I couldn’t have been more astonished. This boy was far from being an inquiring intellectual - his short career had included stints as a barman, pub cook, plasterer and rent boy - and anyway your average ill-educated Russian is even less likely than his English counterpart to tolerate foreign ways and is certain to detest Muslims. So what was he thinking?
“Well,” he said, not batting an eyelid at what in Russia is almost universally a heresy, “there’s a lot in what the Imam says. And what about the Chechens? Everyone knows they’ve suffered. Why wouldn’t I feel pity? After nine months here, I know what suffering is.”
In the wake of the July bombings it transpires that there’s been a lot of converting to Islam in detention centres and prisons, sometimes with dire consequences.
One of the four 21/7 London bomb suspects became a convert at Feltham Young Offenders Institute in West London. Richard Reid, the “shoe bomber” who tried to blow up a plane in 2001, also converted while serving at Feltham for a string of muggings.
Theodore Dalrymple, prison doctor and journalist, says the number of Muslims in prison has risen sixfold over the past 15 years. Imam Abduljalid Sajid, chairman of the National Council for the Welfare of Muslim Prisoners, told me this week that there are now about 7,500 Muslim prisoners in the system – about 12 per cent of all people in prison in Britain, even though Muslims only account for 2 per cent of the population as a whole.
What makes Islam so attractive to prisoners? America’s Reverend Charles Colson, founder of the American Prison Ministries (one in six of the 2 million prisoners in America is a Muslim), has one answer. “Islam, certainly the radical variety, feeds on the resentment and anger all too prevalent in our prisons,” he wrote in the Wall Street Journal. “Many feel oppressed by the white power structure and sentencing disparities, which too often fall most harshly on minorities. Alienated, disenfranchised people are prime targets for radical Islamists who preach a religion of violence, of overcoming oppression by jihad. (Although most Muslims see jihad is as an internal struggle), this understanding of the Koran, mixed with inmate resentment, is a lethal combination.”
Most prison converts find only good in their new faith - a way of looking at God, staving off the suicidal urges that claim more than 90 lives a year, perhaps of ordering their lives. What frightens police is the tiny minority - the fanatics and jihadists, and the criminals.
A blend of crime and religious observance defines the South London gang known as the Muslim Boys – a few hundred youths aged between 15 and 30 who swagger the estates of Brixton, Stockwell and Wandsworth, robbing shops and banks, forcing open mosques to pray in the middle of the night, and compelling other young men – at gunpoint – to convert. Lee Jasper, the Mayor of London’s senior advisor on policing and chairman of Lambeth police consultative group, has said of them: “the Muslim Boys pose one of the most serious criminal threats the black community has ever faced. The police tell me they have never seen anything like this gang before.” His concern is that “the leaders of the Muslim Boys could be a criminalized front for terrorist extremists”.
The Brixton Mosque, where 60 per cent of the 500-strong community are black converts, has a reputation for helping ex-offenders readjust to life outside. Richard Reid made progress at first. He renamed himself Abdel Rahim and learned Arabic. But, says Abdul Haqq Baker, the head of the mosque, he was “tempted away” by “individuals who set up a few years ago away from the mosque” - extremists who worked on “weak characters”. Baker has also told CNN that Reid overlapped at Brixton Mosque, in 1998-99, with Zacarias Moussaoui, the Frenchman of Moroccan origin who has been charged in US with conspiracy over the September 11 attacks. Moussaoui was expelled from Brixton Mosque for his extreme views and attempts to impose them on younger members. Reid also left. Baker calls Reid “very, very impressionable”.
Imam Sajid has been warning for years that the weaknesses of the British prison system are creating a breeding ground for fanaticism. Back in late 2001, after the Richard Reid episode, three imams were suspended from the prison service: at Feltham, at the high-security Belmarsh Jail, and at Aylesbury Young Offenders’ Institution northwest of London. One had allegedly been handing out anti-American literature to inmates and playing videos promoting jihad. Theodore Dalrymple says Islamic tracts litter British prisons so thickly that “a visitor might be forgiven for concluding that Britain was an Islamic country”. In 2001, Imam Sajid blamed the government’s muddled, meanspirited way of recruiting imams to the prison service. The Home Office was refusing to pay imams in the same way as Anglican padres, he complained, which meant leaving the job to a bunch of volunteers of uncertain background and qualifications.
Has the Home Office made any improvements? “Yes,” he said. “The Government has started bringing equality. There are 20 or 21 full-time imams now – but there are 179 prisons. The spiritual needs of Muslims are still not being met.” So most prisons are still visited by 130-odd freelance spiritual leaders. “Most have their own mosques, and that means they can’t go to the prisons on Fridays. They can’t read one to one with the prisoners and can’t offer the same solace.”
Imam Sajid wants more full-time paid prison imams. He also hopes Hazel Blears of the Home Office will enact another of his ideas, to create a commission of Muslims to check the qualifications and reputation of imams arriving in Britain. “We don’t want extremists. They must be fully trained, not only in their religious knowledge but also in the law and habits of this country. People can convert, why not? It’s a free world. They may feel Islam brings them purpose in life - especially in prison. But inmates should be given proper guidance. That’s why we don’t want extremists there - so the inmates’ views don’t become extremist.”
Could damping the fire of Islamic extremism in prisons be this simple? Make sure all the imams touring British prisons are qualified and respectable: give them the same contractual health and safety, holiday and pension arrangements as other padres; bring them fully into the system, with a payslip at the end of each month. Every Anglican cleric can predict what would happen next. As the imams become religious bureaucrats they would, almost certainly, lose their romantic underdog appeal for prisoners.
Whether that would mean that the Korans and worry beads and half-baked jihadist ideas would find their way to the same dusty shelves and forgotten cupboards as the Bibles and CofE hymnbooks is another matter. It may already be too late for that.
Slices of London: e-mail Urban Fox here
