It feels like everyone already knows Anjem Choudary. After being dubbed Britain’s “best-known Islamic extremist”, he was a kind of anti-celebrity. For the best part of two decades he was a regular feature on our airways, appearing after almost every terrorist outrage to push an insensitive, indignant or otherwise irritable message. But on 30 July he was convicted for a second time of directing a terrorist organisation, earning him a minimum sentence of 28 years. He may well die in prison.
If this does mark the end of Choudary’s influence in British society, his journey over the past three decades has nonetheless been a remarkable one, from weed-smoking and beer-swilling law student to the country’s most notorious hate preacher. His story, and that of the network that spawned him, stand as a personification for the growth of radical Islam in 21st-century Britain, and its growing conflict with the security state. And his involvement with extremism is almost as long as the history of organised Islamist agitation in Britain itself. Through his rise and fall, we can better understand the trajectory of the ideology behind him – and how best to combat it.
The British Islamist movement was first spawned by events in the Middle East and has, in one way or another, been shaped by them ever since. Choudary’s axial role was preceded by his ideological mentor, a man known as Omar Bakri Muhammad. Bakri is a Syrian scholar from Aleppo who has spent his entire life engaging with radical groups, including the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, Hizb ut-Tahrir (which was recently banned in the UK) and Al-Muhajiroun (which he founded). That activism brought him to the attention of authorities in Saudi Arabia, where he was living in the 1980s, prompting his arrest on several occasions. By 1986, Bakri had decided there was too much attention on him and, already possessing a visitor visa to the UK, decided to seek sanctuary in London.
For the next five years or so, Bakri was not particularly active in the public eye, but this changed when more Islamists fled the Middle East through the early- and mid-1990s, regrouping in Europe. Many had travelled to Afghanistan to fight the Soviet Union in the 1980s but found themselves facing persecution upon their return home, where they were viewed as security threats. Arab governments were right to be wary. Intoxicated by their unlikely victory against the Soviet imperium, this returning foreign legion of so-called Arab-Afghans now wanted to recast the contours of power back home. By 1993, Algeria had fallen into civil war, and Egypt’s prime minister, Atef Sedky, was lucky to survive an assassination attempt. Most significantly, however, extremists across the entire region had been outraged by the Saudi royal family’s decision to enter into a military alliance with the US against Saddam Hussein, who had invaded Kuwait in 1990. The shock of an American military presence on the Arabian peninsula – regarded as holy land by Islamic conservatives – was a formative moment that galvanised extremists well beyond Saudi’s borders.
When regional governments in the Middle East started to crack down on this enemy within, a number of radicals found refuge in Europe, settling in Britain, France, Germany and Austria. Bakri was waiting and ready to greet them when they arrived. Like them, he viewed the fallout from Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait as a watershed moment – but what would they all do now? After all, Europe was not their primary arena of activity. These Islamists were all still focused on the Middle East, where they aspired to unseat what they regarded as despotic governments, establish a caliphate, and diminish Western influence in the region. At the time, there was no plan to overthrow governments in Europe or any vision for an Islamic State in the West. Many of the continent’s security agencies were consequently lured into the false belief that this small but growing community of robed radicals would pose little threat at home.
No one at the time recognised this for what it was: the birth of a dangerous new movement in Britain whose actions would ultimately reverberate around the world. But in Europe, the new Islamist émigrés spied an opportunity. They reasoned they could harness Europe’s more liberal and permissive environment around free speech to project their message back into the Muslim world. They were still in the business of recruiting British Muslims, but the idea was to mobilise these recruits in support of political causes abroad, such as the House of Saud’s foreign policy, political repression in Egypt, or the actions of the Arab League over Palestine. Again, for the security agencies, these early recruits to the Islamist cause appeared to be little more than oddballs with parochial interests in far-flung and exotic parts of the world. Prior to 9/11, few in the West were familiar with concepts such as jihad or caliphate.
To appreciate how these Arab dissidents were able to successfully recruit British Muslims requires some historical context. Almost 40 per cent of all British Muslims are ethnically Pakistani and close to two thirds are from the broader Indian subcontinent. When they first migrated to the UK in the 1960s and 1970s, these new arrivals focused on meeting the everyday challenges of Muslim life in Britain such as securing access to halal food, establishing mosques and creating services for Islamic burial. But their children faced different challenges, most of which related to their place in Britain. Salman Rushdie’s publication of The Satanic Verses in 1988 had caused global uproar among Muslims who saw the book as blasphemous and insulting, leading to book burnings in Bradford and bookshops being firebombed across the UK. A few years later, the Bosnian War also raised difficult questions about Islam’s place in Europe, a conflict every bit as seminal for European Muslims at that time as the Syrian conflict was for those coming of age in the 2010s.
Arab leaders arriving in London found themselves well-placed to capitalise on this more politicised community. They began targeting British Muslims at universities around the country, bringing them a message of doctrine and defiance. And, having already lived in the UK for years, Bakri was front and centre. He was fluent in English, and possessed a jovial charisma that made him appear more rascal than radical. It also meant he was the perfect frontman to interact with the press – and Bakri loved the attention. He quickly learned how to use the media for his own ends, harnessing their outrage to sell tickets for events or generate publicity for meetings. His first major public conference was organised in 1994 at Wembley Arena, billed as a “Rally for Khilafah”. Thousands attended, though the majority were far from hardened Islamists. Most went out of curiosity more than anything else, eager to see the Islamist circus rolling through town. Among them was Anjem Choudary.
Bakri began to make outrage and offence his hallmarks. The following year he organised a “Rally for Islam” in Trafalgar Square where he implored the Queen and John Major to embrace Islam. Officially, Bakri was operating at this time under the umbrella of Hizb ut-Tahrir, a rigidly hierarchical and transnational Islamist group whose name means “party of liberation”. It is committed to the creation of a global caliphate through ostensibly peaceful means, believing it must cause a popular revolution or a coup d’état by inciting the armies of Muslim countries to sedition. Hizb ut-Tahrir was only banned in January this year after it held a rally in London calling on Muslim armies to wage jihad against Israel in defence of Gaza. Yet, even in the mid-1990s, Bakri’s growing fanaticism and consistent refusal to work within Hizb ut-Tahrir’s structures meant that by February 1996 he decided to go it alone and launch his own group, Al-Muhajiroun (meaning “the emigrants”).
Choudary’s moment had arrived. Bakri needed a deputy, and he was perfectly placed to embrace the role: older and more engaged than Bakri’s other acolytes, most of whom were either young undergraduates, listless school-leavers, or converts from often very turbulent backgrounds. Choudary quickly became noticed for his intelligence, having studied law at Southampton University, knowledge that may have been extremely useful for al-Muhajiroun as it repeatedly pushed the boundaries of legality. Within months of al-Muhajiroun’s launch, Choudary became the central figure in an unsuccessful attempt to organise yet another rally at Wembley Arena. Among those invited to participate either in person or by video message were Osama bin Laden, imprisoned jihadist leaders from the Algerian Civil War, and Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, who was jailed by the US for his role in the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing. The organisers had hoped he would send a letter from his jail cell in America’s most secure prison, the federal supermax in Colorado.
The meeting was so controversial that the governments of Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia and Israel all formally protested to John Major at the time. “I am surprised that this conference, which includes many of the elements which support terrorism, will convene,” said Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak. “This does not serve the fight against international terrorism.” The rally was eventually cancelled, but only because Wembley Arena imposed such prohibitive costs for additional security on the organisers that they had no choice but to abandon their plans. None of this mattered to Bakri or Choudary. The abortive rally had already achieved exactly what they wanted – attention for their cause on a global scale. But what is notable is that Wembley Arena forced the event’s cancellation, not the authorities. When asked about the conference, the foreign secretary at the time, Malcolm Rifkind, baldly noted, “People who wish to hold conferences, of course, don’t need to seek permission from the government.” This seeming indifference infuriated allies abroad who believed the UK had deliberately adopted a soft-touch approach towards Islamist extremism. The British state seemed to be calculating that so long as this wave of reactionary rage was directed abroad, we would be safe at home.
Choudary’s influence continued to grow through the late 1990s, and by the time of the 9/11 attacks, he was a well-established and respected figure within the landscape of radical British Islam. When Tony Blair lent his full support to the US in the War on Terror, following George W Bush into both Afghanistan and Iraq, the Al-Muhajiroun network became even more extreme. It openly praised the 9/11 terrorists, hailing them as martyrs and the “magnificent 19”. Choudary’s importance to Bakri and the broader movement began to grow, his legal knowledge helping them to remain just within the limits of counter-terrorism law. A book published by Bakri in 2004, titled The World Is Divided into Two Camps…, offers some insight into how Al-Muhajiroun stretched these boundaries. “Each individual Muslim has a covenant of security with the state, either through the passports they legally applied for… or by the travel or residency VISAs [sic] they obtained,” he wrote. “If the country in question violates the security of an individual Muslim or invalidates the terms of their contract of security by arresting or holding them without charge then that particular person no longer has any contract of security with the nation.”
This logic allowed them to express support for terrorists by arguing the covenant had been broken for those specific individuals. By contrast, Bakri and Choudary maintained that theirs remained intact and, consequently, that they posed no threat to the British state. To understand how slippery this approach was, consider Al-Muhajiroun’s activities at the time. It told Muslims that Britain was at war with Islam, that it was part of a “crusader” alliance fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, and that it was seeking to destroy Muslim life in the UK. In those frenzied early years of the War on Terror, any ordinary person listening to Al-Muhajiroun would be left with the clear impression that Britain was a belligerent nation, and that Muslims were obligated to fight it. Audiences across the country were filled with this message of anger and hate at every event Al-Muhajiroun organised. Yet Bakri and Choudary would then tell them to also consider whether they had a covenant with the state. It provided them with a wafer-thin alibi, even while the actual aim of their message was more than clear.
The inevitable came in 2003. The group was linked to an identifiable terrorist attack when two British men, Omar Sharif and Asif Hanif, bombed a bar in Tel Aviv. The pair had travelled to Gaza after attending public talks given by Al-Muhajiroun, as well as private invitation-only meetings that were usually a precursor to joining. Once there, they met with the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades (the same group responsible for the 7 October atrocities last year) before embarking on a mission to become suicide bombers. In the ensuing attack, three people were killed and more than 50 injured. Less than three months later, Bakri and Choudary were arrested for questioning in the UK under counter-terrorism legislation, but were released shortly afterwards.
By 2004 it became clear the group also had links to those who intended to carry out attacks at home. When police successfully concluded Operation Crevice, an investigation into a plot to make bombs from 600 kilograms of ammonium nitrate, they uncovered an expansive global network with Al-Muhajiroun at its centre. It turned out that several of the plot’s ringleaders had been radicalised by the group and that a few had even attended a terrorist training camp they had helped establish in the Malakand province of Pakistan’s tribal areas. Bakri became fearful that Al-Muhajiroun was about to be banned in the UK and dissolved it, spawning two splinter groups that were ostensibly led by others: the Saved Sect and Al-Ghurabaa (meaning “the strangers”). Neither group operated for long before the 7/7 terrorist attacks in London in 2005 killed 52 people and injured more than 700. Suspecting he might be arrested again, Bakri fled the country to Lebanon. The home secretary Charles Clarke immediately took the opportunity to ban Bakri from returning, permanently removing him from the landscape of radical British Islam in the process.
[See also: Shaking hands with Islamic State]
Bakri continued to stir trouble from Lebanon, maintaining contact with followers in Britain. In the years since, he has been in and out of prison in Lebanon for fomenting terrorism, and was most recently released last year. But with him banished from Britain, the stage was set for Choudary to become the country’s most important Islamic extremist. Under his sole leadership, his former comrades from Al-Muhajiroun grew even more radical and confrontational. This began almost straight away when, in the summer of 2006, a man Choudary had radicalised named Omar Brooks confronted Clarke’s successor as home secretary, John Reid, on national television. Reid had become home secretary in May 2006 and promptly banned both the Saved Sect and Al-Ghurabaa. When he then addressed a Muslim audience in east London just two months later, Brooks was there to challenge him. “How dare you come to a Muslim area?” he shouted at Reid. “You are an enemy of Islam and Muslims.” Several others associated with Al-Muhajiroun also denounced Reid and held up placards as Brooks was bundled out of the room by security. In footage of the melee, Choudary can be seen in his favourite position: standing in the background, coordinating the chaos yet insulated from any fallout.
Choudary spread Bakri’s message to a global audience through the internet, extending his influence into the US, Netherlands and Belgium. At home, Choudary also oversaw the launch of various new stunts such as “Muslim patrols” in Tower Hamlets where his supporters enforced sharia rules in vigilante fashion on the streets. They plastered the local area with signs declaring it a “Muslim area” or “sharia zone” and insisted that public displays of drunkenness were forbidden or that Tower Hamlets was now a “gay-free zone”. The group had become so brazen that they even uploaded footage of themselves to YouTube harassing gay couples in the street, branding them “fags” or, in another, forcing a gay man to call himself “dirty”. The police eventually arrested these patrollers as their tactics spread around the country, resulting in Kabir Ahmed from Derby becoming the first person in Britain to be convicted of a homophobic hate crime in 2012.
Once again, Choudary found ways of evading accountability. Although he had overseen the Muslim patrol project, he outsourced its actual operation to Abu Rumaysah, a convert who was arrested on six separate occasions for a variety of offences. This was now a common occurrence among the coterie that surrounded Choudary. Almost all of them found themselves arrested multiple times on various charges relating to terrorism (often to do with fundraising), hate crimes or violent assaults. Life was becoming harder for these men as they shuttled in and out of prison. Then in 2013, the Fusilier Lee Rigby was murdered by Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale in a brutal terrorist attack. He had been hacked to death on London’s streets in an act of supposed retribution for British foreign policy. Predictably, it transpired that the mastermind of the plot, Adebolajo, had links to Al-Muhajiroun.
By this point, however, the dynamics of Muslim extremism had shifted. Islamists from around the world had begun flooding into Syria to fight on behalf of Islamic State (IS) – a development that would prove to be Choudary’s undoing. He and his followers had long argued that an Islamic State was a religious obligation and that once an “authentic” one had been established, it was incumbent upon all Muslims to migrate there. For his supporters, the proclamation of a caliphate in Syria was precisely what they had been waiting for. After serving his 15-month sentence, Kabir Ahmed joined IS and became a suicide bomber, carrying out an attack for the group in Iraq. Plenty of others associated with Choudary’s network also made the move. His former bodyguard, Mohammed Reza Haque, joined IS before appearing in the group’s propaganda videos executing prisoners of war. Most notably however, Choudary’s chief patroller, Abu Rumaysah, also made the journey along with his heavily pregnant wife and their four children, all of whom are believed to have been killed. Even two of Bakri’s sons travelled to Syria and ultimately died there.
Many others – among them Brooks, and those convicted of fundraising for terrorism, hate crimes or other offences – also tried to go to Syria but were intercepted by authorities. But it was not only Choudary’s British acolytes making the journey. So many people associated with the radical networks Choudary had spearheaded in the Netherlands and Belgium travelled to IS territory that it effectively eradicated his international network. Pressure also grew on Choudary personally. How was he still in Britain when increasing numbers of his comrades were migrating to the promised land? With most of his henchmen gone or in jail, Choudary was forced to take greater risks himself. Things came to a head during an online meeting that radicals from around the world joined to discuss events in the Middle East. Abu Rumaysah joined the chat from Syria and challenged Choudary to declare his support for Islamic State, telling him to take an oath of allegiance to its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. It was impossible for Choudary to back down and he was forced to take the oath. For authorities spying on the meeting, it was the moment they had been waiting for.
In 2016 Choudary was sentenced to five-and-a-half years in prison for supporting a terrorist organisation. He served half that time in custody before being released on stringent licence conditions. It briefly seemed that Choudary had been brought to heel. He complied with the restrictions placed on his liberty and no longer had much of a network. Most of his associates were either dead, serving custodial sentences, or had just been released on licence themselves. Yet in 2021, after his licence conditions expired, Choudary resumed contact with the corpus of his remaining colleagues, some of whom were in the US and Canada.
It proved what authorities had suspected for years: that despite proscribing Al-Muhajiroun as a terrorist organisation, it had persisted as a movement under a variety of names with Choudary as its leader. When Choudary reconnected with his counterparts in North America, what he didn’t realise was they were already under surveillance by the authorities in their own countries, who tipped off their British colleagues. Choudary’s home was bugged and his activities monitored. It quickly became apparent that he was still effectively leading Al-Muhajiroun. When one of his Canadian followers, Khaled Hussein, travelled to London to meet him, authorities decided it was time to swoop and Choudary was arrested in a dawn raid at his home in east London on 17 July 2023.
“You are a man of great determination who has continued to pursue your aims despite your previous conviction for a terrorist offence and subsequent imprisonment,” Justice Mark Wall told Choudary at his sentencing last month. “I am sure that you will continue to preach your message of hate and division when or if you are given the opportunity to do so.” Wall’s pithy assessment illuminates a key feature of Choudary’s career and of radical British Islam in general over the last 30 years: it is a phenomenon driven by doggedly determined, resilient and unwavering actors. Conflicts and convictions, arrests and expulsions have done little to slow their trajectory or the trajectory of the destructive ideology they promote. Indeed, Choudary revelled in his status as one of the country’s most notorious hate preachers; an anti-hero who took comfort and pride in the discomfort and suffering he caused the country. He inspired scores of young men both at home and abroad to do the same. Yet this was never unique to Choudary. He was once just Bakri’s unassuming understudy who only moved to centre stage after his mentor left the country following the 7/7 attacks.
Following the recent race riots which have placed British Muslims under renewed threat and scrutiny, another generation is exploring the very questions Choudary was first asking himself in the mid-1990s. Young Muslims are once again asking themselves whether they have a future in Britain. Will they be safe? Will they be considered as equals? Or will their confessional identity forever relegate them to the status of half-citizens, tolerated but never really accepted? Having people that uncertain of their place in society serves as a boon to extremist recruiters. In the years since Choudary’s rise, even more radicals have emerged, but so too has a more muscular British state, one that has now effectively condemned Choudary to spend the rest of his days in prison. In this contested new environment, it remains to be seen whether the state’s long-overdue realisation about the dangers of radical Islam will have finally killed off Al-Muhajiroun once and for all. Or it may be that one of Choudary’s acolytes is willing to fill the void and continue the struggle, just as he did almost two decades ago.
Shiraz Maher is co-director of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation at King’s College London
[See also: The history of English rioting repeats itself]
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This article appears in the 21 Aug 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The Christian Comeback