Back home, however, things feel anything but open. Over recent months, this has been most clear in Sweida, a southern town rocked by anti-government protests. Sweida is home to many Syrian Druze, a syncretic faith born out of Shi’ism, and which claims the loyalty of 3% of Syrians. The protesters waved Israeli flags, and for the first time in Syria’s history demanded self-determination. They have also set up their own “national” guard, born out of the militias that enforced order during the long years of civil war.

No one apart from Israel — which has been lobbying Washington for a weak Syria — wants to see the Balkanization of the country. Al-Sharaa himself is now distancing his country from the putative Abraham Accords. The Americans, certainly, are keen on stability, and have stepped in to avert a civil war. The fact al-Sharaa took time out of his busy New York schedule to meet both Secretary of State Marco Rubio and General David Petraeus, the ex-commander of US forces in Iraq, certainly hints at the hopes the White House now places in him.

Be that as it may, the Sweida violence suggests a country spiraling out of control, as do rumors of a resurgent Assadism on the coast. Yet in the end, such pessimism would be to misdiagnose the unrest. For the chaos is not an aberration, a disaster to be averted, but rather represents the birth pangs of a process long underway: the Sunnification of Syria. Whatever al-Sharaa’s claims, as he enjoys the world’s attention in Manhattan, what we are witnessing is the emergence of a new Sunni state — and not the pluralist nation that foreign analysts might like to imagine.

Outsiders often read the Syrian revolution as romantically simple: the people rose up against the tyrant, and after years of brutal struggle finally secured their freedom. But that overlooks other interpretations, especially when it comes to religion. The Syrian conflict, after all, was also about the long-oppressed Sunni majority versus the Alawite minority — another heterodox offshoot of Islam to which the Assad dynasty belonged. Viewed through that lens, the fall of Damascus, and al-Sharaa’s own triumph, was merely the culmination of Sunni empowerment.

I witnessed these tensions first hand, in 2009, while I was teaching business English to staff at the Syrian National Bank. By then, I had lived in the country long enough to discern a student’s sectarian background through dress, mannerisms, attitudes. My classroom reflected the country: Sunnis — including Kurds — made up around 70%; Christians 10%, Druze 3%; and Alawites 13%. The students were all supposedly supportive of the stern-looking president, Bashar al-Assad, whose portrait hung in every room, paid their salaries, and claimed to run the country under the banner of Baathism, a secular pan-Arab socialist ideology which didn’t care about your sectarian affiliation.

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That, of course, was a lie. The Assad dynasty had stayed in power for 50 years by pitting the resentments and fears of the various sects against each other. They promoted Sunni clerics to positions of influence, based Syrian family law on Islamic jurisprudence, even married into a Sunni family — as Bashar did — yet still kept Sunnis out of power. All the while, they propagated the message that only they could protect minorities from Sunni tyranny. It was not uncommon for pro-government rallies to come with banners declaring “no to sectarianism”, the implication being that Sunni domination would result in the marginalization of Christians and others.

Such sectarianism also played out in my classroom. On exam day, no matter how hard the Sunni employees studied, or how rigorously I marked the papers — the Alawite students and those connected to the government would end up top of the class, with the results bitterly accepted by the Sunnis. Of course, I didn’t have the courage to make an issue of it. All of us, whether Syrian or not, knew what happened to the unruly. The horrors of Tadmor prison lived alongside us, as did slaughters of 1982, when the Hafez al-Assad crushed a Muslim Brotherhood-led uprising in the central Syrian town of Hama.

In 2011, that brittle sectarian order shattered. Bashar al-Assad repeated his father’s strategy and tried to crush the Sunni-led discontent. The Sunnis, in turn, went from peaceful demonstrations during Friday prayers to violent insurrection, with al-Qaeda-affiliated Ahmed al-Sharaa being one of the rebellion’s most effective leaders. Eventually, his victory came not from the international community, but from a rebellious Sunni redoubt of Idlib, a small town in northern Syria which prided itself on having quite literally thrown a sandal at Hafez al-Assad. The Sunnis, in short, had helped themselves to power: or so they told themselves.

Throughout all this, Syria’s minorities were in an impossible situation. Should they side with the tyrant they knew, or with the revolutionaries, some of whom were jihadists? At the same time, they were bombarded with regime propaganda, plenty of it real. Sunni Islamists, after all, had massacred the Druze at Qalb Lozeh in 2015, and ISIS had attacked them at Sweida. Christians, for their part, had their churches desecrated, their people killed or kidnapped. The prospect of joining the revolutionaries, then, was not as clear-cut as it seemed to many Sunnis. But with victory going to al-Sharaa’s forces, even neutrality could be interpreted as complicity, especially given the terrors Assad had inflicted on Sunni civilians.

Out of this sectarian chaos came Ahmad al-Sharaa. He was a jihadist, aggressively Sunni, who believed that minorities like the Alawites should not only renounce their support for Assad, but also their “heretic” faiths. Yet by 2017, al-Sharaa was courting Druze and Christian leaders in his newly established “Salvation” government in Idlib. Either he had changed — or he was just a political Machiavel.

Whatever the case, al-Sharaa reversed a lot of the damage that his group had been responsible for. On 10 June 2022, for instance, he visited Qalb Lozeh. Many Druze in the area had been forced to convert to Islam, the better to escape the clutches of Sunni extremism. In a marked departure from his earlier rhetoric, however, al-Sharaa publicly assured Druze leaders that there is no compulsion in religion, and that they were free to practice their faith without fear. This statement sent a strong signal to his followers that his Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) Islamist group was changing.

Indeed, according to an informative new book on HTS, its political evolution is not unlike that of far-Right groups in Europe. To wield power, explain its authors Patrick Haenni and Jerome Drevon, al-Sharaa had to move to the center. Of course, there are still radicals on the periphery, but he increasingly relied on a broad Sunni populism over hardcore ideologues. Extremists — notably Osama Qasem, leader of Egyptian Islamic Jihad and once celebrated for his ties to al-Qaeda — were compelled to step down after being deemed a “liability”.

In al-Sharaa’s Salvation government was also a clue as to how the new Syria might look. His rump in Idlib was essentially a Sunni proto-state, as al-Sharaa transferred power from the warlords to a civilian government, run by a new generation of Islamist technocrats, each intimately connected to al-Sharaa himself. Certainly, Syria’s interim president has followed a similar path once he eventually took power in Damascus, filling state institutions, long hollowed out by Assad, with his own supporters, friends and family.

Maybe that explains why the Gulf kingdoms, which initially viewed al-Sharaa with deep suspicion due to his Islamism, eventually came round. Perhaps, they thought, he was someone who wanted to build a state not unlike their own — conservative, authoritarian, anti-Iran and pro-stability, all elements the emirs could work with. And, what was more, none of this contravened Sunni Islamic jurisprudence: which, as its long history testifies, has always taken a pragmatic approach to wielding power. Sunni Islam, as historians like Marshall Hodgson have shown, is quietist by temperament, and has happily lived alongside caliphs, sultans and presidents.

At the same time, al-Sharaa’s Salvation government was not intolerant of minorities. That was clear enough in his rapprochement with the Druze and Christians, but also his ban on the notorious jizya payments — a tax levied on non-Muslims for protection and exemption from military service.

By the time Damascus fell, Haenni and Drevon write, Syria’s minorities had gone from “dhimmis [protected minorities] no more” to “citizens not yet”. And if that hints at the ambiguous status they enjoy in the new Syria, al-Sharaa’s country is also being shaped by forces not directly under his control. Once again, the experience of Idlib is revealing here. Under years of Islamist rule, the rural hinterland had inevitably become more conservative. Meanwhile, Druze who had initially converted out of fear found that their children had forgotten the tenets of their faith, and prayed and fasted like Sunnis.

Yet if the Sunnification of northern Syria had begun long before the Assads finally fled, this must once again be tempered by al-Sharaa’s apparent moderation. When I last visited Idlib, in March 2025, it was a bustling town like any other, albeit with the occasional shop selling Kalashnikovs. There was no religious police enforcing the hijab, and shops remained open when the call for prayer came, just as they had before the revolution. Islamic laws were adhered to because people in Idlib — devout or not — accepted them. In post-Assad Damascus, too, life continued as before. In the Christian quarter of the Old City, alcohol was available in the bars, just as it had always been, and I suspect this will remain the case.

That’s shadowed elsewhere too. Al-Sharaa has repeatedly emphasized that the Syrian people are one. By March, when the interim government drafted its 2025 constitutional declaration, it confirmed that Syria would remain a republic, its president would be a Muslim and the republic’s source of law was Islamic jurisprudence. All the while, minorities and their personal beliefs were protected. All this is based on the 1973 constitution, and affirmed the secular social contract first drafted by the Assads.

Even so, and as the constitutional primacy of Muslims implies, Sunnis will ultimately shape Syria’s future. In many ways, it didn’t matter whether they’re Islamists, devout Sunnis or liberals. Most Syrian Sunnis, after all, are small “c” conservatives, traumatized by war and shaped by the fight against Assad. This has glued them together, allowing them to stand alone if need be.

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This Sunni supremacism has manifested itself in other ways too. For one thing, Friday sermons have become overtly Sunni in tone. Hezbollah — a Shia militant group — is referred to as Hizb al-Shaytan (“the party of the devil”). Black and white flags emblazoned with the Islamic declaration of faith, long associated with jihadists, are waved by Sunnis as they go about their business. When the bastion of traditional Sunnism Sheikh Osama al-Rifai — someone who has often disagreed with al-Sharaa in the past — returned from exile in January, he received a rockstar’s welcome. In fact, al-Sharaa appointed him the grand mufti of Syria.

All the while, the war’s aftershocks have continued to play out. In February, former Assadists tried to foment a counter-revolution of sorts, resulting in massacres of Alawites near the coastal city of Latakia. Sunni revanchism soon followed, and old scores were settled: former Assadists, paramilitaries and Alawite officers, who had raped and tortured Sunnis, were killed and buried in unknown graves. But so too were many innocent Alawites, simply caught up in the violence, with the sect increasingly seen as a fifth column. The Druze in Sweida have faced similar troubles. After the summer’s violence, Druze leaders accused al-Sharaa of siding with Sunni Bedouins: but then committed political suicide by calling for Israeli support and demanding self-determination. In the eyes of many Sunnis, they, like the Alawites, are edging towards treason.

In the end, though, Syria’s process of Sunnification will conclude only if Damascus manages to incorporate the Kurds into the new state. Most Kurds are Sunnis, and though they have spent years fighting the Arab majority, Damascus could probably bring them on board more easily than the country’s religious minorities. Mazloum Abadi — head of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and one of the de facto leaders of the Kurdish enclave in Syria’s north — is a formidable political operator. But he is fast running out of political road. For one thing, the PKK, the SDF’s sister organization in Turkey, has disbanded. For another, the US have abandoned Abadi in favor of al-Sharaa, and if the former seeks support from Israel, or allies himself with the Druze, he’ll soon become discredited. The SDF, then, are outgunned both militarily and diplomatically, and the resources required to restart another civil war seem politically out of reach.

Either way, each of these stories — Druze unrest, Alawite reprisals, Kurdish bargaining — all point the same way: towards a Sunni majoritarian state. That doesn’t mean Syria will become an Islamist theocracy. But it does likely mean that pluralism, minority rights and perhaps even democracy itself will operate within a conservative Sunni framework. Whether that’s better or worse for the exhausted people of Syria will probably depend on where and how you pray.

Mohammed Merah began his rampage in Toulouse on March 11, 2012, first executing a French-Moroccan paratrooper who nobly refused an order to lie down. He struck again on March 15, firing on three soldiers in Montauban — two were killed and another left paralysed. The murdered soldiers were all of North African Muslim descent. Then, on March 19, Merah pulled up outside the Ozar Hatorah Jewish school. In the schoolyard, he gunned down a Rabbi before executing the man’s three and five-year-old sons as they tried to crawl to safety. He then entered the school and grabbed an eight-year-old girl, at which point his gun jammed. Unperturbed, he swapped weapons and shot her. He filmed it all. After a manhunt and lengthy standoff, Merah was shot dead by police at his apartment.

Even considering the usual moral squalor of jihadist violence, Merah’s spree stands out for its depravity. Yet, for some reason, he is still widely revered. Nicole Yardeni, a deputy mayor in the city, tells me that his name is sometimes viewed positively even outside of jihadist circles, as “a symbol of rebellion” against society. After all, Merah is the man “who brought France to its knees”, as one local youth reminded the mother of his first victim. Even at the time of the police manhunt and siege, Facebook posts and pages honouring the gunman attracted thousands of likes, while police prevented people from laying flowers at his apartment. (It goes without saying that the overwhelming majority, Muslim and non-Muslim, were horrified.)

Within Salafi-jihadist circles, Merah’s cold-blooded rampage made him an icon. At the time of his attack a petty criminal, 28-year-old Mehdi Nemmouche, was killing time in a prison cell. Ordinarily, he would have refused to watch infidel television, but this time he asked his guards for a TV set so he could jubilantly follow the Merah manhunt live. Nemmouche would later head for Syria where he became a jailer for Islamic State. Chillingly, he told a captive that, like Merah, he “dreamed of grabbing a Jewish girl by the hair and shooting her dead”. Nemmouche would go on to deliberately target and murder Jews, killing four at Brussels’ Jewish Museum in 2014. It was Europe’s first attack by an Isis returnee.

Merah told police that he had conducted his attack on behalf of al-Qaeda, but that has not stopped their bitter Islamic State rivals from invoking his name. Journalist David Thomson interviewed several French members of Isis, each one praising Merah. Even official Isis propaganda has urged Francophone supporters to follow in Merah’s footsteps.

Laurence Bindner, who co-founded Jihadoscope to monitor jihadi online activity, tells me that Merah’s impact on the ground in his Cité des Izards housing estate “has been profound”. To Bindner, Merah’s place in jihadi lore is symbolic for a simple, gruesome reason: “He was the one who has no limits, the one who kills children.” But, she quickly adds, “this also put him beyond the pale even for some radical Islamists”. Merah was the first to cross a line.

Merah’s act divided Salafi-jihadists in France and beyond. But for the next few years, his supporters seemed to be winning the argument, and decisively so. The Merah generation wanted to transform Europe’s streets and plazas into the new theatres of jihad. In doing so, they helped unleash a campaign of extreme violence against European civilians with France — very deliberately — at the centre. Merah and his imitators shattered the illusion that France, by virtue of not participating in the Iraq invasion, would be spared the terror which had struck in Madrid and London in the years prior. Following in Merah’s footsteps, this generation had few qualms about the massacre of children, from Nice’s Promenade des Anglais to the foyer of Manchester Arena.

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Perhaps the most damaging myth that Merah created was that of the loup solitaire — the lone wolf. It was deployed in Merah’s case to underline that he had acted alone and not received formal direction from al-Qaeda, but these were the old rules of counter-terrorism not yet updated for European jihad’s coming of age. Security services anticipated clandestine cells and bombings of “high value” targets and infrastructure; what they got was a bottom up wave of often intimate mass casualty violence, and trained extremists with EU passports dispatched across borders from a terror state on Europe’s doorstep. The lone wolf framing prevented the state and civil society from fully realising what was coming, and it obscured the extremist socialisation processes quietly taking place in certain locales around Western Europe.

Some of those affected locales were in Toulouse, where decades ago militants connected to Algeria’s Groupe Islamique Armé (GIA) helped to construct a key node of French jihadism — a milieu where Mohammed Merah belonged. A mentor to Merah was the Syrian “white emir” Olivier Corel, who established a cult-like Salafi-jihadist commune in the countryside. Other Merah associates included the notorious Clain brothers, whose activism helped to swell the ranks of Toulouse’s extremist circles from a few dozen to a few hundred. In the 2000s, this network dispatched extremists to fight against the Americans and the Shia with al-Qaeda in Iraq.

Merah was no black sheep: his extended family nurtured an intense hatred of French society and Jews. His own brother, nicknamed locally after Osama Bin Laden, is thought to have joined the jihad in Iraq. His sister Souad was active in militant Salafist networks. She was part of an independent school established to raise model Muslims as defined by Salafists and the Muslim Brotherhood — whose ideas had cross-pollinated in the densely populated housing estates. Souad, who declared she was “proud, proud, proud” of her brother for massacring Jews would, like so many of Merah’s associates, eventually join Isis. Meanwhile, Merah’s stepbrother was the only Frenchman formally accused of crimes against humanity for his role in the Yazidi genocide.

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Merah’s killing spree also triggered a debate on the apparently unique susceptibility of petty criminals and gangsters to jihadism. And though it may well be true that the brutality was attractive to those already inured to violence and seeking status or redemption, this view fails to consider the bigger picture. In France, certain neighbourhoods once in the grip of gangs were slowly taken over by the muscular evangelising of Salafi activists and Islamists, a process facilitated by the isolation, urban density and absence of authority in the Cités. In some locales, the Salafi activists steered people away from crime towards militant religion, in others — like in Toulouse — they incorporated the drug trade into their activism and saw no contradiction between the two. Examining the housing blocks explicitly targeted by this aggressive proselytising programme, it is perhaps less surprising that many petty criminals eventually filled the ranks of Isis.

Merah’s impact on the jihadist movement and European counter-terrorism was profound, but so was his impact on Toulouse. I briefly moved to the city in the aftermath of the rampage, and the attack seemed to loom over its residents. It also weighed heavily on Toulouse’s Jewish community, as Yardeni, who headed a Jewish organisation before joining the mayor’s office, estimates that hundreds of families took the impossible decision to leave. Perhaps it was not just the cruelty of Mohammed Merah’s killing spree that made Toulouse’s Jews reconsider, but the knowledge that, to a small number of their neighbours, this act made him a hero.

Many of Britain’s most dangerous jihadists are imprisoned, perhaps affording us this false sense of security. But the sporadic information we get from behind the prison walls is anything but reassuring. While much hope is pinned on the largely uncharted territory of “deradicalisation”, its targets are making a mockery of these efforts. As the Chief Inspector of Prisons made clear a few weeks ago, the highest-risk prisoners in the country are outright boycotting these interventions, with some offenders listening to music or pretending to sleep during their one to one sessions.

On the other hand, even those who appear to comply may pose a threat, as Usman Khan’s slaying of those who sought only to help him tragically demonstrated. While participating in an educational course or qualification can be taken by authorities as a sign of progress, it is no objective measure of deradicalisation, not least when the knowledge gained can be put to use for the cause, to better proselytise or wage war.

Prisons are not isolated and cut off from the world, their walls are porous: people, information and material come and go. Meanwhile, the jihadists inside do not see imprisonment as an end to their struggle — so nor should we. The West’s experience with jihadism, now into its fourth decade, shows how its adherents often see their incarceration as a rite of passage and opportunity: to better prepare for jihad, to gain qualifications and skills on the taxpayer, to forge crucial connections and relationships, to proselytise among the prison population, and to test their faith.

Prisons around the world have proven integral to the global jihadist movement’s remarkable resiliency and regenerative capability, but so has naivety. In 2005, a jailed Parisian named Chérif Kouachi led his social worker to believe he had been “tricked” into associating with extremists busy funnelling fighters to the insurgency in Iraq. On the inside, however, Chérif fraternised with jihadi veteran Djamal Beghal, who had helped recruit “shoe bomber” Richard Reid in London in the Nineties. Exactly a decade after being “tricked”, Chérif and his brother Saïd burst into the offices of Charlie Hebdo magazine to massacre the writers, satirists and illustrators inside.

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Today, no longer pick-up riding or passport-burning, the Islamic State’s jihadists are marooned in the dilapidated camps and makeshift prisons of Northern Syria, where — like the Islamists in Bosnia and Afghanistan before them — they play back our own tropes about their manipulation and vulnerability for the domestic audiences they once threatened on social media. Some even offer to help deradicalise or prevent radicalisation in future, while lying about their own trajectory into terror.

Inside the British prison system though, a more bellicose extremist subculture appears to be developing. According to a recent review, among the imprisoned extremists an Islamist gang culture has developed. The counterterrorism lead at HMP Whitemoor, the site of Britain’s first attack inside the prison walls, told an inquest that terror offenders are held in a kind of “perverse esteem”. while Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, Johnathan Hall QC, wrote how some offenders enjoy a “distinctly heroic profile”.

The risk, though, is not just of attacks. The failed state-building project of Isis should have made clear there is an ideological endgame, an all-encompassing worldview, a way of living and a revolutionary overhaul of state and society which jihadis seek to usher in. In their own microcosms, imprisoned jihadists are trying to live their lives in accordance with this endgame from the inside. There are cases of extremists intimidating staff and prisoners who do not comply with their interpretation of Sharia and holding crude Sharia courts which mete out floggings. Self-styled ‘emirs’ exert such influence over prison wings that authorities sometimes appeal to them to help restore order.

Surrounded by like-minded practitioners of their faith, they are living pure, virtuous and rigorist lives in accordance with God’s will. To them, this life of belief is the straight and narrow, while the rest of us are morally decayed hypocrites and criminals. For them, the idea they need deradicalising or rehabilitating is a bad joke and worthy of scorn. Just a few hours a week of mentoring and interventions stands little chance of competing with the offender’s entire social circle, the moral universe which colours it, the norms which govern their every action and interaction, and the status they enjoy as a terrorism offender on the inside.

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This is not to say that there is no hope, but that it will take an almighty effort to dismantle a worldview that we don’t seem able to fully comprehend, or at times even discuss out of misplaced sensitivities. Being realistic about the scale of the challenge and treating the extremists as intellectually serious and rational beings, rather than unthinking vessels driven to terrorism by circumstances beyond their control, gives the best hopes of averting tragedy like at Fishmonger’s Hall.

As we have seen, when the chips are down, jihadists have historically pleaded innocence or ignorance. But the reports above suggest this is not how Britain’s imprisoned extremists are behaving. Far from it. This indicates that they do not perceive themselves to be in a state of weakness but in one of strength. After living their lives as close as possible to the ideal Islamic state from inside the prison walls, it seems likely that upon release, many will continue to try to do so while they wait for the caliphate or divine reward they are assured will eventually arrive.

I have written before about the possibility of the jihadist movement in Europe evolving into a belligerent and destructive social force, rather than one merely focused on mass-casualty attacks, which were only ever a means to an end. The subcultures developing in prisons translating to the outside world would see these extremists creating micro-communities which reject and withdraw from the surrounding unbelief of society, in order to instil their own norms and values in line with the principle of “loyalty and disavowal” (al-wala’ wa’l-bara’).

Of course, the problem should not be overstated: the numbers being discussed here may be unprecedented, but they are nonetheless small. There are graver threats and societal issues facing Britain and her allies. But at the same time, being prepared to combat the threat, not just through security or intelligence, but intellectually, is critical. In certain locations, a mere handful of extremists have already been able to multiply their followings into several hundred over the course of a decade. The networks — perhaps better thought of as micro-communities— they fostered would go on to fill the ranks of Isis.

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Far from radicalised online and overnight, many of those who migrated to Isis’s Caliphate project were extremist activists who were already, as Bernard Rougier put it, “living in an imagined caliphate” from inside the unbelief of the West. Through the barrel of an AK-47, Isis transformed their fantasy into an irresistible operational reality, so they merely diverted their energy from practice and proselytising in the likes of Brussels, Trappes, Portsmouth or Gothenburg towards migration to Islamic State.

The risk is that the genie is again out of the bottle. 9/11 resulted in al-Qaeda’s decimation but nonetheless succeeded in advertising jihadism to the entire world on live television. ISIS, by contrast, declared itself a caliphate and invited confrontation with the West which reduced it to rubble, but nevertheless succeeded in advertising not just attacks, but the Salafi-jihadist endgame to the world. We do not yet know who and how many were paying attention.

With the time they are afforded in British, European and Kurdish prisons, the movement is currently assessing the mistakes and shortcomings of that episode so as not to repeat them. Some will conclude the attacks of Bataclan or Manchester Arena were counterproductive, so will channel their energies into other means but remain believers. Others will no doubt remain committed to more of the same. Despite its apparent medieval rigidity, jihadism is a constantly mutating phenomenon which adapts to its own time and place. How the movement evolves and re-emerges from its current ailing condition depends on the discussion and debate happening right now inside cells and on prison landings. It’s time to start paying attention.

It was early 2016, and I had gone to Trinidad to report on Trinidadian ISIS foreign fighters for The Atlantic. Between 2013 and 2016, some 240 Trinis travelled to Syria and Iraq to join the caliphate, making Trinidad one of the world’s biggest exporters, per capita, of ISIS foreign fighters. I wanted to know how a country famed for calypso, rum and carnival could incubate something so profoundly unTrinidadian.

As a former resident of the country, I’d heard a lot of things about Yasin Abu Bakr, none of which contained the word “spiritual”. He had led the Jamaat al Muslimeen (JAM), a fringe group of black Muslims, with all the tact of an inebriated pitbull — and it was clear there was a connection, albeit tangled and complex, between the JAM radicals of the Nineties and the ISIS fighters who came later.

It was here, 32 years ago this week, on 27 July 1990, outside the mosque where Fuad and I were standing, that Bakr gathered his men for a group prayer and pep-talk. They were armed to the teeth with AK47s, pump-action shotguns and rifles. According to Fuad, Bakr was seeking guidance from God, a sign that he was on the right path: “He was saying to God, ‘if I’m gonna do the wrong thing, then stop me from leaving here’.” But there was no divine obstruction, and Bakr and his men, all 114 of them, sped off into Port of Spain to overthrow the government.

When Bakr and his men left the compound at 1 Murcarapo Road, one group headed for the nation’s parliament in the Red House, and another to Trinidad’s only TV station, Trinidad and Tobago Television (TTT). Within hours of laying siege to the parliament, which was still in session, a senior JAM member had shot Prime Minister Arthur Robinson in the leg. A female clerk was killed, and Leo des Vignes, a government MP, was also shot in the leg: he died from blood loss a couple of days later. Robinson, already wounded, was made to lie on the floor with his trousers pulled down.

In the TTT building, where 27 hostages were being held, Bakr was preparing to address the nation. Like the stars of the present-day global jihad, Bakr instinctively understood the power of the media, both as a tool for attracting attention and for spreading propaganda. At just after 7pm, TTT went on air with the most dramatic newscast in its 28-year-old history: “At 6pm this afternoon, the government of Trinidad and Tobago was overthrown,” Bakr coolly told the nation. “The Prime Minister and members of the cabinet are under arrest. We are asking everybody to remain calm. The revolutionary forces are commanded to control the streets. There shall be no looting.”

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Almost immediately, looting began — but there was no uprising. The JAM leadership had made a gamble: that once they took over the parliament and TTT, a groundswell of popular support would propel them forward to a real and durable political takeover. But it didn’t happen, because while many Trinis sympathised with Bakr’s critique of political corruption and social injustice, they were appalled by his violent contempt for democracy. This included the vast majority of Trinidad’s mostly East Indian Muslim population, who were suspicious of Bakr’s group and did not take kindly to Bakr’s inflammatory suggestion, voiced to the Trinidad and Tobago Sunday Express in 1985, that they were not “really practising the true tenets of the religion”.

The coup continues to cast a dark shadow over life and politics in Trinidad. Bakr and his followers were never properly punished for their actions — they were pardoned after serving just two years in prison — and Bakr not only took perverse delight in playing up to the monstrous image that the local media had assigned to him, but remained a vexatious and controversial public figure in Trinidad right up until his death last year aged 80.

Furthermore, many Trinis believe that the spiralling levels of crime in the country since the late Nineties is a legacy of the coup: Trinidad and Tobago currently has one of the highest crime rates in the world. In Freudian terms, Bakr, the big monster, cleared a path for all the little monsters, showing them it was possible to unleash murderous havoc in Trinidad and more or less get away with it. Then in 2013, Trinis began joining ISIS; many were the sons and daughters of original JAM members.

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But how could this mainly Christian and Hindu country, with a population evenly divided between descendants of African slaves and Indian indentured labourers, fall victim to an attempted Islamist coup?

The answer doesn’t lie in ideology — although Bakr would have journalists believe that the JAM had sacrificed themselves for “the poor and oppressed”. While it’s true that Bakr’s group attracted many impoverished families, providing them with shelter, food, work and a supportive community, the coup had nothing to do with advancing the interests of Trinidad’s marginal men and women. Nor was it about some grand plan to create an Islamic State in Trinidad.

The primary cause, rather, was far more prosaic: it was to do with a convoluted land dispute between the JAM and the government over the ownership of 1 Murcarapo Road. When the JAM moved there in the late Seventies as guests of the Islamic Missionary Guild (IMG), it was mostly swampland. The IMG left, but the JAM remained: they drained the land and started building on it, putting up a mosque, a medical clinic, housing quarters and a primary school. But they did so without the approval of the local government, and on land that they had no legal right to. And so began the JAM’s conflict with the government.

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Three months before the coup attempt, the army and police entered the Murcarapo premises and set up positions. This was to prevent the JAM from continuing to build on the land. Bakr not only saw this as an intolerable challenge to his moral authority; he also came to believe that the authorities wanted to kill him and destroy his group. When asked, in 1993, by criminologist Ramesh Deosaran what “really sparked” the 1990 insurrection, Bakr said: “It was a military solution to a military problem.”

Last year, I made a 12-minute documentary: Diary of a Jihadi: The 1990 Coup in Trinidad and Tobago, supported by the Airey Neave Trust, on how the coup unfolded over the course of six days. The opening scene features the late Raoul Pantin, a prodigiously talented journalist who was working at TTT when Bakr’s men came calling and was taken hostage alongside his other male colleagues. In his personal account of the coup, Days of Wrath, he sharply conveys the sheer ridiculousness of Bakr and the strangeness of the events he unleashed. In one telling passage, he recalls that three days into the coup Bakr and his men broke into song:

There was Bakr, using the mouth of an AK47 rifle as a microphone, singing along with a popular calypso playing on the radio. It was the old legendary calypsonian, Sniper, crooning, “Trinidad is my land and to love it I’m proud and glad”… Two or three other gunmen had joined in, one of them using his rifle butt as a drum, and the other strumming an imaginary guitar on his AK47.

Just days earlier, these militants had aimed those very same weapons at the heads of the hostages in TTT, and had already put them to vigorous use. Now they resembled the kind of moronic extremists that Chris Morris would go on to satirise with such verve in Four Lions.

In an observation that cuts to the very psychological core of Bakr, Pantin speculates that it was “not wholly implausible that Bakr had staged a bloody coup merely to appear on television and harangue the nation… In his two earlier appearances on TTT that Friday night, Bakr had been the star of his own show, relishing every moment of it, switching from the angry Leader of the Revolution, to the humble Imam who was merely carrying out ‘the will of Allah’”.

Toward the end of Days of Wrath, Pantin wonders if Bakr is crazy. On the last day of the coup, after he had successfully negotiated a deal with the government and agreed to surrender, Bakr invited all the hostages at TTT to dinner at his Murcarapo compound once the coup was over. “A shuddering thought went through my mind,” Pantin wrote. “He’s insane. He’s probably been insane for years.”

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Political violence is such a horrible and serious business that there’s a strong temptation to think that violent extremists must be deeply serious people. Pantin’s book calls this into question. A good number of the JAM militants were very young, Pantin observes, and clearly didn’t know what they were doing. But did Bakr and the other senior leaders of the JAM know any better? Despite their rhetoric about martyrdom, they clearly did not want to die. Indeed, they eventually surrendered. And the idea that 114 self-styled jihadis could overthrow a democratically-elected government in a majority Christian-Hindu country was utterly insane. Pantin teaches us to prick the self-glorifying rhetoric of extremists and to recognise their fundamental lack of seriousness.

Of all of Bakr’s critics, perhaps the most trenchant were the Trini ISIS jihadists, whose parents were once part of Bakr’s orbit. In July 2016, Dabiq, ISIS’s glossy propaganda magazine, published an interview with Shane Crawford, one of the first Trinis to join ISIS. He would have been five years old in 1990: “There was a faction of Muslims in Trinidad that was known for ‘militancy’,” he told the magazine, referring to the JAM. “Its members attempted to overthrow the disbelieving government but quickly surrendered, apostatised, and participated in the religion of democracy, demonstrating that they weren’t upon the correct methodology of jihad.” This was no idle reminiscence on Crawford’s part: according to many classical interpretations of the Islamic faith, the punishment for apostasy is death. Crawford was, in effect, saying that the blood of the JAM was halal and could be shed. In February 2017, Crawford’s own blood was shed: he was severely injured in a US airstrike in Raqqa and died.

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The irony is that without Bakr and the JAM, Crawford would probably still be selling fish along the Southern Main Road in Enterprise, central Trinidad, for it was from the JAM that an ISIS-supporting faction emerged. Nazim Mohammed, who fought in the coup and is now in his late seventies, split from Bakr and set up his own radical Islamic community in the south. At least 15 members of his family left Trinidad to join ISIS in Syria and Iraq — but he denies any association with ISIS.

No one in Trinidad has yet been charged for joining or supporting ISIS, and there are reportedly around 100 Trinis in detention in camps in Syria, while Nazim Mohammed’s daughter and three granddaughters are currently locked up in an Iraqi prison. At some point, they will return.

Whether the jihadi spirit will be rekindled in Trinidad is yet to be seen. But Bakr’s coup shows just how easy it is for a small group of marginal men, radicalised by grievance and inflamed with ideological zeal, to inflict a tremendous amount chaos and suffering on a democratic society. It also serves as a salutary reminder that, while we should resist the temptations of apocalyptic alarmism, we should never take for granted the resilience of democratic institutions.

The overwhelming focus from authorities, political leaders and the press has become the personal and psychological dramas of the perpetrators. After every incident, the attackers’ pasts are combed and every twist and turn in their tangled biographies is retrospectively injected with significance and relevance to their (often much later) decision to kill.

Of course, the personal profiles of perpetrators are important, but the resultant disconnection of the spate of stabbings, vehicular attacks and, less frequently, shootings and bombings across Europe leaves us in danger of prematurely writing off the lingering jihadist threat.

We should know by now that militant Islamism in the West has long horizons. It was eight years between the 7/7 bombings and the murder of Lee Rigby; the following year, Isis proclaimed itself a “Caliphate” and instructed Muslims worldwide to migrate to their bloody utopia — at least 6,000 from Europe answered the call. France and Belgium suffered terribly in the years to follow, while Britain saw a wave of jihadist attacks three years later.

There is no reason that lulls should be interpreted as a waning threat, yet today attention seems elsewhere. Last October, political leaders in Britain greeted what looks like the jihadist assassination of one of their colleagues with a very serious debate on online anonymity. And only this month, thanks in part to the Americanisation of political discourse, the bloated cottage industry of which I am a part was more comfortable gorging on year-old events 3,600 miles away at the US Capitol building than discussing threats closer to home.

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In the wake of America’s withdrawal from the region, much has been made of the danger of Afghanistan once again becoming a terrorist safe haven threatening the West. Such concerns are certainly legitimate. Whenever they have controlled territory, jihadists have made the West pay: from the archipelago of training camps in Afghanistan which churned out the “Magnificent 19” hijackers, to the commandos dispatched from the Isis caliphate to gun down revellers and commuters in Paris and Brussels.

The more urgent concern, however, should be on Europe, and how the jihadist movement reconstitutes itself inside the continents borders after the Islamic State. The principal concern for security services has been the threat posed by Isis returnees, and with good reason. There is nothing new about Europeans travelling to jihadist conflict zones, but more travelled to Syria and Iraq for jihad than every previous jihadist insurgency combined. Not all made it home, but many did or will in future.

Available evidence does suggest that only a minority of foreign fighter returnees attack at home, but this should not necessarily be a cause for complacency. The statistics alone do not account for the constant ideological transformation and evolution of militant Islamism in the West: when commuters were murdered in London in 2005, or when Mohammed Merah executed Jewish schoolchildren and soldiers in France in 2012, these acts sparked internal debates on legitimacy within salafi-jihadist circles. Today, thanks to the work of salafi-jihadist scholars, there would be no such debate.

Nor do low rates of attack tell the whole story of the impact of returnees. Each generation of returnees from conflict overseas has successfully helped to cultivate a new and larger generation of extremists. Isis hotspots in Europe often directly overlap with recruitment hotspots for jihadist insurgencies from decades ago. If the Isis generation is able to socialise a new, more violent, more extreme generation of salafi-jihadists then it may be years, or even decades, until we feel the full force of the most recent returnee wave.

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That isn’t to say these jihadis are driven by pure rage and bloodlust, reflexively likely to slaughter the first infidel they see. Like any terrorist group or movement, jihadists learn from their tactical and strategic mistakes, and some believe they overplayed their hand with the attacks of 2015-17. Many believed a tipping point had been reached, and that such bloodletting would spark the civil conflict on the continent they desired, in doing so drastically and disgracefully overestimating their support within Western Muslim communities. Meanwhile, the attacks on the West also served to accelerate the aerial bombardment of the “caliphate” on the ground, only hastening its demise. This helps explain why the main jihadist groups are no longer claiming or orchestrating major attacks in the West: it isn’t only a sign of weakness, but of the movement adapting to realities.

Hakim el-Karoui and Benjamin Hodayé’s recent extensive study of European militants suggested two possible scenarios for the future of jihadism in the West: the first, as hinted at above, sees the veterans of the Syrian jihad and their future cohorts turn their crosshairs primarily towards Europe, rather than some distant war zone.

The second, arguably more unsettling, prospect, is the jihadist population in Europe reconstitutes into a social movement, accelerating what European governments term separatism. At the very least, it’s possible a faction of Europe’s salafi-jihadis remain committed to mass casualty violence against civilians and their dreams of a caliphate. Recognising the shortcomings of ISIS need not lessen commitment to the utopian ideology: “real communism has never been tried.”

In this scenario, salafi-jihadis would establish closed communities withdrawn from and hostile towards the ignorance and sin of wider society. Perhaps they would only occasionally lash out, but more people would certainly die in Europe over ‘blasphemy’ and cartoons. There is precedent here in the monastic communities established in some of the global jihadi hotspots, from Toulouse and the surrounding countryside to the isolated salafi-jihadi communes in the Caribbean.

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Another French academic, Hugo Micheron, recently spoke to dozens of imprisoned jihadis and some hinted at this change in strategy. Instead of simply radicalising others for attacks, their aim is rather the total homogenisation of Western Muslim belief under their interpretation (the only true Islam, as they see it), before encouraging or enforcing separation and withdrawal from the surrounding unbelief. The objective, according to the incarcerated extremists, is to insert a salafi-jihadist project at the heart of Europe instead of a faraway battlefield. If this strain of thought becomes dominant then, as Micheron writes, jihadism becomes a social, intellectual and political challenge “before it ever picks up a Kalashnikov”.

For now, Western Jihadis have gone quiet. But it could prove a major miscalculation to interpret this lull as jihadism finally on the wane, to be usurped by some other ideological challenge. As expert Suzanne Raine recently warned, when terrorists have gone quiet in the past, it usually means they are planning. The challenge is syncing the terrorist planning cycle with the resource and short attention cycle of Western governments and publics.

Perhaps we’re lucky that many of Europe’s most committed jihadis and thinkers — ones with real experience and connections — are in prison, or stranded in Syria. Thus the residual attacks are perpetrated by losers and the misfits without links to formal cells or networks, so we put it down to mental health and soothe ourselves into believing this is all that is left of Western jihad. But those in prison will soon get out and others will make it back from Syria. They now know better than to blunder into more confrontations with Western states from a position of weakness. A movement that thinks in centuries will not rush into its next move.

Of course, the jihadist movement could collapse or fade into irrelevance. It’s just that there’s no reason to think it will, and that all the indicators — mostly from historical precedent — point the other way. Jihadis are not some nightmarish omnipotent force as they were too often portrayed during the Isis years. But while there is no call for alarmism, there may well be cause for pessimism.

But despite the obvious differences between a failed Arab state of 18 million and a dual-island nation of 1.3 million, the two countries have become strange bedfellows. As unlikely as it may seem, Trinidad has become one of the world’s key recruiting grounds for Isis, a status linked to the country’s other big wheeze: drug trafficking.

I was reminded of the connection between the Caribbean, the caliphate and cocaine last week after hearing of the death of 80-year-old Yasin Abu Bakr, an imposing 6ft 6in former TV producer and ex-cop who, as leader of the Jamaat al Muslimeen movement, in 1990 pulled off an attempted coup in Trinidad. For the better part of a week, Abu Bakr was effectively the head of state, making him the only person to ever lead an Islamic coup in the Western Hemisphere.

I met Abu Bakr in Port of Spain, Trinidad’s capital, in 2018 while researching a book on tribalism. Initially, I was drawn to him after more than 100 Trinidadians left home to join Isis and the jihadi cause, lured by a mix of fundamentalist ideology, warped romanticism and, in many cases, money. These young men travelled not just to Syria but also Iraq, often taking with them, and usually against their will, scores of women and children.

Given its small population, Trinidad has provided disproportionate numbers of jihadis to the ISIS cause. The US and Canada, with a combined population of some 350 million, larger Muslim communities and a seemingly more fertile breeding ground for anti-Western sentiment, are believed to have exported just 300 or so men and women to the Levant for jihad.

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Yet in Trinidad, just 6% of the population are Muslim, and, of these, an estimated 90% are of Indian descent. While most are arguably “moderate”, a small minority has no strong attachment to their communities — thanks to a combination of atomised families, absent fathers, rampant drug addiction, gang culture and social marginalisation. Such a perfect storm feeds the worst excesses of identity politics, making young, impressionable and often desperate men vulnerable to the chest-beating Isis propaganda machine.

But even before Isis existed as an idea, let alone as an organised terror group, the foundations of Islamic extremism were being laid in Trinidad. In the late Seventies, the island saw a revival of Islam that came off the back of an American black power movement underscored by the teachings of Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan, as well as the Islamic revolution in Iran and the assertion of a more muscular, global Muslim identity. This Islamic reboot differed from the prevailing, passive Trinidadian Muslim identity and capitalised on endemic corruption, a growing gang problem fuelled by a burgeoning cocaine trade and a sense of alienation felt by many youths who were unable to access a piece of the oil and gas pie being divvied up by foreign capitalists and their government cronies.

Without proper education and lacking job opportunities, those who felt left behind began to turn to Islam as a way out, and a means of clearing the streets of the drugs that went hand in glove with the new money. Located seven miles north of Venezuela, which has an ultra-porous 1,378-mile border with the cocaine capital of the world, Colombia, drugs continue to enter Trinidad by speedboat and leave on container ships, planes and private yachts, as well as in condoms carried inside the stomachs of drug mules.

These narcotics often enter Trinidad with decommissioned Venezuelan military weapons, which explains the tendency of gangs in Port of Spain and elsewhere to have more firepower on the streets than most police forces. Perhaps that’s why an unofficial investigation by the government in 2009 found that up to 90% of cops were involved in illegality, ranging from “running and selling drugs, to colluding with gangs by renting out weapons to criminals, to performing extra-legal killings”.

Throughout the Eighties, the Islamist reboot was seen as a counterpoint to a society that was rapidly turning into a Sodom and Gomorrah for urban youth. Muslim militias took the fight to the dealers, drug lords and gangs on the streets of Port of Spain and beyond, becoming a vigilante force to be reckoned with. Indeed, as the new incarnation of Islam became more and more powerful, its more pernicious fringes — who were more concerned with financial gain than philosophical enlightenment — became enforcers, protection racketeers and, in many cases, out-and-out gangsters themselves.

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Already well-developed in the US, Prislam — a brand of prison-based Islam that conferred protection to its adherents and access to criminal networks both inside and outside of jail — soon took hold, causing schism after schism. Initially, these took the form of pseudo-religious “Muslims versus apostates” conflicts aimed at legitimising gang-on-gang assassinations. Then came “Muslims versus non-Muslims” contract killings — until it became expedient for gang members to either align themselves with the Prislamic “Muslim City” faction or their non-Muslim uber-gang rivals, “Rasta City”.

Semantics aside, the names of both organised crime groups soon had little to do with Mecca or Haile Selassie, save for some members who happened to be Muslims or Rastas, as well as drug dealers, hitmen and government stooges. But something had to give. With cocaine and oil came the juxtaposition of wealth and poverty, unbridled corruption and gangster politics, which eventually gave rise to an unprecedented rejection of the government.

Enter Abu Bakr.

Over afternoon tea in the Jamaat al Muslimeen compound in Port of Spain, Abu Bakr, a sardonic, charismatic character formerly known as Lennox Phillip, told me how on July 25, 1990, he mounted the coup with some 113 black Muslim foot soldiers, using intelligence sources to determine when key police and military figures were indisposed or out of town. The plotters duly blew up the capital’s main police station, took the local TV news channel and stormed parliament, taking the prime minister, ANR Robinson, and a number of his fellow legislators hostage at gunpoint for several days. Trinidad being Trinidad, chaos ensued. Riots led to several hundred injuries and some 30 deaths.

Having taken the Trinidadian government to task for its complicity in ramping up the country’s drug problems and spiralling violent crime, Abu Bakr’s audacious move, in fairness, was more a citizen’s arrest of the government than a coup d’état, designed to seize control and take the reins of power. Abu Bakr’s power grab came to an end when he and his followers gave themselves up. After being charged with murder and treason, Abu Bakr was released from prison two years later as part of an amnesty deal.

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“We were a community outreach organisation,” he told me in his modest office, adding he still believed that he could have reversed Trinidad’s crime epidemic if he had succeeded. “A hundred people would convert at Friday prayers. We got money from Libya. We were cleaning up the drugs on the street — we were doing good work. We had outreach centres, feeding centres, shops, businesses, land, medical centres… The Government feared us.”

That fear, Abu Bakr said, had led to the government violently clamping down on his organisation. With no recourse to the law, Jamaat al Muslimeen’s seizure of power was, he claimed, as much about self-preservation as it was about ending corruption.

“It’s a known fact that many people who said they were Muslims manifested themselves as something else,” he suggested. Certainly Jamaat al Muslimeen struck me more as a sort of Islamic scout movement than an insurgency. But for a few that wasn’t enough; the lure of jihad was too great. “The Trinidad-ISIS connection is not nonsense,” Abu Bakr told me. “Many people left Trinidad to fight for ISIS because of the lack of hope.”

Is there any sign of that hope being restored? If there is, it is hard to spot. Three years after our conversation, the drugs continue to flow into Trinidad — and violence continues to erupt. As Abu Bakr told me at the time: “This is the land of steel pan and carnival. This is supposed to be paradise. Yet for many, it is anything but.”

True, even in 2021, some groups such as the resurgent Taliban and Boko Haram — to say nothing of the Iranian regime — remain committed to a type of Islamist militancy that includes an emphasis on violence, with all the human suffering that entails. But for the most part, jihadist militancy has proved unpopular among Muslims, often inviting a violent counter-reaction. Its promise of an Islamist dream state has lost its appeal.

Yet Islamists in the West appear to have found a possible solution that sidesteps, at least for now, the use of explicit violence. The core of this alternative strategy is to focus as much as possible on dawa.

Nearly 20 years after 9/11, Westerners still remain unfamiliar with dawa. In theory, the term simply refers to the call to Islam, a kind of invitation; Westerners would recognise it as part of a proselytising mission. In practice, however, Islamists rely on dawa as a comprehensive propaganda, PR and brainwashing system designed to make all Muslims embrace an Islamist programme while converting as many non-Muslims as possible.

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Among Western analysts, dawa — which became a tool of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 20^th century — has traditionally received far less attention than militant jihad, though observers have emphasised its importance in the “humanitarian” activities of Hamas.

In Unveiled, the ex-Muslim Yasmine Mohammed compellingly describes her difficult marriage to the Egyptian jihadist Essam Marzouk. Yasmine commented on the rivalry that exists between jihadists (such as her ex-husband) and ostensibly “non-violent” Islamists:

“The truth is that Essam hated the [Muslim] Brotherhood: he thought Islamists were a bunch of pansies. He was actually aligned with a more militant group in Egypt called Al Jihad, who were the Egyptian wing of Al Qaeda. Both Islamists and jihadis have the same goal — to spread Islam — but they have different methods. Islamists want to do this through passive means such as politics, immigration and childbirth.”

This important point is often lost on politicians in Western countries. For no matter what misguided retired CIA officials may claim, groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood are neither moderate organisations nor pluralist partners in civil society. Islamist groups are certainly not likely to prevent the radicalisation of young Muslims. Instead, as one observer noted more than a decade ago, “the history of the Brotherhood movement shows, in fact, that it has operated by and large not as a firewall against jihadism, but as a fertile incubator of radical ideas in a variety of locales”.

In a cynical way, Islamists achieve far more through dawa than when they confine themselves to simply blowing things up and stabbing people to death. The threat is not as obvious. Jihad and the use of violence tend to provoke an immediate response. With dawa, on the other hand, it is possible to talk about charity, spirituality and religion — and then compare it to normal religious proselytising missions. In a free society, what reasonable person would take issue with that?

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But dawa is also about building networks: local, regional and international. In The Call, Krithika Varagur revealed both the enormous global scale and opaque nature of these efforts. Saudi Arabia, in particular, has channelled billions of dollars into dawa — with much of it directed into the US.

In the West, these regimes are not given much thought, nor is the Islamist infrastructure in the United States. Nonetheless, Islamism is spreading within Western institutions, and it’s largely thanks to an unlikely alliance: dawa has recognised the alluring power of “woke”, and has started to adopt the language of civil rights and multiculturalism.

Of course, this is not an entirely American phenomenon, but the energy in our progressive movement has taken this cooperation one step further. In France, by contrast, “Islamo-gauchisme” (Islamo-Leftism) is much more likely to be correctly identified as a threat to the model of universal, secular and republican citizenship. In Britain, it remains less prominent, confined to fringe politicians such as George Galloway, who believes that “the progressive movement around the world and the Muslims have the same enemies”.

Yet as historian Daniel Pipes has noted, the relationship between Islamism and extreme Leftism is nothing new. In 2007, Oskar Lafontaine, former chairman of Germany’s Social Democratic party, noted: “Islam depends on community, which places it in opposition to extreme individualism, which threatens to fail in the West. [In addition,] the devout Muslim is required to share his wealth with others. The Leftist also wants to see the strong help the weak.”

But the internal tension between “wokeism” and Islamism is never far away. Just look at Al Jazeera, which uploads documentaries about transgender rights on to its social media channel, while broadcasting sermons suggesting husbands should beat their wives on its Arabic station.

Nevertheless, the two movements do share objectives. Both are anti-West and anti-American. Both have a critical attitude towards “capitalism” based on individualism. True, the Islamists have been around for much longer. But Islamist ideologues are willing to co-operate with non-Muslim Leftists as long as it serves their purposes.

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To their credit, some on the Left refuse to countenance Islamism, as they become increasingly aware of the contradiction between supporting universal human rights (including women’s rights) and the demands of Islamists. In France, for example, the centre-Left former Prime Minister Manuel Valls courageously denounced Islamo-Leftism without the least hesitation.

In the United States, however, such vocal opposition from the Left is increasingly rare. Indeed, at the 2019 Netroots Nation conference — America’s “largest annual conference for progressives” — multiple panel discussions and training sessions reflected the Islamist agenda, frequently coalescing around a critique of Israel while neglecting the toxic role played by Hamas in perpetuating the conflict. Meanwhile, Linda Sarsour, a feminist organiser and co-chair of the “Women’s March”, has made her support for Islamism more explicit: “You’ll know when you’re living under Shariah law if suddenly all your loans and credit cards become interest-free. Sounds nice, doesn’t it?”

In government, too, Islamism’s capture of progressivism has become increasingly clear. Turkey’s Islamist President Erdogan might lead one of the world’s most brutal and repressive regimes, but that hasn’t stopped Ilhan Omar, the Democratic congresswoman from Minnesota, from expressing support for him. No doubt she was inspired by Erdogan last year when he proclaimed that “social justice is in our book”, and that “Turkey is the biggest opportunity for western countries in the fight against xenophobia, Islamophobia, cultural racism and extremism”.

Erdogan, in effect, was explicitly using progressive rhetoric. It’s a move that’s since been mirrored in Iran. The Tehran Times ­— which describes itself as “a loud voice of the Islamic Revolution” — recently attacked former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for his “deep-rooted Islamophobia”. And in March, Iranian Foreign Minister Zarif “lauded the determination of Islamic countries to address Islamophobia as one of the main challenges facing the Islamic Ummah [community in the West]”. Islamists, in other words, are becoming skilled at wrapping themselves in a mantle of woke words, while engaging in systematic brutality and repression within their own countries.

To this new alliance between Islamism and progressive rhetoric, there is no simple response. Dawa, by its very nature, is inherently more difficult to fight than jihad. But those who believe, as I do, in a free, open, pluralist society need to be aware of the nature and magnitude of this new challenge. After two decades of fighting Islamist terrorism, we have a new and more subtle foe to contend with. Wokeism has long been regarded as a dangerous phenomenon — but only now are we starting to see why.

But one day their weekly ritual came to an end in a flash of fire and light. “We drove over the mine. I don’t remember anything,” he murmurs in pain from his hospital bed: “I woke up in the hospital and my brother was dead.”

The 45-year-old trader’s life and body have now been torn apart. In a hospital in Mopti town in central Mali, doctors crowd around examining his wounds. Metal struts stick out from both arms and there is a short stump where his right leg used to be. He is covered in bandages stained a dark brown from dried blood and iodine.

For now, all Moussa can do is lie there confused and alone. His wife and five children are still in their village far away to the north. “I don’t know how I will support them now,” he says.

Mopti used to be a major tourist destination. Westerners came with backpacks and bulging wallets to admire at the town’s medieval mosque and mud-brick alleys, before following the great Niger River up to the desert city of Timbuktu.

Today the town is at the centre of a grim war spilling out across the region. All around in the surrounding countryside, hidden horrors are unfolding every day. Jihadist groups lay roadside bombs and massacre local soldiers in gun battles and once peaceful communities tear each other apart in ethnic bloodletting matches.

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Far from being a staging ground for scenic excursions, Mopti is now a military hub. White armoured personnel trucks bristling with guns bearing the light blue logo of the United Nations roll down the road past camps teeming with newly arrived refugees. “Before the war, every white man was carrying a camera. Now every white man is carrying a gun,” jokes Amadou Cisse, a local tour guide.

In the West, we rarely hear or read anything about the stretch of scrubland running underneath the Sahara Desert, known as the Sahel. Many could not place the five key countries — Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Chad and Mauritania — on a map, or even know they exist.

But our collective ignorance is in for a hard shock. The region is battling the world’s fastest-growing jihadist insurgency. Poorly trained and badly equipped local armies are being overwhelmed by groups allied to Al Qaeda and Islamic State.

The conflict can be traced back to Britain and France’s failed intervention in Libya’s civil war in 2011. Jihadists and rebels looted Colonel Gaddafi’s vast arsenals and used the heavy weaponry to invade northern Mali in 2012. French troops drove them back into the desert in 2013 but over the last seven years, the insecurity has slowly spread out destabilising the region.

Now a dizzying myriad of armed groups and ethnic militias have taken hold over vast stretches of territory in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger. The violence has killed well over 5,000 people and forced a million people to flee in the last year alone.

To make matters worse, the Sahel is facing an environmental and health catastrophe. The region is warming at 1.5 times the global average. Almost every year, cyclical bouts of famine rage across the land.

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This month, the UN said that over 5 million people were in dire need of food. Now the coronavirus pandemic is spreading rapidly threatening to overwhelm the Sahel’s tattered health care systems.

The hunger and poverty are both contributing factors to and effects of the insurgency. The vast majority of the Sahel’s jihadists are not radicalised middle-class professionals. They are young men in desperate need of money to feed and clothe their families. The jihadist leaders can reportedly pay the men hundreds of dollars for a single raid — several months salary for your average herder. Sadly, the more the fighting goes on the worse the food insecurity becomes.

Centuries ago the Sahara desert acted as some sort of mythical wall dividing Africa from Europe. But today the Sahel is not some faraway land. The desert can be crossed in a matter of days if not hours by 4×4 convoys.

One might expect the Western response to the crisis on Europe’s doorstep to be overwhelming. Sadly, our collective ignorance of the region has played out in half-hearted and often self-serving policies.

Take the military response. Local armies are in desperate need of training and strong international support, but the Western response has been confused and uncoordinated at best.

France is the key foreign power in the Sahel and has huge economic investments in the region. It has close to 5,000 troops stationed there on its counter jihadist mission, Operation Barkhane. But as the fighting spreads, France is increasingly overstretched and unpopular trying to maintain a security presence over an area the size of Western Europe.

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The US is another key foreign power in the region. It has over a thousand troops in West Africa providing valuable training to local forces. However, it is reportedly considering withdrawing all of its forces from the region, as Washington tries to pivot towards countering China and Russia.

Germany and several other European countries have sent hundreds of troops on the UN’s beleaguered peacekeeping mission in Mali, MINUSMA. The EU also has several training missions in the region. But aside from these token commitments, the European response has been utterly underwhelming.

The EU has focused most of its efforts on stopping the flow of migrants through the Sahel to Mediterranean shores — keeping any crisis at arm’s length. Over the last few years, it has spent hundreds of millions of euros pressuring Niger to crack down on migration routes crisscrossing the country.

International aid agencies are often the last line of defence for many Sahelians in crisis. But humanitarians complain that because of ignorance in the West, their operations are some of the most underfunded on earth.

To its credit, Britain has tried to scale up its involvement in the region. It has spent hundreds of millions of pounds in aid and development in the Sahel and soon 250 British frontline troops will be sent to UN’s peacekeeping mission in Mali. But this military contribution — while undoubtedly important — resembles drops of rain in a storm.

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If the Sahel keeps going on its current trajectory, many fear the fighting could spread through Burkina Faso into the states of Ivory Coast, Togo, Benin and Ghana. This would be a disaster of catastrophic proportions potentially destabilising swathes of West Africa for the next decade and hamstringing development in a region which for the last few years has been one of the fastest-growing in the world.

So far the vast majority of the Sahelian IDPs and refugees have stayed in the region but if the Sahelian states collapse, Europe can expect hundreds of thousands of refugees.

While a strong military and humanitarian response are undoubtedly crucial, an overly militarised policy will not solve the crisis. The Sahel needs more than guns and aid parcels.

More effort should go into tackling the root causes of the conflict and radicalisation: economic deprivation, foreign exploitation of resources, a break down of dialogue between communities and a disconnect between Sahelian elites in the metropoles and people in rural areas.

Fundamentally, these solutions will be led by local people. But the West must support them in any way possible.

Not much more than a mile away from where the Institute of Criminology conference ended so catastrophically, somewhere off the Edgware Road an old man was being celebrated for his career at the helm of political Islam in Britain.

The two events were not un-linked, the celebration being the launch of Dr Ghayasuddin Siddiqui’s biography A Very British Muslim Activist, a book that unerringly describes the foundations that lie beneath the rise of political Islam in Britain.

It chronicles the now deep roots of religious radicalisation in Britain, through the work of a fistful of organizations founded and once headed by Siddiqui: the Muslim Institute, the Jamaati-e-Islami magazine Impact, the Muslim Parliament and the Mulim Manifesto it put out three decades ago, all committed to “taking power from the West”.

Ghayasuddin Siddiqui is the most important Muslim that Britain has never heard of. A small, unassuming man with a neat beard and a talent for friendship, he was always far more interested in righting what he saw as wrongs than in any theological justification for it. Apparently indiscriminate in his associations, he has been pictured with Malcolm X — whose trip to Sheffield University in 1964 he organised — Tariq Ali as well as Jeremy Corbyn, with whom he founded the Stop the War Coalition.

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If he felt it would address the, as he saw it, unjust condition of world Islam, then it must be done without delay. The blame for all injustice he laid at the feet of Britain; they alone ended Mughal power in India when Islam seemed, he believed, to have almost uniquely got the balance right between pluralism and cultural might. They alone should pay.

It is an irony that Britain carelessly allowed Siddiqui to establish London as “the centre of the Islamic movement” and then gave him the space to rethink and regroup, and in so doing, lose control of that movement. For Ghayas came to repudiate both violence and then political Islam itself by the mid-90s — but it came too late to stop a later violent political movement from growing, witnessed once again last Friday.

“Great Britain … was a sandbox for Muslims to play at developing their ideologies, philosophies, and eventually movements,” writes the book’s young American Muslim author, C Scott Jordan, a protégé of academic Ziauddin Siddiqui who founded the highly regarded quarterly journal Critical Muslim (published by mainstream publishers Hurst). That play would have disastrous results.

Yet his story begins in unlikely ways. His father worked for the British Raj in India before partition, and Siddiqui’s PhD in chemistry at Sheffield University was paid for with a grant from BP. He has lived quietly in the Cotswolds village of Chesham for thirty years; his wife is a prominent member of the highly-respected Muslim Women’s Institute, his sons educated at grammar school.

As a student mobiliser of the youth wing of the Jamaat-i-Islami at Hyderabad University, he heard — literally — the wailing of a Hindu woman just widowed by her husband too poor to undertake the rituals that would see him to his next life. Ghayas rounded up some friends there and then, raised the money to hire a bus to take her to a priest, and paid for the cremation. It was all achieved before sunrise the next morning; he was just 23 years old and it set a template for action.

His own radicalisation happened in Pakistan long before he moved to Sheffield, when he was just 14, through the writings of the “father of Islamism” himself, Abul a’la Maududi. He travelled to meet him in prison in Multan where he was condemned to death for inciting the massacre of 200 Ahmadis, “heretics” in the eyes of many Muslims. Maududi sought to revive the caliphate and purify Islam, and he learned much of his methodology from the West, the Nazis in particular.

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The idealistic young Siddiqui brought his thinking to Britain. But it was only when he met Kalim Siddiqui, infinitely more dangerous, who wrote for the Guardian and penned the infamous Muslim Manifesto that advocated the “capture” of British governance and the subversion of the elites, that the revolution Maududi wanted to see was consolidated.

Ghayas remained in the older man’s shadow for the next 30 years. He even orchestrated the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, travelling frequently to Iran to meet Ayatollah Khomeini. That Kalim was the evil genius of the London-based revolution is clear from his reaction to the hostage crisis in Tehran in which one Iranian and eight Americans died: “such instances were the necessary evil of revolution… the hope and good the revolution could bring to the Muslim community outweighed these minor indiscretions”.

The book captures his revolutionary intent, the projections of hatred and fear onto a country that never meted out the least retribution for such assiduous undermining. Siddiqui faced far greater opposition “within” — from Muslims who had served with him in this ragtag army of subversives, and who fought him for a decade over his dismantling of Kalim Siddiqui’s revolutionary legacy.

Yet within a year of Kalim’s death, and the end of the revolution in Iran, Ghayas had come to see how much more effective it was to try to forge a truly British Islam within the structures and mores of British society. He began to admire Britain’s consensual style of politics, although much harm had already been done.

What accounted for this change of heart? It was evidently no Damascene conversion, and the book is opaque on this score. Ghayas himself tells me: “If I remember correctly I re-assessed everything and I thought it was the right thing to do. It was a process of logic. I was not looking at things emotionally but getting to see things logically.”

He later confessed he felt partly to blame for the attitudes if not the actions that resulted in 7/7 — and let me write his mea cupla in the Evening Standard. He recruited Christian friends to the High Wycombe interfaith group, the Council of Christian Muslim Relations, where he enthused: “You can say anything.” He joined the religious literacy charity that I ran, Lapido Media, as a trustee, and spoke up for its work to a Muslim within the Charity Commission inspectorate.

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Above all he began to see that the real enemy was not Britain, but extremists within his own community. He founded the Halal Food Authority, with Jewish help, to ensure regulation and compliance. He took on the imams on child abuse in the then wholly unregulated madrassas.

He campaigned with renowned Muslim Women’s Network luminary Cassandra Balchin to reform marriage practices, and he worked with MP Anne Cryer over her Stop Forced Marriages Campaign. His gentleness, supportive nature and compassionate energy attracted many women to work alongside him – myself included — and are surely peerless: he has rather topically been dubbed “the bearded feminist”.

The new chapter of the Muslim Parliament and the new direction of the Muslim Institute was to initiate projects that set the stage for the first home grown generation of British Muslims to flourish: “not as outsiders looking for a voice, but as native members of a larger society dedicated to progress and justice for all of their neighbours”.

Ghayas celebrated his eightieth birthday this week. On his reaction to the book, he had this to say: “I think it is a genuine attempt to present myself. Only readers can tell me whether it is a success story or a failure. If I am exposed, the reality is the reality. What have I to lose in that way?

“There are hundreds of things I have done wrong for which I am sorry. There are so many other things which I have done for which I am proud.”

This book is at its core a unique tribute not to Ghayasuddin Siddiqui and the journey he’s been allowed to make, but ultimately to his faith in a system. It is a system that believes as passionately as he does, in restoration. But the tragedy of London Bridge is possibly the most unforgettable sign of it.