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CHAPTER FIVE

LONDONISTAN

Summer 1998–Early 2000

I arrived at Heathrow airport on a muggy late summer’s day in 1998, relieved to be free of the dust and heat of Sana’a and faintly amused by the orderly appearance of suburban London. I was soon reunited with Mahmud al-Tayyib at the Regent’s Park mosque and regaled him with stories of Dammaj and Sana’a.

I helped teach Muslims who came to the mosque and began accompanying an elderly Iraqi preacher and several converts to Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park, where we would try to spread the word of Islam. We must have been a strange sight in our long Islamic thawbs, the ankle-length robe. Sometimes we would get into heated debates with evangelical Christians.

‘The Koran is the pure word of God,’ I would shout, remembering to quote a famous verse from the Koran. ‘Had it issued from any but God, they would surely have found in it many a contradiction.’

We were usually greeted by a mixture of indifference and suspicion, which only reinforced our determination to continue proselytizing.

For radical Muslims London had become a cauldron of debate and rivalry. There were many echoes of the discussions that had occupied our afternoons under the date-palms of Dammaj. And the gritty district of Brixton, south of the River Thames, had become the centre of this tussle for the soul of Islam.

Brixton had seen riots in the early 1980s, pitching Afro-Caribbean youth against the Metropolitan Police. Disturbances had then spread to a dozen cities. The area had since become somewhat gentrified, but its housing was rundown and there was still plenty of poverty. Even on a bright summer’s day in 1998 the high street was gloomy – a collection of down-at-heel stores and roads strewn with escaped plastic bags. But Brixton mosque was thriving and its reputation for Salafism was attracting devotees from across Europe. I had first heard about the mosque from British Muslims who had come to Yemen.

Most of my friends and flatmates were of a similar outlook. My experiences in Yemen and especially my time at Dammaj fascinated them. I even met the singer Cat Stevens several times. He had changed his name to Yusuf Islam and become a Sufi Muslim; I had some animated conversations with him about the true path of Islam. Salafis scorned Sufi Muslims for their veneration of saints and other perceived distortions of the faith.

I picked up temporary jobs, mostly driving, which helped me find radical mosques throughout London: in Hounslow, Shepherd’s Bush and Finchley. None was as grand as Regent’s Park; some were no more than shabby basements. But they were energized by a fervour which was by then challenging – and worrying – more moderate preachers, as well as the British security services.

The new circle I had entered included plenty of angry young men looking to inflict revenge on the West for its persecution of Muslims. A few clearly had emotional or psychological issues, displaying wild mood swings or budding paranoia, but most were driven by an unshakable belief that they had found the true way to obey Allah and that obedience called for waging jihad. A surprising number of French converts had come to Brixton, including one called Mukhtar. We talked about everything, shared a passion for martial arts and attended the mosque together.

Mukhtar was a French convert in his thirties, with a lean physique and close-set dark eyes. He reminded me a little of the French footballer Zinedine Zidane. We had met at Brixton mosque and he told me he had come to London to get away from police brutality in the rundown suburb of Paris where he had lived.

I soon met his French-Moroccan flatmate, one Zacarias Moussaoui. They lived in a decrepit 1960s council tower block that reeked of decay. Their apartment was bare: no beds or sofas, just a couple of mattresses and rough hessian mats on the floor. It was a typical Salafists’ pad.

Moussaoui had just turned thirty. He was well-built but beginning to put on weight. A thin black beard ran from his sideburns down his jaw and petered out at his chin. His receding hair was swept back. He would often cook tagine and couscous for everyone.

Moussaoui was clearly intelligent and had recently received a Master’s degree at London’s South Bank University, which was not far from Brixton. Most of the time he was quiet and unassuming, but brooding. He rarely talked about himself and never about his family. He did, however, have a passion for martial arts, especially Filipino knife-fighting.

Occasionally he would talk in general terms about jihad in Afghanistan and especially in Chechnya, which was at that time the cause célèbre of jihadis. Islamist rebels were battling the might of the Russian army. We all agreed that there was an obligation to support the rebels, through prayer, money or even waging jihad ourselves.

‘It would be sinful if we don’t at least raise money,’ Moussaoui once said in his soft French-accented voice, as we sat cross-legged on the floor.

The age of online videos had dawned and we would watch stuttering, blurry images on websites which championed the Chechen struggle: ambushes of Russian troops, but more often human rights atrocities by the Russians against Chechen civilians in the Chechen capital, Grozny. Moussaoui would stare at the screen, his eyes glistening and his head shaking.

‘Kuffar [infidel] Russians,’ he muttered one day. ‘I would happily die in Grozny if I could take a platoon of them with me.’

What he never told us was that he had already been to Chechnya and worked for the rebels – helping tell the world of their cause with his IT skills. He had also helped recruit others from abroad to join the Chechen war. Nor did he tell us he had spent time in one of al-Qaeda’s camps in Afghanistan in the spring of 1998. While the rest of us debated jihad, Moussaoui had already lived it.

In October 1999 the Russians began a ground offensive against Grozny. Television coverage and videos posted online revealed the true horror of what amounted to a scorched-earth campaign, with tens of thousands of civilians forced to flee their homes.

Thousands of miles away, my small Salafist circle in Brixton could not contain its anger. One bright autumn morning we emerged from the Brixton mosque furious that the preachers had never called for prayers let alone action in support of the Chechen resistance. Their battle against overwhelming odds made them heroes to us. We also knew that hundreds of foreign fighters, including graduates from Dammaj, had made their way to the Russian Caucasus.

‘You see,’ I said to Moussaoui and others, ‘once again the establishment has deserted us, allowing the atheists to murder and maim our people without even raising a murmur. Our preachers are terrified they will fall foul of the police; they are so comfortable with their London life.’

We picketed the mosque, appealing for money and support for the Chechen resistance.

On 21 October Russian rockets rained down on a market in Grozny, killing dozens of women and children. I was instantly reminded of the Bosnian Serbs’ shelling of the Sarajevo market, which had killed ­dozens of Muslims in 1995. The television footage was heartbreaking and enraging – and we redoubled our efforts to shame the mosque establishment into acknowledging the Chechens’ suffering. Sometimes we would register our anger by attending a nearby mosque run by Nigerians that openly supported jihad in Chechnya.

In autumn 1999 Moussaoui’s demeanour changed. The brooding became anger. He began to turn up at the Brixton mosque wearing combat fatigues and embraced the more militant environment at the Finsbury Park mosque in North London. Among those who trailed in his wake was a tall Jamaican-Englishman called Richard Reid, who had a long, thin face, a straggly beard and unkempt, curly hair held together in a ponytail. In another era he might have been a hippy. Reid was a petty criminal and Muslim convert, and he always looked like he needed a decent meal.

It was clear that Reid was in awe of Moussaoui. He attached himself to our group but said little; he seemed lonely. I lost contact with both men late in 1999 and thought little more of them, especially Reid – who seemed weak, impressionable. There were rumours that they had gone to Afghanistan – and I wondered whether the two of them had trained with al-Qaeda. Even so, I was stunned when their names and faces were splashed on television and newspapers two years later.

Moussaoui would be arrested shortly before 9/11 in Minnesota. He had entered the United States to get flying lessons, and would soon become known as the ‘twentieth hijacker’. Reid would board a flight from Paris to Miami on 22 December 2001 with explosive powder hidden in his shoes. Restrained by flight attendants and passengers as he tried to light fuses hidden in his shoes, he would become known as the ‘shoe-bomber’.

As my associations with radical Islamists expanded, I was often surprised by who among them crossed the Rubicon from talk to terror. They were rarely the obvious ones. But it was clear even in 1999 that London – and especially the mosque at Finsbury Park – was becoming the clearing-house for dozens of militants intent on acts of terrorism. And they often had similar backgrounds: with difficult or violent childhoods, little education and few prospects; unemployed, unmarried and seething with resentments.

Aware of the militant rhetoric emerging from places like the Finsbury Park mosque, the British security services were beginning to pay more attention to London’s jihadist scene. But like many Western agencies they seemed to be playing catch-up, trying to grasp the extent of the problem, find out more about the leading lights, travel and funding, the rivalries among radical circles. Brixton and Finsbury Park became the battlegrounds for Londonistan, pitching the pro-Saudi Salafis like old Tayyib against a generation of angry jihadis that wanted to bring down the Saudi royal family, fight the Russians in Chechnya and purify the Muslim world of Western influences.

For my own part, books, lectures and conversations late into the night all helped prod me towards support for jihad, for taking up arms to defend the faith. I could not understand why the imams of most London mosques, including Abdul Baker at Brixton, studiously avoided mention of jihad let alone issue fatwas, commands to action. In Dammaj the duty of jihad as part of our religion had been our daily fare.

In the dying days of 1999 I went to a lecture in Luton, a town north of London, by Shaikh Yahya al-Hajuri, one of the teachers at Dammaj. He was surprised to see me.

‘What are you doing here?’ he asked me as I greeted him afterwards. ‘You are supposed to be back in Yemen.’

I was taken aback by his tone. Had I abandoned the true path? Was my faith being adulterated in Europe? I went home and prayed for guidance, for a sign from Allah that I should return to what in many ways was the cradle of my devotion.

It came on a Friday morning just weeks later. I had dropped into the basement kitchen at the Regent’s Park mosque for a cheap meal. A dark-skinned woman approached me, looking anxious.

‘Brother, please can you come to help my husband. He wants to pray but he can’t walk from the car.’

I went upstairs with her. The couple were from Mauritius. Her elderly husband looked so fragile that I thought to move him might break him. He was sitting in the driver’s seat of an ancient Mercedes.

‘I’m all right, brother,’ he said. ‘I just need to rest and get my breath back.’

I picked up an inhaler from the floor of the car. But he only became paler; it was almost as if he were vanishing before my eyes. His breathing became laboured, a quiet heaving scarcely audible amid the rush of traffic. His eyes closed and he fell back in the seat. There was a faint gurgling in his throat and his eyes reopened, staring vacantly through the front window.

I thought for a moment that he had recovered from some sort of spasm but soon found myself muttering in Arabic ‘There is no God but Allah’ to aid his passage to paradise. He coughed weakly and was gone.

As his wife screamed hysterically, I lifted the man out of the car and was struck for an instant by how surreal the scene must seem: a large Viking carrying a sliver of an African across lanes of London traffic. A park warden ran over to tell me that he had radioed for an ambulance. But it was too late.

It shook me. How we all hang by a thread. I helped prepare the man’s corpse for burial at the Wembley mosque in keeping with Islamic practice. As I washed the grey skin I thought about how I had seen him leave this world – and how fortunate he had been that a fellow Muslim had been on hand to pray for him as he passed.

It was a sign. I could not die here among the kuffar. I had to be surrounded by people of my faith. Allah had prescribed it. If you died among disbelievers it was a sin. In the words of one hadith: ‘Whoever settles among the disbelievers, celebrates their feasts and joins in their revelry and dies in their midst will likewise be raised to stand with them on the Day of Resurrection.’

The world was divided into believers and non-believers, and the worst Muslim was better than the best Christian.

But to return to the Muslim world would require a passport. Mine had been ruined during my travels. I went to the Danish embassy in London to try to get a replacement. But they had other business with me – an outstanding criminal conviction. Back in 1996 I had been involved in a scrap in a bar over a spilt drink. I had head-butted one of my assailants and then punched another. I was arrested on the way home and later sentenced to a six-month term, to be served in typically Danish fashion when cell space became available. Before it did, I had left Denmark, and under the date-palms in Dammaj I had forgotten the whole episode. Now the sentence was overdue – and I would only get a new passport if I returned to Denmark to face the music.

I would spend the first months of the new millennium behind bars.