MEDINA IN BIRMINGHAM, NAJAF IN BRENT INNES BOWEN Medina in Birmingham, Najaf in Brent Inside British Islam HURST & COMPANY, LONDON First published in the United Kingdom in 2014 by C. Hurst & Co. (Publishers) Ltd., 41 Great Russell Street, London, WC1B 3PL © Innes Bowen, 2014 All rights reserved. Printed in the USA Distributed in the United States, Canada and Latin America by Oxford University Press, 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. The right of Innes Bowen to be identified as the author of this publication is asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988. A Cataloguing-in-Publication data record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 978-1849043014 www.hurstpublishers.com This book is printed using paper from registered sustainable and managed sources. CONTENTS Acknowledgements vii Glossary ix Introduction 1 1. The Deobandis: The Market Leaders 11 2. The Tablighi Jamaat: Missionaries and a Mega Mosque 35 3. The Salafis: ‘Don’t call us Wahhabis!’ 57 4. The Jamaat-e-Islami: British Islam’s Political Class 83 5. The Muslim Brotherhood: The Arab Islamist Exiles 101 6. The Barelwis: Sufis and Traditionalists 115 7. The Shia ‘Twelvers’: Najaf in Brent 135 8. The Ismailis: The Dawoodi Bohras and the Followers of the Aga Khan 165 Notes 187 Index 211 v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book could not have been completed were it not for the help of those whom it is about: the followers of Britain’s most important Islamic networks. I am grateful to the many individuals who made time to be interviewed and trusted me to tell their stories. They are too numerous to mention here by name but most are attributed in the chapters that follow. Some of those I interviewed and who helped me in my research deserve special thanks for their time and patience: the Muslim Brother- hood activist Dr Kamal Helbawy; Abu Khadeejah of Salafi Publications in Birmingham; Mehmood Naqshbandi, creator of the indispensable website muslimsinbritain.org; Faruqe Master; and Yahya Birt. Writing this book has been a part-time project, undertaken in the evenings, weekends and holidays around my full-time job as a BBC jour- nalist. It has therefore taken a long time to complete—almost seven years, in fact. Thankfully I had a patient and encouraging publisher in Michael Dwyer of Hurst. He made finishing the manuscript feel achiev- able at a time when I was ready to give up. I am grateful to his team: copyeditor Tim Page and proofreader Hannah Wann, cover designer Fatima Jamadar, and the rest of the team: Jon de Peyer, Rob Pinney and Georgie Williams. They have done a wonderful job in producing and marketing the book. I have colleagues, friends and family to thank too. First among them is my editor at the BBC, Nicola Meyrick, who encouraged me soon after I arrived in her department in 2002 to develop an interest in this topic. When that interest grew into an extra-curricula obsession she regarded it as an asset rather than a nuisance. This book is not a BBC project but it was prompted by the journalism I did and the radio programmes I vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS made under Nicola’s editorship. Other early inspiration for this topic came from Dr Aminul Hoque who presented my first BBC programme about Islam in Britain and from my colleague Mukul Devichand who, as ever, was ahead of the game in getting to grips with an important subject that few of us understood. Andrew Bowen urged me to channel my interest into a book and never seemed to doubt that I would complete it. Without his encouragement, I would not have embarked upon such a huge task. Fiona Leach, a fellow BBC journalist, read the whole book in draft form and did much to help me improve the structure and content. Former Woman’s Hour colleagues Sharmini Selvarajah, Katy Hickman and Jenni Murray read some of the draft chapters and suggested ways of making them more accessible to readers who do not share my preoccupa- tion with the subject. Helen Grady, another BBC journalist, read some of the draft material and suggested people to interview and stories to pursue. Sajid Iqbal from BBC Monitoring was on hand at short notice to translate from Urdu into English and to offer wise advice. Finally, I wish to thank my mother, Janet. When I have needed time and a lack of distractions to write, she has taken care of all the essential things in life like food and a place to stay and has never uttered a word of complaint about my reclusiveness or expected anything in return. With- out her support I might never have finished. Innes Bowen February 2014 viii GLOSSARY A note on italicisation Foreign words which are now in common use in the English language (e.g. hijab, jihad and sharia) appear in roman script (without italiciza- tion) and an ‘s’ is added to denote the plural. The exception to this is the term ulema, which means Islamic scholars, and is in more common use in English than the word for a single scholar which is alim. For less familiar words which are used regularly in this book (e.g. alima) in the first instance the word is defined in English and its transliterated foreign form follows italicised in parentheses. Thereafter, I have used either used the English term or the foreign term in roman script. alim (plural: ulema) Islamic religious scholar (male) alima Female Islamic religious scholar amir leader ayatollah honorific title given to senior shi’ite religious scholar caliph ruler of the caliphate caliphate an Islamic state or empire bayat an oath of allegiance chillah The group Tablighi Jamaat’s term for a trip of forty days to do missionary work. darul uloom Islamic seminary. dawa Inviting people to practise the Islamic faith. fatwa An opinion on an issue of Islamic law, issued by a scholar. ix GLOSSARY hadith A recorded deed or saying of the Prophet Moham- med or one of his early companions. hijab Literally a screen or partition; the term is more commonly used to describe modest clothing for Muslim women, in particular the headscarf. khalifa Successor or deputy to a sheikh in tasawwuf. kuffar Non-believers or non-Muslims. madhab A traditional school of Islamic law and doctrine. (plural: madhahib) The four major schools of Sunni Islamic law are Hanafi, Maliki, Hanbali and Shafi’i. Most Sunni Muslims follow one of these four madhahib. marja a leading shi’ite scholar recognised as worthy of emulation markaz Term used by the missionary group Tablighi Jamaat to describe one of its main centres. milad a nabi Celebration of the Prophet Mohammed’s birthday (also known as mawlid). mawlid Celebration of the Prophet Mohammed’s birthday (also known as milad a nabi). mureed Disciple of a sheikh in tasawwuf. niqab Face veil. pir A sheikh in tasawwuf, also sometimes referred to as a murshid. salafism A branch of Sunni Islam which attempts to emulate the early followers of Islam and defers less to the traditional schools of Sunni Islamic law. sufism A branch of Islam which emphasises spirituality and mysticism. tariqa A sufi network led by a sheikh in tasawwuf. tasawwuf The spiritual and mystical aspects of Islam. ulema Islamic religious scholars (masculine singular: alim; feminine singular: alima) zikr (also dhikr) Spiritual meditation, chanting or more ecstatic forms of worship. x INTRODUCTION What individual Muslims feel in their hearts about Britain and its people will have a huge impact upon the future of the UK’s community relations as well as its national security. Yet the religious trends which inform the thoughts and feelings of Britain’s Muslim communities are still poorly understood. This book aims to fill that gap in understanding. The book is based on extensive interviews with followers from all the mainstream Islamic groups in the UK and is a guide to the way these believers see the world. There already exists a great deal of sociological research into Britain’s Muslim population, including analysis of ethnicity, familial structures, gender roles, educational attainment, employment, migration patterns and experiences of racism.1 This is useful work. But ideology is important too. The phenomenon of ‘home-grown’ terrorism in Britain cannot, for example, be explained in purely sociological terms. Those involved in terrorist plots have come from a wide range of ethnic, social and educa- tional backgrounds. The only thing they have had in common is a shared set of ideas and a willingness to act on them. The motivation for writing this book was the belief that the content of the ideologies that are popular in Muslim Britain matters. The task of researching and explaining those belief systems felt all the more urgent when I realised that the politicians, interfaith groups, police and journal- ists who interact with these Islamic groups often know shockingly little about them. In one English city I visited, the police had a relationship with the management committees of just five of the 100 local mosques. A police officer I spoke to despaired at the ignorance of many of his colleagues, 1 MEDINA IN BIRMINGHAM, NAJAF IN BRENT yet even he knew little about 95 per cent of the mosques in his patch and was oblivious to the fact that one of his favoured Muslim organisations had played host to a jihadi leader from Pakistan. A lack of knowledge exists not just at the grassroots level of the British state but at the top as well. In 2006 I met a man who was advising a senior Cabinet minister on relations with Britain’s Muslim communities.