What Makes Youths Volunteer?

By Helen Gibson

To British lawyer Anjem Choudary, 40, a British passport means very little. For a true Muslim, he says, "a British passport is no more than a travel document." Abu Yahya, 26, a Londoner and veteran of military training camps in Kashmir and Afghanistan, agrees: "Our allegiance is solely to Allah and his messenger, not to the Queen and country. Nationality...means nothing."

Choudary and Yahya belong to the extremist Islamic group al-Muhajiroun, and though they speak for only a tiny fraction of Britain's 2 million Muslims, their views received grim publicity last week with the news that three British-born Muslims had been killed in Kabul--allegedly in a U.S. bombing raid on a Taliban compound--after volunteering for the jihad.

The deaths of the three young men shocked their families. In Crawley, an industrial town 33 miles south of London, the mother of Yasir Khan, 28, insisted her son had gone to Pakistan for humanitarian work. In Luton, 34 miles north of London, the parents of computer-engineering student Afzal Munir and taxi driver Aftab Manzoor, both 25, weren't aware the two had joined up. Both lived with their parents in modest suburban houses in this quiet town that is home to 22,000 Muslims.

Many Muslims in Britain, however, are loudly anti-American and highly critical of the bombing in Afghanistan. Al-Muhajiroun is capitalizing on this anger. The group had been saying for weeks that Britons were flocking to the bin Laden cause, much as Jewish youths went to Tel Aviv in 1967 to fight in the Arab-Israeli war. In Lahore, Pakistan, last week a spokesman--British university graduate Abu Ibrahim--put the numbers at between 600 and 700. British authorities, however, speculated that volunteers probably amounted to a few dozen. Conservative peer Norman Tebbit suggested that it would be treason for British citizens to take up arms against Anglo-American forces. Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon warned that those who did fight for the Taliban might face prosecution should they return.

The jihad volunteers are mostly from first-generation British families and feel oppressed by the stresses of biculturalism, suggests Mounir Daymi, executive director of Britain's Muslim Students Society. This alienation is felt most deeply in the poorer communities. That's where you will find "some people who want the clash of civilizations to happen," Daymi says. Adam Armstrong, 35, a Luton teacher who converted to Islam in 1989 because he felt "something was missing" in his life, endorses that view. The volunteers, however few, are "devout Muslims, often university students," he says, the sort of idealists who used to go to Chechnya and now go to Afghanistan. Asked why mostly Britons seem to have volunteered so far, he said that Muslims are better organized in Britain, often have families in Pakistan or Kashmir and enjoy greater freedom of movement. There are no national identity cards, giving authorities less knowledge of their whereabouts.

Most British Muslims reject al-Muhajiroun's militant campaigning; fellow Muslims in Luton have been giving the hard-liners a rough time. Al-Muhajiroun leaflets have been banned from Luton's Central Mosque, and last week the local al-Muhajiroun leader, known simply as Shahed, was attacked in the street after he staged a noisy demonstration in support of the Taliban. Although Daymi of the Muslim Students Society rejects al-Muhajiroun's message, he does believe that now is the time for jihad--but not the kind others are pursuing. "In these days of war, our jihad is to show the peaceful face of Islam," he says. "Retaliation and revenge will just lead to more retaliation and revenge. You can defend your religion peacefully." That may be the kind of jihad worth joining.

--By Helen Gibson. With reporting by Jeff Chu/Birmingham and Ghulam Hasnain/Karachi

With reporting by Jeff Chu/Birmingham and Ghulam Hasnain/Karachi