The One True God, Allah

On a warm April morning in 2004, I travelled out to Whitechapel in the East End of London to meet a young Englishman named Sulayman Keller (formerly Simon Keeler) who was a recent convert to Islam. He was stocky with sharp eyes and a sparse, sandy beard, and was a leading member of the radical Islamist political group al-Muhajiroun, which translates from Arabic as ‘the emigrants’. It was a group with a defined manifesto: fierce opposition to British foreign policy in Iraq and Afghanistan, the creation of a global Islamic state rules by a caliph, and Islamic revolution in Britain, with the black flag of Islam being hoisted over 10 Downing Street.

Keeler and I sat and talked in a McDonald’s for an hour about his beliefs and what had led to his conversion to Islam. ‘It’s like diving off the biggest diving board into the unknown,’ he said. ‘It’s a complete shift from what I used to be. Before, I believed in democracy, freedom, and it was all about doing what I liked and making the most out of this life, enjoyment of it to the max, whereas when I embraced Islam all of that changed.’

He had grown up in the quiet Sussex town of Crawley. He was intelligent and articulate and spoke fluently, if rather predictably, about what he considered to be the decadence of Western society and about the atrocities he said had been perpetrated by Western states against Muslims across the world. ‘I don’t believe in democracy,’ he said. ‘It’s man-made. You’re talking about a government that taxes the people to death. It oppresses many millions of people in the world. It wouldn’t be such a shame to have them overturned.’

I had first begun to investigate al-Muhajiroun in the summer of 2001, shortly before the September 11 attacks in America. But my interest in the group had been rekindled by my experience of reporting in Iraq for BBC Newsnight in 2003. There I had witnessed the swift humiliation of Saddam Hussein’s forces in Basra and had investigated his regime’s torture and murder of shi’a Muslims in the south of the country. Not a single Muslim I interviewed then expressed any regret about the fall of Saddam, yet during the months after my return to Britain, political Islamists from al-Muhajiroun had begun to use Britain’s intervention in Iraq as a potent recruiting tool.