To solve the mystery of Britain's radical Islamists you don't have to look too hard for clues.

It is a Friday night in London's Bethnal Green, a heterogeneous neighborhood of working class cockneys, gentrifying young media workers and immigrants, mostly Muslim, from South Asia and Africa. In an old Unitarian church hall an energetic group of young men is preparing the room for a meeting. Rows of chairs are being neatly laid out, a couple of fellows take a cloth and cover a painting of Christ saving a nude Mary Magdalene.

(AP) Sheikh Omar Bakri

This evening's gathering is sponsored by Al-Muhajiroun, one of Britain's most prominent radical Islamist groups. Al-Muhajiroun meaning "the emigrants," was set up 20 years ago in Saudi Arabia by the evening's featured speaker, Sheikh Omar Bakri. It is dedicated to re-establishing the Caliphate, a single state for all the world's Muslims. Sheikh Omar is a little late so a young acolyte, Abu Muwahid, begins the lecture.

The subject tonight is Tawheed, the central tenet of Wahabbi Islamic teaching. The Wahabbi view of Tawheed demands that any Muslim put his allegiance to Islam above any other claims society may make on him, "Tawheed is to give up the way of life of the disbelievers," Abu Muwahid explains. "It means that you give up democracy and liberalism and freedom." It's not just Western ideas that are dismissed. Abu Muwahid heaps scorn on people who are not believers in Islam, including Jews, Christians, Hindus, Sikhs, homosexuals and socialists.

The evening's main guest, Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed, arrives and begins his talk. One of the obligations of Tawheed is to fight the disbelievers and the weapon of choice is suicide bombing. The preacher begins, "People like to call it suicide bombing; We call it self-sacrifice operation."

Bakri is a Syrian born Islamic scholar and Sharia judge. He was educated from the age of five exclusively in madrassahs (Islamic schools). He leads the group through a Koranic exegesis, in English and Arabic, about death:

"The cause of Death is almighty Allah. The situation how death occurs could be accident, could be battlefields, could be self-sacrifice operation, could be suicide."

Bakri builds up a head of steam to lead his audience of around 100 to his conclusion that they owe no loyalty at all to any man-made system of government and law:

"No one has the right to legislate, no one has the right to say what's wrong or right but almighty Allah. No one has the right to say what is crime and punishment but almighty Allah. Therefore we say let man-made law go to hell."

To listen to Omar Bakri for an hour is to have your beliefs in free speech challenged to the limit. Indeed, that seems to be his intent. Bakri cheerfully admits that if he spoke this way about the Assad government in his native Syria, or the House of Saud in Saudi Arabia, he would be thrown into prison and tortured.

(AP) Tariq Modood

The influence of radical Islamic preachers is a relatively recent phenomenon in the British Muslim community, a community whose modern roots go back to the decade just after World War II. Tariq Modood, a sociology professor at Bristol University says, "Britain like all the other Western European economies needed cheap labor and people came from all over the world mainly the British Commonwealth. The Muslims were primarily from the Indian subcontinent and they were mainly men."

According to Modood, what was unique about these immigrants is that unlike other groups they came without their families. They intended to make money and then return home. They made little effort to integrate into British society. But political instability in their homelands and the low pay they received in Britain meant that most never made it back. In the '70s they began to bring their families over or start families in Britain. So, integration was a prolonged process. And people in their twenties today are actually the first generation brought up wholly in Britain. And this generation grew to maturity as their religion was going through radical change.   Next...

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