Militants prey on London mosque for new recruits

A converted Victorian house in central Brixton bears a small sign above the door, with the inscription: "In the name of Allah, most gracious, most merciful."

The double-bay fronted house is a well-known stopping point for young Muslim men newly released from prison and looking for help during their first days of freedom. It has an unusually young and multicultural membership, with an average age of 30 and a high proportion of converts, many of them ex-convicts.

The presence of so many members new to Islam and struggling to find the version with which they feel happiest has made it an attractive recruiting ground for extremists. The mosque preaches an orthodox form of Islam, which rejects violence against non-believers, says its chairman, Abdul Haqq Baker.

But members of the mosque say extremists affiliated to groups such as those of Abu Qatada, based in west London, and Abu Hamza, of the Finsbury Park mosque, often launch leafleting campaigns in Brixton and encourage members to attend their own study groups in the area.

Such Muslims scorn the practices at Brixton as being a "passive" form of the religion that fails to challenge the west and so lets down the Islamic world.

Mr Baker, a Londoner who became chairman of the mosque eight years ago, four years after he became a Muslim, says their message is attractive to disaffected, frustrated young men who have despaired of Britain's official Muslim leaders.

He warns that, in their view, the Muslim Council of Great Britain, the Muslim parliament, are completely out of touch and perceived as irrelevant, with the result that many young believers and new recruits go to the other extreme.

Mr Baker said the Brixton mosque was offering a form of Islam that could not be seen to be in thrall to the West but rejected the interpretation of jihad, or holy war, preached by the extremists.

They would approach members, telling them that Brixton's interpretation of jihad was wrong because its leaders were British and could not read the Koran in Arabic, so failed to understand its original meaning.

Brixton's approach has not always been successful, as Mr Moussaoui and Mr Reid appear to demonstrate, but Mr Baker said most of his mosque's new recruits stayed with his community.

There has, though, been a bitter feud between the Brixton mosque and the more extreme Islamic centres in London.

A spokesman for Abu Hamza found it "very funny" a bomber appeared to have come from the Brixton mosque, which would be the last to condone a terrorist attack.

The mosque and Mr Baker himself have received threats, including one that promised to break both his legs shortly after he took over as chairman.

"If this place gets bombed, it will not be by extreme non-Muslims, it will be by extreme Muslims," he said.