Within a few minutes of Noman Benotman’s arrival at the
Kandahar guest house, Osama bin Laden came to welcome him. The journey
from Kabul had been hard – 17 hours in a Toyota pick-up truck, bumping
along what passed as the main highway to southern Afghanistan. It was the
summer of 2000 and Benotman, then a leader of a group trying to overthrow
the Libyan dictator, Muammar Gaddafi, had been invited by bin Laden to a
conference of jihadists from around the Arab world, the first of its kind
since al-Qaeda had moved to Afghanistan in 1996. Benotman, the scion of an
aristocratic family marginalised by Gaddafi, had known bin Laden from
their days fighting the communist Afghan government in the early 1990s, a
period when Benotman established himself as a leader of the militant
Libyan Islamic Fighting Group.
The night of Benotman’s arrival, bin Laden threw a lavish
banquet in the main hall of his compound, an unusual extravagance for the
frugal al-Qaeda leader. As bin Laden circulated, making small talk, large
dishes of rice and platters of whole roasted lamb were served to some 200
jihadists, many of whom had come from around the Middle East. "It was one
big reunification," Benotman recalls. "The leaders of most of the jihadist
groups in the Arab world were there and almost everybody within al-Qaeda."
Bin Laden was trying to win over other militant groups to
the global jihad he had announced against the West in 1998. Over the next
five days bin Laden and his top aides, including Ayman al-Zawahiri, met
with a dozen or so jihadist leaders. They sat on the floor in a circle
with large cushions arrayed around them to discuss the future of their
movement. "This was a big strategy meeting," Benotman told one of us late
last year in his first account of the meeting to a reporter. "We talked
about everything, where are we going, what are the lessons of the past 20
years."
Despite the warm welcome, Benotman surprised his hosts
with a bleak assessment of their prospects. "I told them that the jihadist
movement had failed. That we had gone from one disaster to another, like
in Algeria, because we had not mobilised the people," recalls Benotman,
referring to the Algerian civil war launched by jihadists in the 1990s
that left more than 1,00,000 dead and destroyed whatever local support the
militants had once enjoyed. Benotman also told bin Laden that the al-Qaeda
leader’s decision to target the West would only sabotage attempts by
groups such as Benotman’s to overthrow the secular dictatorships in the
Arab world. "We made a clear-cut request for him to stop his campaign
against the United States because it was going to lead to nowhere,"
Benotman recalls, "but they laughed when I told them that America would
attack the whole region if they launched another attack against it."
Benotman says that bin Laden tried to placate him with a
promise: "I have one more operation and after that I will quit" – an
apparent reference to September 11. "I can’t call this one back because
that would demoralise the whole organisation," Benotman remembers bin
Laden saying.
After the attacks Benotman, now living in London, resigned
from the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, realising that the United States,
in its war on terrorism, would differentiate little between al-Qaeda and
his organisation.
Benotman however did more than just retire. In January
2007, under a veil of secrecy, he flew to Tripoli in a private jet
chartered by the Libyan government to try to persuade the imprisoned
senior leadership of his former group to enter into peace negotiations
with the regime. He was successful. This May, Benotman told us that the
two parties could be as little as three months away from an agreement that
would see the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group formally end its operations in
Libya and denounce al-Qaeda’s global jihad. At that point the group would
also publicly refute recent claims by al-Qaeda that the two organisations
had joined forces.
This past November, Benotman went public with his own
criticism of al-Qaeda in an open letter to al-Zawahiri, absorbed and well
received, he says, by the jihadist leaders in Tripoli. In the letter
Benotman recalled his Kandahar warnings and called on al-Qaeda to end all
operations in Arab countries and in the West. The citizens of western
countries were blameless and should not be the target of terrorist
attacks, argued Benotman, his refined English accent, smart suit, trimmed
beard and easy-going demeanour making it hard to imagine that he was once
on the front lines in Afghanistan.
Although Benotman’s public rebuke of al-Qaeda went
unnoticed in the United States, it received wide attention in the Arabic
press. In repudiating al-Qaeda, Benotman was adding his voice to a rising
tide of anger in the Islamic world toward al-Qaeda and its affiliates,
whose victims since September 11 have mostly been fellow Muslims.
Significantly, he was also joining a larger group of religious scholars,
former fighters and militants who had once had great influence over al-Qaeda’s
leaders and who – alarmed by the targeting of civilians in the West,
senseless killings in Muslim countries and barbaric tactics in Iraq – have
turned against the organisation, many just in the past year.
After September 11, there was considerable fear in the
West that we were headed for a clash of civilisations, with the Muslim
world led by bin Laden who would entice masses of young Muslims into his
jihadist movement. But the religious leaders and former militants who are
now critiquing al-Qaeda’s terrorist campaign – both in the Middle East and
in Muslim enclaves in the West – make that less likely. The potential
repercussions for al-Qaeda cannot be underestimated because, unlike most
mainstream Muslim leaders, al-Qaeda’s new critics have the jihadist
credentials to make their criticisms bite. "The starting point has to be
that jihad is legitimate otherwise no one will listen," says Benotman, who
sees the Iraqi insurgency as a legitimate jihad. "The reaction [to my
criticism of al-Qaeda] has been beyond imagination. It has made the
radicals very angry. They are very shaky about it."
Why have clerics and militants once considered allies by
al-Qaeda’s leaders turned against them? To a large extent it is because
al-Qaeda and its affiliates have increasingly adopted the doctrine of
takfir by which they claim the right to decide who is a "true" Muslim.
Al-Qaeda’s Muslim critics know what results from this takfiri view:
first, the radicals deem some Muslims apostates; after that the radicals
start killing them. This fatal progression happened in both Algeria and
Egypt in the 1990s. It is now taking place even more dramatically in Iraq
where al-Qaeda’s suicide bombers have killed more than 10,000 Iraqis, most
of them targeted simply for being Shia. Recently, al-Qaeda in Iraq has
turned its fire on Sunnis who oppose its diktats, a fact not lost on the
Islamic world’s Sunni majority.
Additionally, al-Qaeda and its affiliates have killed
thousands of Muslim civilians elsewhere since September 11: hundreds of
Afghans killed every year by the Taliban, dozens of Saudis killed by
terrorists since 2003, scores of Jordanians massacred at a wedding at a US
hotel in Amman in November 2005. Even those sympathetic to al-Qaeda have
started to notice. "Excuse me Mr Zawahiri but who is it who is killing,
with Your Excellency’s blessing, the innocents in Baghdad, Morocco and
Algeria?" one supporter asked in an online Q&A with al-Qaeda’s deputy
leader in April that was posted widely on jihadist websites. All this has
created a dawning recognition among Muslims that the ideological virus
that unleashed September 11 and the terrorist attacks in London and Madrid
is the same virus now wreaking havoc in the Muslim world.
Two months before Benotman’s letter to al-Zawahiri was
publicised in the Arab press al-Qaeda received a blow from one of bin
Laden’s erstwhile heroes, Sheikh Salman al-Oudah, a Saudi religious
scholar. Around the sixth anniversary of September 11 al-Oudah addressed
al-Qaeda’s leader on MBC, a widely watched Middle East TV network: "My
brother Osama, how much blood has been spilt? How many innocent people,
children, elderly and women have been killed… in the name of al-Qaeda?
Will you be happy to meet god almighty carrying the burden of these
hundreds of thousands or millions [of victims] on your back?"
What was noteworthy about al-Oudah’s statement was that it
was not simply a condemnation of terrorism, or even of September 11, but
that it was a personal rebuke which clerics in the Muslim world have shied
away from. In Saudi Arabia in February, one of us met with al-Oudah who
rarely speaks to western reporters. Dressed in the long black robe fringed
with gold that is worn by those accorded respect in Saudi society, al-Oudah
recalled meeting with bin Laden – a "simple man without scholarly
religious credentials, an attractive personality who spoke well," he said
– in the northern Saudi region of Qassim in 1990. Al-Oudah explained that
he had criticised al-Qaeda for years but until now had not directed it at
bin Laden himself: "Most religious scholars have directed criticism at
acts of terrorism, not a particular person… I don’t expect a positive
effect on bin Laden personally as a result of my statement. It’s really a
message to his followers."
Al-Oudah’s rebuke was also significant because he is
considered one of the fathers of the Sahwa, the fundamentalist awakening
movement that swept through Saudi Arabia in the 1980s. His sermons against
the US military presence in Saudi Arabia following Saddam Hussein’s 1990
invasion of Kuwait helped turn bin Laden against the United States. And
bin Laden told one of us in 1997 that al-Oudah’s 1994 imprisonment by the
Saudi regime was one of the reasons he was calling for attacks on US
targets. Al-Oudah is also one of 26 Saudi clerics who, in 2004, handed
down a religious ruling urging Iraqis to fight the allied occupation of
their country. He is, in short, not someone al-Qaeda can paint as an
American sympathiser or a tool of the Saudi government.
Tellingly, al-Qaeda has not responded to al-Oudah’s
critique but the research organisation, Political Islam Online, tracked
postings on six Islamist websites and the websites of Al Jazeera and Al
Arabiya TV networks in the week after al-Oudah’s statements; it found that
more than two-thirds of respondents reacted favourably. Al-Oudah’s large
youth following in the Muslim world has helped his anti-al-Qaeda message
resonate. In 2006, for instance, he addressed a gathering of around 20,000
young British Muslims in London’s East End. "Oudah is well known by all
the youth. It’s almost a celebrity culture out there… He has definitely
helped to offset al-Qaeda’s rhetoric," one young imam told us.
More doubt about al-Qaeda was planted in the Muslim world
when Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, the ideological godfather of al-Qaeda,
sensationally withdrew his support in a book written last year from his
prison cell in Cairo. Al-Sharif, generally known as "Dr Fadl", was an
architect of the doctrine of takfir, arguing that Muslims who did
not support armed jihad or who participated in elections were kuffar
– unbelievers. Although Dr Fadl never explicitly called for such
individuals to be killed, his takfiri treatises from 1988 and 1993
gave theological cover to jihadists targeting civilians.
Dr Fadl was also al-Zawahiri’s mentor. Like his protégé,
he is a skilled surgeon and moved in militant circles when he was a member
of Cairo University’s medical faculty in the 1970s. In 1981, when Anwar
Sadat was assassinated and al-Zawahiri was jailed in connection with the
plot, Dr Fadl fled to Peshawar, Pakistan, where he operated on wounded
mujahideen fighting the Soviets. After al-Zawahiri’s release from jail he
joined Dr Fadl in Peshawar where they established a new branch of the
"Jihad group" that would later morph into al-Qaeda. Osama Rushdi, a former
Egyptian jihadist then living in Peshawar, recalls that there was little
doubt about Dr Fadl’s importance: "He was like the big boss in the Mafia
in Chicago." And bin Laden also owed a deeply personal debt to Dr Fadl; in
Sudan in 1993 the doctor operated on al-Qaeda’s leader after he was hurt
in an assassination attempt.
So it was an unwelcome surprise for al-Qaeda’s leaders
when Dr Fadl’s new book, Rationalisation of Jihad, was serialised
in an independent Egyptian newspaper in November. The incentive for
writing the book, he explained, was that "jihad… was blemished with grave
Shariah violations during recent years… Now there are those who kill
hundreds, including women and children, Muslims and non-Muslims, in the
name of jihad!" Dr Fadl ruled that al-Qaeda’s bombings in Egypt, Saudi
Arabia and elsewhere were illegitimate and that terrorism against
civilians in western countries was wrong. He also took on al-Qaeda’s
leaders directly in an interview with the newspaper, Al-Hayat. "Zawahiri
and his Emir bin Laden [are] extremely immoral," he said. "I have spoken
about this in order to warn the youth against them, youth who are seduced
by them and don’t know them."
Dr Fadl’s harsh words attracted attention throughout the
Arabic-speaking world; even a majority of al-Zawahiri’s own Jihad group
jailed in Egyptian prisons promised to end their armed struggle. In
December, al-Zawahiri released an audiotape lambasting his former mentor,
accusing him of being in league with the "bloodthirsty betrayer", Egyptian
president, Hosni Mubarak; and in a 200-page book titled The Exoneration,
published in March, he portrayed Dr Fadl as a prisoner trying to curry
favour with Egypt’s security services and the author of "a desperate
attempt (under American sponsorship) to confront the high tide of the
jihadist awakening".
Ultimately, the ideological battle against al-Qaeda in the
West may be won here in Britain, in places such as Leyton and Walthamstow,
East London, whose residents include five of the eight alleged al-Qaeda
operatives currently on trial for plotting to bring down US-bound
passenger jets in 2006. It is in this country that many leaders of the
jihadist movement have settled as political refugees and the capital has
long been a key barometer of future Islamist trends. There are probably
more supporters of al-Qaeda in Britain than any other western country.
Over the last half-year we have been interviewing London-based militants
who have defected from al-Qaeda, retired mujahideen, Muslim community
leaders and members of the security services. Most say that when al-Qaeda’s
bombs went off in London in 2005 sympathy for the terrorists evaporated.
In Leyton, the local mosque is on the main road, a street
of terraced houses, halal food joints and South Asian hairdressers. Around
1,000 people attend Friday prayers there each week. Usama Hassan, an imam
at the mosque, has a PhD in artificial intelligence from Imperial College
in London, read theoretical physics at Cambridge and now teaches at
Middlesex University. But he also trained in a jihadist camp in
Afghanistan in the 1990s and until a few years ago was openly sympathetic
to bin Laden. And, in another unusual twist, he is now one of the most
prominent critics of al-Qaeda. Over several cups of Earl Grey in the tea
room next to the mosque, Hassan – loquacious and intelligent, every bit
the university lecturer – explained how he had switched sides.
Raised in London by Pakistani parents, Hassan arrived in
Cambridge in 1989 and, feeling culturally isolated, fell in with Jam’iat
Ihyaa Minhaaj Al-Sunnah (JIMAS), a student organisation then supportive of
jihads in Palestine, Kashmir and Afghanistan. In December 1990 Hassan
travelled to Afghanistan where he briefly attended an Arab jihadist camp.
He was shown how to use Kalashnikovs and M-16s and was taken to the front
lines where a shell landed near his group’s position. "My feeling was, if
I was killed, then brilliant, I would be a martyr," he recalls. Later, as
a postgraduate student in London, Hassan played a lead role in the student
Islamic Society, then a hotbed of radical activism. "At the time I was
very anti-American… It was all black and white for us. I used to be
impressed with bin Laden. There was no other leadership in the Muslim
world standing up for Muslims." When September 11 happened Hassan says the
view in his circle was that "al-Qaeda had given one back to George Bush".
As al-Qaeda continued to target civilians for attacks,
Hassan began to rethink. His employment by an artificial intelligence
consulting firm also integrated him back toward mainstream British life.
"It was a slow process and involved a lot of soul-searching… Over time I
became convinced bin Laden was dangerous and an extremist." The July 2005
bombings in London were the clincher. "I was devastated by the attack," he
says. "My feeling was, how dare they attack my city."
Three days after the London bombings the Leyton mosque
held an emergency meeting; about 300 people attended. "We explained that
these acts were evil, that they were haram [unlawful]," recalls Hassan. It
was not the easiest of crowds; one youngster stormed out, shouting, ‘As
far as I’m concerned, 50 dead kuffar is not a problem.’"
In Friday sermons since then Hassan has hammered home the
difference between legitimate jihad and terrorism despite a death threat
from pro-al-Qaeda militants: "I think I’m listened to by the young because
I have street cred(ibility) from having spent time in a [jihadist]
training camp." This spring, Hassan helped launch the Quilliam Foundation,
an organisation set up by former Islamist extremists to counter radicalism
by making speeches to young British Muslims about how they had been duped
into embracing hatred of the West.
Such counter-radicalisation efforts will help lower the
pool of potential recruits for al-Qaeda – the only way the organisation
can be defeated in the long term. But the reality facing British
counterterrorism officials, such as Detective Inspector Robert Lambert,
the recently departed head of the Metropolitan Police’s Muslim Contact
Unit, is that "al-Qaeda values dozens of recruits more than hundreds of
supporters". In order to target the most radical extremists the
Metropolitan Police have backed the efforts of a Muslim community group,
the Active Change Foundation, based around a gym in Walthamstow run by
Hanif and Imtiaz Qadir, two brothers of Kashmiri descent.
Hanif Qadir, now 42, revealed to us that he himself was
recruited by al-Qaeda after the US overthrow of the Taliban in
Afghanistan. Jihadist recruiters in East London, no doubt noting wealth,
sought out Qadir, who had earned enough money running a car repair shop to
buy a Rolls-Royce and live in some style, and recounted lurid tales of
American brutality in Afghanistan. "The guy who handled me was a Syrian
called Abu Sufiyan… I’m sure he was from al-Qaeda," recalls Qadir. "He was
good at telling you what you wanted to hear… he touched all my emotional
buttons, like the fact I’ve always wanted to help others."
Qadir agreed to join. He drew up a will and in December
2002 bought a first-class ticket to Pakistan. But, as the truck he was in
crossed the dirt roads into Afghanistan, a chance occurrence changed his
life: a truck carrying wounded fighters approached them from the other
direction, among them a young Punjabi boy whose white robes were stained
with blood. "These are evil people," another of the wounded shouted. "We
came here to fight jihad but they are just using us as cannon fodder."
Qadir’s truckload of wannabe jihadists made a U-turn. "That kid, he was
like an angel. He kicked me back into reality," he recalls. When Qadir
landed back in the UK he was so angry at having been manipulated that he
wanted to find his recruiters and confront them. He never found
them but became determined to stop others like him from being recruited.
In 2004 he and his brother opened the gym and community centre in
Walthamstow. Soon hundreds of young Muslims were attending.
The scale of the challenge was quickly clear. Soon after
the centre opened he got wind that pro-al-Qaeda militants were secretly
booking rooms there for their meetings. Worse, in the summer of 2006
several of those arrested in connection with the al-Qaeda airlines plot,
including alleged ringleader Abdullah Ahmed Ali, were found to have
attended his gym. But, rather than shutting the radicals out, Qadir
continued to allow them to meet. "Sometimes our youngsters get into
debates with these people, for example on jihad, and make them look
ridiculous in front of their followers," he says. Qadir believes his
approach is finally starting to pay off: "The extremists are burning out:
the number of radicals in Walthamstow is diminishing, not growing."
Qadir, determined to do his part to prevent all innocent
loss of life, is now extending his de-radicalisation drive to the rest of
London. "We are going to mirror our adversaries’ tactics by identifying
and recruiting vulnerable youngsters," he told us last week, "but we are
going to channel their desire to help their fellow Muslims in a positive
direction by involving them in local community projects, for example."
Not far down the road from Walthamstow is the Finsbury
Park mosque, dominated by the notorious hook-handed cleric, Abu Hamza al-Masri,
from the late 1990s until it was shut down by police in 2003. Abu Hamza’s
followers continued to have a strong presence in the area. But in February
2005 police helped broker a deal for the mosque to reopen under the
leadership of the local chapter of the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB),
a Muslim Brotherhood group. The Brotherhood is the most powerful Islamist
group in the Arab world, with chapters throughout Europe and North
America. It has long opposed al-Qaeda’s jihad, a stance that so angered
al-Zawahiri that he published a book, The Bitter Harvest,
condemning the organisation in 1991.
No sooner had the moderates gained control of the mosque
than they were confronted by Abu Hamza’s angry followers, led by the
pugnacious Atilla Ahmet who calls himself "the number one al-Qaeda in
Europe" and who, in October, pled guilty to providing British Muslims with
terrorist training. "They brought sticks and knives with them," recalls
Kamal El-Helbawy, spokesman for the new trustees of the mosque.
Undeterred, a few days later Helbawy gave the first Friday
sermon, explaining that this was a new start for the mosque and stressing
how important it was for Muslims to live in harmony with their neighbours.
Detective Inspector Lambert, the Metropolitan Police officer who helped
broker the takeover, says that because of its social welfare work and its
track record supporting the Palestinian cause the MAB has "big street cred
in the area and [has] made an impact on Abu Hamza’s young followers".
Salman al-Oudah, the Saudi preacher, spoke at the reopened
mosque in 2006, as has Abdullah Anas, an Algerian former mujahideen
fighter based in London who has been a critic of al-Qaeda for years. Anas
worked with bin Laden in Pakistan during the 1980s, fought in Afghanistan
for almost a decade against the communists and married the daughter of a
Palestinian cleric who is still lionised as the spiritual godfather of the
jihadist movement, the most radical wing of which would morph into al-Qaeda.
Anas told us that his critiques of al-Qaeda were not well received in 2003
but that "in the last two or three years there has been a change in
opinion", citing the Madrid and London bombings as turning points. In 2006
Anas went public with his criticisms of al-Qaeda in an interview with
Asharq Alawsat, one of the leading newspapers in the Arab world,
criticising the London subway bombings as "criminal deeds… prohibited by
Shariah".
In December, al-Qaeda’s campaign of violence reached new
depths in the eyes of many Muslims, with a plot to launch attacks in Saudi
Arabia while millions were gathered for the Haj. Saudi security services
arrested 28 al-Qaeda militants in Mecca, Medina and Riyadh, whose targets
allegedly included religious leaders critical of al-Qaeda, among them the
Saudi grand mufti, Sheikh Abdul Aziz al-Sheikh, who responded to the plot
by ruling that al-Qaeda operatives should be punished by execution,
crucifixion or exile. Plotting such attacks during the Haj could not have
been more counterproductive to al-Qaeda’s cause, says Anas, who was making
the pilgrimage to Mecca himself. "People over there… were very angry. The
feeling was, how was it possible for Muslims to do that? I still can’t
quite believe it myself. The mood was one of shock, real shock."
Is al-Qaeda going to dissipate as a result of the
criticism from its former mentors and allies? Despite the recent internal
criticism, probably not in the short term. Al-Qaeda, on the verge of
defeat in 2002, has regrouped and is now able to launch significant
terrorist operations in Europe. And last summer, US intelligence agencies
judged that it had "regenerated its [US] Homeland attack capability" in
Pakistan’s tribal areas. Since then al-Qaeda and the Taliban have only
entrenched their position further, launching a record number of suicide
attacks in Pakistan in the past year. Afghanistan, Algeria and Iraq also
saw record numbers of suicide attacks in 2007 (though the group’s
capabilities have deteriorated in Iraq of late). Meanwhile, al-Qaeda is
still able to find recruits in the West. In November, Jonathan Evans, the
head of MI5, said that record numbers of UK residents are now supportive
of the group, with around 2,000 posing a "direct threat to national
security and public safety".
However, encoded in the DNA of apocalyptic jihadist groups
such as al-Qaeda are the seeds of their own long-term destruction: their
victims are often Muslim civilians; they don’t offer a positive vision of
the future (but rather the prospect of Taliban-style regimes from Morocco
to Indonesia); they keep expanding their list of enemies, including any
Muslim who doesn’t share their precise world view; and they seem incapable
of becoming politically successful because their ideology prevents them
from making the real-world compromises that would allow them to engage in
genuine politics.
Which means that the repudiation of al-Qaeda’s leaders by
its former religious, military and political guides will help hasten the
implosion of the jihadist terrorist movement. As Churchill remarked after
the battle of El Alamein in 1942, which he saw as turning the tide in the
Second World War, "This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of
the end. But it is perhaps the end of the beginning."
Noman Benotman, bin Laden’s Libyan former companion in
arms, assesses that al-Qaeda’s recent resurgence, which he says has been
fuelled by the Iraq war, will not last. "There may be a wave of violence
right now but… in five years al-Qaeda will be more isolated than ever. No
one will give a toss about them."
The scholars and fighters now criticising al-Qaeda, in
concert with mainstream Muslim leaders, have created a powerful coalition
countering the organisation’s ideology. According to Pew polls, support
for al-Qaeda has been dropping around the Muslim world in recent years.
The numbers supporting suicide bombings in Indonesia, Lebanon and
Bangladesh, for instance, have dropped by half or more in the past five
years. In Saudi Arabia, only 10 per cent now have a favourable view of al-Qaeda,
according to a December poll by Terror Free Tomorrow, a Washington-based
think tank. Following a wave of suicide attacks in Pakistan in the past
year, support for suicide operations among Pakistanis has dropped to nine
per cent (it was 33 per cent five years ago) while favourable views of bin
Laden in the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan, around where he is
believed to be hiding, have plummeted to four per cent from 70 per cent in
August 2007.
Unsurprisingly, al-Qaeda’s leaders have been thrown on the
defensive. In December, bin Laden released a tape which stressed that "the
Muslim victims who fall during the operations against the infidel
crusaders… are not the intended targets". Bin Laden warned the former
mujahideen now turning on al-Qaeda that, whatever their track records as
jihadists, they had now committed one of the "nullifiers of Islam", which
is helping the "infidels against the Muslims".
Kamal El-Helbawy, the Muslim Brotherhood leader who helped
bring in moderates at the Finsbury Park mosque in London, believes that
al-Qaeda’s days may be numbered: "No government, no police force, is
achieving what these [religious] scholars are achieving. To defeat
terrorism, to convince the radicals… you have to persuade them that theirs
is not the path to paradise."