Introduction
The British public’s first real introduction to Anjem Choudary was as a supporting cast member in Jon Ronson’s 1997 documentary The Tottenham Ayatollah. The pioneering gonzo reporter closely followed the surreal day-to-day of Omar Bakri Muhammad, a Syrian-born former member of both the Muslim Brotherhood and Hizb ut-Tahrir who went on to found the more radical Salafi-jihadist activist network al-Muhajiroun (ALM).
Since Choudary appeared in The Tottenham Ayatollah, where he is seen openly raising money for Hamas (something that would be impossible now), the strength and relevance of al-Muhajiroun have waxed and waned. The group has undergone multiple makeovers in response to changing terrorism legislation and the Home Secretary’s banning orders.
One constant throughout has been Choudary’s devotion to the cause. As a founding member of ALM and de facto leader since Bakri Muhammad’s imprisonment in Lebanon, he has devoted years of his life to the cause of a global Caliphate and is about to devote several more.
On 30 July, Choudary was sentenced to a minimum of 28 years in prison after being found guilty of continuing to direct his proscribed organisation, ALM. The conviction was the result of a multinational investigation involving the UK Counter-Terror Police, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), and the New York Police Department (NYPD).
The extremist preacher’s name often appears in news reporting alongside stats relating to the number of convicted or successful terrorists who once moved in his circles, but this only offers a partial view of the nature of his activism. It should also not be overlooked that Choudary has received a hard sentence under terrorism legislation despite never actually being involved in terrorism himself. This Insight will, therefore, take a long view, from the Ronson documentary to the latest conviction, to understand the impact and legacy of Choudary’s life in Salafi-jihadist activism beyond just his terrorist alumni.
2021: Back to Dawah
Until 2021, Anjem Choudary had significant restrictions placed on him and his ability to communicate owing to his 2016 terror conviction, handed down for inviting support for Islamic State (the group this time, rather than merely the concept) and for which he served half of a five-year sentence. Nonetheless, he went straight back to his life of proselytising the moment his bail conditions allowed – immediately broadcasting over WhatsApp and Telegram. The greying preacher also tried to re-establish himself on other platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn, where he advertised himself as a lecturer in Islamic jurisprudence, but he was promptly removed.
Choudary’s recent online dawah extended across international borders, including lectures and meetings with the Islamic Thinkers Society (ITS), which the prosecution asserted was ALM in a different guise. Despite the defence maintaining that ITS and ALM are not the same and that Choudary never held a leadership position in ITS, the judge agreed with the prosecution, handing down the 28-year sentence to a shocked and ageing defendant.
“Complete Disaster”
According to BBC reporting, Choudary sometimes lectured online to just a handful of people – any number of whom were undercover officers. However, on other occasions, his online audiences could extend into the hundreds. In either case, this is a far cry from the days when he would even be invited on to flagship shows like BBC Newsnight, or when his predecessor, Bakri Muhammad, could fill lecture theatres. Again, this is something that would be unthinkable and likely illegal today. This reflects just how throttled Choudary’s influence has been, owing to changing terrorism legislation, online moderation and bail conditions imposed on the 57-year-old.
Choudary had even complained to his former mentor, Bakri Muhammad, less than 24 hours after the latter’s release from a Lebanese prison. The UK is a “complete disaster”, Choudary explained, adding that attracting recruits is “almost impossible.” He continued to discuss the effect of social media bans: “Every channel I make on Telegram, they ban it. Anything I do, Sheikh, they ban it. Honestly I’m the most banned person.” Compared to his strident and ever-confident public appearances over the years, this candid conversation casts Choudary in an altogether more desperate, flustered light.
Provoking the Unbelievers
Somewhere between the current reality and the Ronson documentary, it was less Choudary and al-Muhajiroun’s individual accounts that posed a challenge than their ability to effectively exploit media and social media to insert themselves into an increasingly partisan and polarised political environment. Part of this strategy was a campaign of provocative stunts, including the protesting of fallen British soldiers’ funerals, or the burning of poppies on Remembrance Day. The Sharia4 copycats followed suit.
Of course, one objective was outrage, at which they clearly succeeded. The stunts drew widespread condemnation, but they also sparked a response that led to the establishment and growth of far-right street movements like the English Defence League (EDL). These groups did much of Choudary and ALM’s work for them: sharing and spreading clips and images of the desecration of national symbols online, attracting thousands of likes and angry comments online. In turn, Choudary et al. were able to pose as victims of societal Islamophobia.
The sorts of provocations ALM made their hallmark are galling to most and turn away many potential fence-sitters, but they can attract and galvanise the kind of committed core which ALM relied upon. Perhaps an even more pertinent example than the poppy burnings were the East London “Muslim patrols” organised by ALM associates acting under the name “The Shariah Project”. Whereby a small group of activists filmed themselves prowling the streets at night to harass drinkers, women deemed to be dressed immodestly, and those they perceived to be homosexual, instructing them to leave “Muslim areas”.
What was ultimately a stunt by a tiny group was beamed around the world on CNN, ABC and Fox News, riding a wave of heightened anxiety on Islamist extremism, fuelled by the rise of jihadists in the Syrian Civil War and the 2013 murder of soldier, Lee Rigby, in broad daylight in London. In response, another far-right street group, Britain First, established its own “Christian patrols” and launched mirror image provocations, while rumours and myth-making about “no-go zones” in British cities circulated on both sides of the Atlantic. The tribalism and polarisation on some of these questions have only deepened since, undoubtedly accelerated by Choudary and ALM’s inflammatory antics.
Choudary’s Trap
The trap set by Choudary and ALM’s media and social media strategy is eloquently explained in jihadism scholar Hugo Micheron’s work: in provoking a hysterical response from the right and far-right, they also successfully toxified concern over Islamist extremism among parts of the liberal-left, which in turn would relativise and downplay the challenges posed by Islamism, so as not to end up in ideological proximity to far-right street hooligans.
This paralysis carried over as increasing numbers of British and European citizens began trickling into Syria to fight for jihadist groups, including the al-Qaeda-linked al-Nusra Front and, subsequently, ISIS. It was during the ensuing ISIS “Caliphate” episode that the true impact of years of ALM activism away from the cameras was revealed, and well beyond British shores.
In the years prior, ALM had proven a challenge for authorities. Although it walked very close to the legal lines of terrorism legislation and individuals in its orbit became involved in terror plots (including Lee Rigby’s killers), the group was not an actual terrorist network – it was primarily an activist one. (Indeed, it may be unpopular to point out that Anjem Choudary has received one of the longest sentences possible under UK terrorism legislation, without ever being involved in any kind of actual terrorism himself.)
The Sharia4 Network
The group’s activism went international in the late 2000s and early 2010s, as Choudary personally helped to establish ALM copycat organisations across Northwestern Europe – the Sharia4 network – exposing large numbers of people not just to the usual provocations but to the dizzying moral and theological universe of Salafi-jihadism.
Away from the stunts, ALM’s members and supporters immersed themselves totally in this universe. In the process, they physically and spiritually dislocated themselves from wider society in adherence to the Salafist principle of “loyalty and disavowal”. Which, as Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens explained in a 2018 research paper, determined that “Muslims should live their lives completely under the rules of Islam and reject anything that has any basis outside the confines of Islam.”
When Sharia Project activist Siddhartha Dhar told Vice News “we don’t recognise British law at all. We believe in Islam. We believe in Sharia. And that’s what sets our parameters for right and wrong,” he was not just doing so for the cameras: he was neatly summarising this integral part of Salafi-jihadist ideology which is often overshadowed by more pressing questions of counter-terrorism and security.
Adherents of this worldview, whether belonging to ALM, Sharia4Belgium, Call to Islam in Denmark or any of the other ALM offshoots, were not spending their time only plotting how to pull off more incendiary antics, much less kill unbelievers. They had committed their lives to establishing a day-to-day existence which conformed to sharia as much as possible from within the surrounding ignorance and unbelief of the West.
It was this element of Choudary and ALM’s blueprint which would have the most resounding impact on Britain and Europe. When, in 2014, ISIS declared a Caliphate, the European locales subjected to years of ALM activism were already home to ideologically primed volunteers who, instead of their sharia simulation at home yearned for the real thing – which the newly declared Islamic State promised to provide.
Transmission Belts to Syria
As Professor Jytte Klausen’s three-decade study of Western Jihadists makes clear: “the Sharia4 networks functioned as transmission belts to the insurgency.” Klausen’s enormous dataset established that “between one-quarter and one-third” of all Western foreign fighters who joined jihadist groups in Syria and Iraq (predominantly ISIS) were connected to ALM “or its branches in Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway and Spain.”
It was not, though, fighting the Assad regime which attracted most in the ALM/Sharia4 orbits, nor the prospect of unleashing murder and mayhem on European streets. It was the opportunity to carve out territory administered under Salafi-jihadist ideology and to live there accordingly. To carry out God’s will on earth. Which was more or less what this small band of believers had been trying to do in their own immediate surroundings in Britain and Europe, just not by force. Dhar, who had extolled his rejection of British democracy to Vice News reporters, was one such volunteer who seized the opportunity to experience the real thing for himself. Like so many others who came through ALM and the Sharia4 networks, he would die in Syria.
This, in large part, explains the diminished state of ALM and of Salafi-jihadist activism in Europe more generally: many of the believers cultivated over years of dawah fell in Iraq or Syria, or remain languishing in the region’s camps and makeshift prisons. Choudary himself boasted of, rather than lamented, this reality in recent lectures: “After so many people went abroad, so many people become Shaheed [martyred].”
Conclusion
One reporter who has followed “the number one radicaliser in Britain” more closely than most is BBC journalist Dominic Casciani. He suggested that the true nature of Choudary’s influence was long underestimated, largely obscured by the sheer novelty of the man who once quipped that he benefited from “jihad seeker’s allowance” rather than jobseeker’s allowance.
The Tottenham Ayatollah’s original chronicler himself, Jon Ronson, has been criticised for his part in the comic light touch afforded to Bakri Muhammad, Choudary and ALM. But, as Ronson pointed out in a 2022 interview with The Observer: “both things can be true. You can be absurd and also capable of inspiring terrorism.”
Bakri Muhammad, Choudary and ALM’s central idea was plainly not too absurd to the thousands of Europeans who wound up travelling to join the genocidal “caliphate” in Iraq and Syria. Nor would this be any consolation to the countless innocent civilians on the receiving end of their colonisation project. This, even more than this many alumni who went on to sow terror at home, is the greater legacy of Choudary’s life in Salafi-jihadist activism.