Part Two: Down This Path Before
When U.S. forces swept through Afghanistan, among the foreign fighters they detained and shipped to Guantanamo Bay were nine British Muslims. After much pressure from the British government some of the men were released. But the U.S. is keeping Moaazam Begg in custody. In Birmingham, Moazzam's father, Azmatt Begg, is trying to hold things together for his family. He is fielding questions from the press, keeping pressure on the Red Cross for news of his son and speaking daily with Moazzam's wife, trying to reassure her that her husband will come home safely.
Azmatt Begg still doesn't understand how a middle-class well educated man like his son embarked on a journey that ended up in Camp Delta. The Begg family has long been assimilated into western ways. When Azmatt brought his family to Birmingham they moved into a neighborhood with immigrants from an earlier migration: Jews. Moazzam attended a state school that was primarily Jewish. His boyhood friends were mostly Jews. He was studying law at university when the big change occurred. He dropped out, got married and started a religious bookshop.
In 2000, Moazzam's bookshop was raided by Britain's special branch police. Their interest piqued by Moazzam's alleged contacts with known jihadists. No charges were brought against him and the shop re-opened. Then Moazzam announced that he was taking his family to Afghanistan. He and his wife were going to open a school. It isn't uncommon for young British Muslims, like young British Christians, to go abroad and do relief work. But it is unusual for a family to go off on its own and do relief work independently. This concerned Azmatt Begg. "I opposed it. I said you will face a lot of difficulties a lot of problems. But he said I'm doing something good for their future and they will remember what I'm going to do for them."
Then September 11th happened and the armies of the U.S. and its allies began to mass around Afghanistan. Moazzam sent his family over the border to Pakistan's capital Islamabad. He followed shortly thereafter. There he was arrested by U.S. soldiers.
Moazzam was held first in Kandahar than in a small cell in a hangar at Bagram airbase near Kabul. After a year in Afghanistan he was transferred to Guantanamo.
No information about the charges against him have been made public. Azmatt Begg wants to see and hear the evidence against his son. He is very skeptical about his son's involvement in any kind of Al Qaeda-linked activity. Begg thinks reports of British Muslim involvement in Islamic terrorism are exaggerated, although he acknowledges he knows little about the younger generation.
There is a profound generational difference in the Muslim community and it finds a keen expression in Islam. Bristol University professor Tariq Modood says the generation born in Britain has a different sense of what it means to be Muslim. "They think of themselves as Muslims in a more dramatic foregrounded way," he says.
Young people challenge their parents' interpretation of Islam and have turned to a new group of Muslim immigrants in Britain, mostly from the Arabian world, well-versed in the political doctrines of Wahabbism.
Syrian born Sheikh Omar Bakri, deported from Saudi Arabia, is a perfect example of a sharp religious political sensibility preaching to second-generation South Asians who feel estranged from their parent's practice of Islam.
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(AP) Finsbury Park Mosque |
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Most of his London group of followers found their way to the sheikh by attending services at the Finsbury Park Mosque in north London. This mosque was notorious for radical activity long before September 11th but gained even greater infamy when it turned out that Zaccarias Moussawi -- the alleged 20th hijacker -- worshipped there as well as Richard Reid, the shoe bomber. On the first anniversary of the World Trade Center attack, Omar Bakri held a conference there called "A Towering Day in History," which praised the attack and called on Muslims to continue the struggle against the West. The British Authorities closed the mosque last year. Its main preacher, Abu Hamza, is in jail fighting extradition to the U.S.
When you talk to Omar Bakri's acolytes they are full of bravado.
They say they're determined to go abroad and wage jihad. But the
moment where this tough talk crosses over into a commitment to
action is a key to the mystery but it is impossible to document
the role of the sheikh, and others in taking acolytes over the
threshold.
The sheikh teaches them, "Martyrdom is what you want. Do the effort, clean your intentions, go forward, never look backwards. Make sure you have nothing left behind to think about or to cry for and fight for the name of Allah."
But Bakri claims not to actively recruit people for jihad. But he can't be surprised that some students join the global jihad after listening to him preach.
The teachings of Sheikh Omar and other radical teachers including Abu Hamza divide the British Muslim community as much as they offend the rest of the country. Sadiq Khan is a lawyer who represents two British Muslims accused of plotting a ricin attack on the London Underground. He also works with the mainstream Muslim Council of Britain, Sadiq Khan says critics need a sense of perspective when talking about the radical preachers, "The real point is this: they are a minority."
There are around 1.8 million Muslims in Britain, perhaps a million live in London. No more than 100 were in the hall the night I attended Omar Bakri's lecture. Overreacting to radical teachers like Omar Bakri has led the British government down the wrong path according to lawyer Saddiq Khan. "The danger happens when the police arrest any Muslim willy-nilly," he says.
In Britain, those suspected of terrorist activities can be arrested and held for seven days before being charged. In the almost three years since the World Trade Center attack, around 550 British Muslims have been detained under anti-terrorism laws, 94 were actually charged with a crime -- only six have been convicted.
British authorities have been down this path before. For thirty years, British governments of the right and the left had to evolve strategies to deal with the IRA. Initially, the British authorities handled Irish Republican terrorism the way the Bush administration has dealt with terrorism post-9/11. Suspected IRA men were subject to indefinite internment in prison and secret trials. But the resentment this bred in the Catholic community of Northern Ireland simply created more recruits for the IRA. So the British Government evolved a more subtle counter-terrorism strategy based on surveillance and penetration of the IRA. But the situation with British Muslims is different says Jonathan Stevenson, author of "We Wrecked the Place," a book about Northern Ireland. Stevenson is also currently a fellow of London's International Institute for Strategic Studies. "It comes down to the mass casualty threat," he says, adding, "If they were tracking an IRA suspect in the interest of gaining intelligence and that suspect happened to elude them, they weren't that worried that he was going to commit some terrorist act that would kill a thousand people. Now there is the possibility that a terrorist could kill in the hundreds or thousands."
So Muslim terrorist suspects are detained more readily. Next...
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