Ideas never die. At no point does this age old maxim seem more relevant than in the age of the Internet where they will literally live on in the panoply of media that we now have around us to communicate. The difficulty in eradicating such ideas was made visible this past month in the incarceration in the UK of Mohammed Ahad and Mohammed Kamali, two men found guilty of being webmasters for Abdullah el Faisal’s Authentic Tauheed online empire. But while both the webmasters and the preacher are now sitting in jail, until this past month the website lived on, with Faisal’s words of ‘entering the lizard hole’ providing the world with a constant reminder of his brutal perspectives. Now that it is down, Faisal’s words may be a little harder to find, but some quick digging shows how they live on scattered around the web.
Unlike most of the other radical preachers from Londonistan, it was Faisal’s words that got him incarcerated. On 14 December 2001, police in Dorset pulled over a car driven by Richard Chinyoka. A convert, Chinyoka was a brutal and manipulative misogynist – raping women, forcibly converting some, burning their feet, beating them and then rubbing salt in their wounds, and generally being a very nasty piece of work. As police went through his belongings, they found a bunch of cassette tapes (still a favoured medium at the time!) which included presentations by Abdullah el Faisal. Full of fire and brimstone the speeches advocated murder, robbery and stirred racial hatred. Shocked by what they heard, police investigated further and found similar cassettes widely available in some religious shops in London. This led to his arrest and eventual conviction on charges of stirring up racial hatred and inciting murder. Legislation, it should be added, that dated back to the 1860s.
It did not silence him, however, and his cassettes, and increasingly online versions of them, continued to live on. Either in copied CDs or cassettes, or shared around as MP3 files online. The July 7 bombers in the UK were fans, having heard him in person they listened to his recordings as they went around Pakistan preparing for their attack. One of the men accused of being a planner of the Airlines plot in 2006 was found to have in his spartan accommodation in Barking very little aside from jihadi material (in Arabic which he did not understand, but enjoyed the images) and MP3s of Abdullah el Faisal’s sermons. At the time Faisal was in jail and by the time of the trial against the airline plotters he had been released and sent to Jamaica.
In 2008 his website Authentic Tauheed started up, though for the first few years it appeared to largely be a repository for others’ work – including Anwar al Awlaki (a man who he had cast takfeer on in the past), and other prominent jihadists. It took until January 2011 for him to start posting his own material on there, including live sermons he was giving. He was, however, already using the site as a center point for his online PalTalk speeches and contacts with his radical flock around the world. He was also using the site as a way to host online conferences which brought together prominent al Muhajiroun and other extremists to speak alongside him.
The point at which he started to delegate responsibilities to others to run the site is unclear, but by the mid-2010s his webmasters were being arrested in the United States. Their role, as was shown in some detail during the recently concluded case in the UK, was to act as transcribers, connectors and filters of Faisal’s speeches and presentations. They would help manage the platforms he was using to communicate with his global flock and help get his ideas out in a form that others could read, listen to and disseminate.
This role stretched between the online and offline world, but it meant that for some time Abduallah el Faisal, by some counts one of the most derided of the Londonistani preachers, was the most followed. While the others were incarcerated or killed, Faisal’s new and old sermons and recordings continued to show up online. While many extremists were motivated by the ease with which they could access him online, once he was removed or silenced, it did little to stop his appeal. His fanatical screeds would continue to inspire and showed up repeatedly amongst the possessions of committed jihadists fighting alongside either Islamic State or al Qaeda. His arrest, his site’s removal and his webmasters’ incarceration may slow down the rate of dissemination, but his speeches, videos and tapes can still be found online, and will likely continue to feature on the playlists of violent extremists for a long time to come.