In 1996, Richard Reid, a petty criminal recently released from prison, found his way to an unassuming mosque in the rough-edged south London neighborhood of Brixton. The majority of worshippers were converts to Islam: some of them ex-convicts who had taken up the faith in prison, some immigrants. Most of the women wore the full niqab and abaya, showing only their eyes in accordance with the mosque's strictly conservative bent.
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The mosque's demographics fit Reid, who had grown up in a mixed-race suburban London household and converted to Islam while in prison. They also suited a fellow Brixton worshipper Reid might or might not have met: Zacarias Moussaoui, a French-born son of Moroccan immigrants who had attended university in London. Neither man stayed long. Moussaoui was kicked out in 1997 for his aggressively extremist views, and Reid drifted away the following year. Both found their way first into terrorist training camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and then, in 2001, into the headlines. Moussaoui, al Qaeda's so-called 20th hijacker, was arrested in the United States and later charged with playing a role in the 9/11 plot; Reid was captured several months later for attempting to blow up a transatlantic flight with a bomb hidden in his shoe.
Although Brixton Mosque was scrupulously anti-violence, Britons began to worry that the mosque had become, in the words of Time magazine, "an ideal hunting ground for terrorist talent spotters." But some of Britain's front-line experts on Islamist radicalism soon came to believe that this cloud hanging over the mosque had a silver lining -- that the same fundamentalist Muslim community that had been a departure point for Britain's most notorious terrorists could be used to persuade other alienated young Muslim men not to make the same decision. "The Brixton Mosque is not a center of violent extremism -- it is a center of resistance to violent extremism," says Robert Lambert, a former counterterrorism operative with London's Metropolitan Police Service.
Nearly a decade after 9/11, this thinking has evolved into one of Britain's most promising counterterrorism strategies -- and perhaps its most controversial. The government is, in effect, betting that the ideology that so many Islamist radicals claim to believe in can be employed to keep them from becoming terrorists in the first place.
The man at the center of this idea is Abdul Haqq Baker, a Londoner who converted to Islam as a young man and served as Brixton Mosque's chairman for 15 years. Born Anthony Baker to Nigerian and Guyanese parents, he adopted a Muslim name when he embraced Salafism, the fundamentalist branch of Sunni Islam preached at the Brixton Mosque. Hard-line mosques like Brixton have often been the last stop before radicalism for people like Moussaoui and Reid. But mosques generally don't know what to do with such young men, especially if they stop short of openly advocating violence. The usual response is to expel them. But once they're out the door, they may be gone for good.
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