does admit to working as a bodyguard for the reviled cleric and former HT leader Omar Bakri Mohammed, who has since been banned from Britain.
At the age of 20, Jahan says, he got married, moved to Birmingham and left “HT and all those other religious groups” behind:
I got involved with my own family and had my three kids.
Asked for his opinion of modern Muslim extremism, Jahan says some young British Muslims need “to cool down” and he adds:
There are too many bleeding extremists now.
However, he says he disagrees with the Conservative Party election manifesto pledge to outlaw Hizb ut-Tahrir and advocates a dialogue with home-grown Islamists:
If you’ve got an extremist group, sit them down and communicate with them. We’ve been at war in Afghanistan for the past ten years and now we’ve decided we want to talk to the Taliban. If we can talk to the Taliban, why can’t we talk to these [domestic] extremist groups?
On his son’s death
Jahan speaks movingly in the interview about Haroon and how hard it has been to cope with the fallout from his murder during the riots:
Publicly, you won’t see a tear from me or my family.
In private, however, it is a different matter:
Me and my wife, we sit down in our bedroom each night, we put our heads together and we cry and we cry and we cry, until we can’t cry any more.
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