5.3 Case Studies: bombers in the making
The stories of three second-generation Muslim youths who committed suicide bombings are analysed in this section to understand what factors influenced their decision to carry out these acts. The names are:
Muhammad Sidique Khan (d. 2005)
Omar Khan Sharif (d. 2003)
Asim Mohammed Hanif (d. 2003)
The acts committed by them confused the British public. Their stories are discussed below.
In 2007, Shiv Malik published an article calledMy Brother the Bomber in which he reportedly spent months in the Leeds suburb of Beeston becoming acquainted with Gultasab Sidique Khan, the brother of Mohammad Sidique Khan.[54] Mohammad was described as a softly spoken youth worker, yet something in his life changed the Islamic perspective of this individual who was western in his youth and was even called Sid by his colleagues.
Khan had volunteered for community youth mentoring in 1997 whilst at Leeds Metropolitan University and his conversion to a form of jihadi Islam reportedly began in 1999. Khan had been working with Omar Sharif and Asif Hanif, the two other suicide bombers discussed in this section of the dissertation. The youth mentoring activities also included explaining to Mirpuri youth that if they wanted to lever themselves out of poverty, they needed to branch out from jobs such as being taxi drivers and restaurant workers.
Beeston is an isolated and undistinguished suburb of Leeds and, one of the poorest places in England, it has remained a ghetto until recent times and become a neighbourhood in which drug dealers now operate. Khan had become a mentor to fellow Muslim youth and had reacted to the situation by affiliating himself with a group of second-generation Pakistanis who called themselves the Mullah Boys. This was a group of fifteen to twenty members which was formed in the mid-1990s whose initial mission it was to deal with the drug issue which the previous generation did not know how to deal with. Khan and his colleagues would reportedly take drug addicts to a flat and forcibly cleanse them of their drug habits.
After the 9/11 incident the Mullah Boys became increasingly religious. They exhibited Salafi tendencies and began to marry girls of their own choice and outside of the Pakistani community and to this end conduct marriages from the premises of Iqra, an Islamic bookshop on Bude Road. Though this caused a stir in the community they defended the marriages saying that pure Islam was not averse to such a practise.
Khan was initially affected by social problems he was surrounded with although it is not clear how he developed into a would-be suicide bomber. It is known that his activities became increasingly jihadi as he began to make excursions to Pakistan. He had links to Abdullah al-Faisal, a radical preacher jailed in 2003 for inciting racial hatred. Malik explains how little was known about Khan’s intentions up until the 7/7 incident. Khan’s friends were increasingly joining more fundamentalist groups thus possibly influencing his path also.
Additionally, Khan’s brother Gultasab said that his local mosque could not connect with the second generation of Muslims because they could not speak English whereas more fundamentalist groups delivered sermons and printed publications in English.
Omar Sharif, a British Muslim from Derby attempted to detonate himself at a bar in Tel Aviv, Israel but the bomb failed to go off. Sharif escaped from the scene but his body was found some twelve days later washed up on the beach and badly decayed.
In an article by Shiv Malik,[55] Sharif’s friend Zaheer Khan explainshow there was a gradual development in Sharif’s radicalisation. Sharif had allegedly established links with Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT) and in particular, Omar Bakri, whilst studying Maths at King’s College London in 1995. Khan explained how Sharif was like ‘an empty bowl’ and how he ‘didn't know much about the culture of his own family, his background’ and he ‘didn’t have a clue about Islam’.
It would initially appear that the reasons for the radicalisation of Sharif were down to his affiliation with HT whose then leader, Bakri, had called for the assassination of John Major in 1991. Sharif’s future wife had also been a student at King’s College and they had both become more traditional in their dress and perspective on Islam since joining HT.
Even Bakri apparently had no prior knowledge of Sharif’s intentions and to this day has denied any involvement in it.
The case of Sharif does nothing to provide a clear reason for the actions especially when HT vehemently denies any desire for their members to become suicide bombers. Nevertheless, the answer would appear to come from Bakri’s explanation as to what the ‘obligation of the time’ is. In his view the obligation of the time is now jihad: the obligation of the Muslim ummah before the occupation of Muslim land was the establishment of a caliphate ‘but when the non-Muslims gather together to fight against Muslims and occupy Muslim land, the mother of all obligations is to liberate, the fight back’.
The suggestion from the above is that rather than an intolerant form of Islam being the driving force behind Sharif’s actions, it was the situation in Israel with the humanitarian crisis of the people of Palestine.
Asim Hanif was born in Hounslow, Middlesex in 1992. He is reported to have been a religious person from an early age. He had been a member of a Sufi group called Light Study based in Hounslow mosque and lead by a Syrian Shaykh called Muhammad al-Yaqoubi whose views are supposedly against violent jihad and al-Qaeda.[56] Despite his leaning towards Sufism Hanif is reported to have been seen in the offices of al-Muhajiroun several times.[57]
In late 2002 Hanif is reported to have travelled to Damascus Syria for studies in Arabic and Islam. He is said to have met with Omar Sharif Khan there. From there he apparently established links with radical Islamic groups and was drawn into the operations of Hamas.
Both he and Sharif travelled around Palestine for a number of weeks as peace activists before occupying a flat for one night during which they filmed their farewell speech in which they denounced the state of Israel and called Israelis the ‘real terrorists’ and ‘sickos’ along with Tony Blair and George Bush. Hanif justified his intentions to carry out the bombings by blaming the treatment of Muslims at the hands of Blair and Bush. The evidence points in the direction of British and American foreign policy being the catalyst in this episode.
5.4 Emerging Trends and Observations
In the above case studies it can be seen that the cognitive opening as discussed by Wiktorowicz appears to have occurred, providing an opening for radical elements. Each person’s case was different and there is a degree of complexity surrounding the thought processes that lead a suicide bomber to their eventual conclusion.
Diagram 1 portrays the above process of radicalisation and compares it with that portrayed within alternative process which reflects the writings of the majority literature in this field and the British media.