An Abyssinian moment in the Chiltern Hills

AFTER breaking news today about another alleged jihadi arrest in High Wycombe welcome news …

Muslims and Christians in this Home-Counties market town have got together to do something about it.

Not earth-shattering by normal standards. No laying siege in clerical pairs – one beard, one dog-collar - to jihadi bedrooms and ripping out the internet cable.

No corralling of every youth under 25 with a Mirpuri background and sticking them in the stocks on a cold November night until they recant.

But what is happening is at least working in a way: a genuine attempt to allay fears, and by so doing, support the poor parents and their peers who are frightened out of their wits by what’s hit them.

‘Ever since the liquid bomb plot’ says reassuring former Mayor Chauhdry Mohammed Shafique, ‘the community was thrown into absolute chaos. We realised something seriously had gone wrong. 

‘The scale with which our streets were taken over by the Metropolitan Police was alarming. People were put out of their houses in temporary shelters … word quickly got around there was an industrial-scale investigation in the northern part of the town. The first feeling we had was a siege mentality. Very few people were coming out. 

‘Yet in these circumstances, High Wycombe rose to the challenge.’

And what he means is what he calls ‘an Abyssinian moment’. 

He went to the churches.

That’s exactly what Muhammad is purported to have instructed his followers to do when, after being persecuted in Mecca, they sought refuge with the Ethiopian King, a Christian.

Now this latter-day Chauhdry Muhammed sits, surrounded by pleasantly smiling Anglican and Baptist clergy who convey gravitas and a lack of alarm; a couple of Prevent officers; the chairman of the local mosques council, a large striking man who calls himself a ‘consultant to the Saudi king’; several elders from the Pakistani community, a couple of women in hijabs ... and the local MP.

This is the Council for Christian and Muslim Relations: not my usual hang-out; least of all in a professional capacity, welcomed to ear-wig on everything, with carte blanche to ask any question I like and expect an answer.

But there is a feeling of momentousness here. A feeling that if we don’t get it right, we face the cataclysm.

Steve Baker (Con) is a little ominous in describing two distinct potential trajectories – on the one hand a desire for ‘struggle and suffering and glory’ among Muslim youth, and on the other a hardening of indigenous attitudes.

Sport might address the former, he suggests . . . and giving birth to a nation of saints the other.

‘One of the things that really worries me is I’ve seen an uptick – people writing to me and expressing bigoted views about Islam. The far-right Britain First is emerging so we have a problem with white nationalism.'

This small ancient market-town, nestled in the Chiltern Hills, that most ‘Home Counties’ of English regions, seems to have become something of a horror movie.

'Fortunately the level of violence is low', he adds, as if to reassure that the natives are still quiescent.

Hard to believe, sitting here looking through plate-glass windows at the rolling hills and autumnal trees, that some of the nastiest jihadis on the planet were born here.  Assad Sarwar, bomb-maker to the 2006 so-called Liquid Bomb Plotters, lived here. And he was no screwed-up adolescent salivating over a laptop in his bedroom. He was 29 years old.

Most recently, the bearded former shelf-stacker Omar Hussein who might have shown you where to find the coriander in aisle 6 of the local Morrisons supermarket, went to Syria and graduated through whatever brainwashing process they have there until he was able not just to watch the journalist James Foley having his head cut off, but brag about it on Twitter afterwards.

Many might think one is scraping some kind of barrel of despair to find something positive to say in this context, but that would not be fair. 

This group, now nine years old, has experienced one another’s most sacred religious rituals even in the midst of tensions. The Christians visited the mosque at Friday prayers, taking part in the prostrations, and the Muslims were invited to the giving of bread and wine of Holy Communion.

It bore fruit later.

Unusually, Muslim elders recognized ‘Awlaki’ (as he became known from his uncanny likeness to the internet groomer), from the Newsnight report about him. Instead of bunkering down in fearful communal isolation, they came forward and told the police he was a local lad.

Shabazz Suleman, 18, a former student at the town’s Royal Grammar School, disappeared this summer while on holiday with his parents in Turkey, after successfully passing his history, economics and psychology A-levels and gaining a place at university.

He slipped into Syria - and it was his parents who went to the police on their return.

Says Chauhdry: ‘This would not have been the case without the work we have been doing. We can be genuinely proud of our pioneering work grappling with a moral and social crisis when it hit us.’

But the tragedy goes on, and although the local Prevent Officer Jeffrey Singleton says there's always a human contact in the radicalisation process, no one seems to have any idea who, in a Muslim population of 28,000, it might be.

And so the toll goes on.  Nineteen-year-old student Yousaf Syed was arrested three days before Remembrance Sunday by armed police at his home in High Wycombe in connection with an alleged plan to carry out a beheading, according to the BBC.

He is one of three remanded in custody at Westminster Magistrates’ Court on 20 November, charged with being ‘jointly engaged’ with preparing for committing acts of terrorism. 

And today, as we went to press, I am tipped off to expect news of yet another arrest.

Isolation scenario

After Shafique's sombre introduction, the group splits up into ‘buzz groups’ to discuss insights and possible solutions to the problems in High Wycombe.  One member comments to me of what he calls 'the ability of everyone to feel they can discuss anything'.

The group I sit in on seems to think the jihadi mentality has to do with isolation at school, the classic disoriented loner/misfit scenario. He could be spotted early on and ‘treated’ in various ways.

But that ignores the fact that Sarwar was 29-years old.

At the plenary, Pakistani elders blame the parents. Others blame the fact that the jihadis are ‘between no cultures’; neither identifying with their remote heritage in northern Pakistan – all come from Mirpur, one of the ten most ‘unreached’ people groups in the world according to Bradford University’s Dr Philip Lewis – or with a post-secular Britain so disorientated that it cannot impart an authentic sense of itself.

One Pakistani elder in a baseball cap wants more youth participation. ‘There is no young people here! This forum can do nothing!’  

The former Mayor himself says he’s picking up a lot of vibe about ‘British foreign policy’.

‘We live in an era in which daily there’s news about immigration, the EU. This gives an opportunity for those that are extreme to get involved in that debate and destroy cohesion. 

‘It’s OK as long as it remains an economic argument and not a racist argument.’

Yet not too many Chinese twenty-somethings have gone back to Hong Kong to behead journalists for the sake of greater China, and the evils done by Britain in the Opium Wars. 

A feeling of heaviness hangs over this well-meaning and stimulating group.

‘The whole religion of Islam is in question,’ says Chauhdry tentatively. ‘People are getting serious about those who bring the name of Islam into disrepute.

‘We need to develop a counter-narrative from the text.’

It’s so serious that he has personally invited a visiting sheikh from Pakistan to speak at a forthcoming meeting, on developments in extremism in the Muslim world and on the true meaning of Islam.

I don’t go, not because I’m not interested – it is endlessly interesting to me – but because I do not believe one can build an Islam off the back of one visiting sheikh or even ten sheikhs whom one finds congenial. 

There are at least six ‘Islams’, according to Beirut University’s Tarif Khalidi, depending on which centuries you choose to cull your literature about Muhammad from. And the most proliferated of all those literatures are the maghazi – tales of military conquest which are said to comprise 75 per cent of the entire sira or oeuvre about the Prophet.

I personally think it’s a quagmire trying to build a future on the basis of some school or other of a religion that has never before settled these North Atlantic islands, and is far too unfamiliar - often ideologically so - with what has stabilised them for centuries.

Character

During the feedback session on 'causes and grievance of extremism and radicalisation', one point comes across loud and clear: the need for a genuine sense of homecoming.

'We are Wycombe residents and that's how we'd like to be identified.  We want to be distanced from religious and ethnic identity' - I am asked to write, as I stand at the flipchart.

An astonishing retort to decades of fashionable politics - and there's surely the rub.

It's friendly, and engaged, and open - up to a point.  Whether it's enough, only the roll call of further arrests will tell.