36 Britain The EconomistSeptember 21st 2019
S
ince thefirst wave of Bangladeshi mi-
grants arrived in Britain in the 1970s,
foreign-born preachers have held sway in
the community. For a while the most visi-
ble consequence to outsiders was when
Bangladeshi restaurants stopped selling al-
cohol, after conservative clerics such as
Delwar Hossain Sayeedi came to preach
temperance to the diaspora in the 1990s
(some curry houses found a theological
loophole in the form of “bring your own
booze”). Recent years have seen more seri-
ous worries about the influence of foreign
extremists. In February Shamima Begum,
an east-London schoolgirl, was stripped of
her British citizenship after running away
to join Islamic State (is) in Syria.
Yet in Dhaka, amid a rising tempo of ter-
rorist attacks, officials are asking who is
radicalising whom. Bangladesh’s govern-
ment often blames outsiders for its pro-
blem with radical Islam. But here it has a
point. British citizens have been implicat-
ed in the planning, funding and promotion
of terrorism in Bangladesh, to the alarm of
the country’s security services. “We do not
know what is driving radicalisation in Brit-
ain,” says a senior officer in Bangladesh’s
Counter-Terrorism Intelligence Bureau,
“but it is contaminating our society.”
Britain’s exporting of radical Islam goes
back a long way. Syed Golam Maula, the
founder of the Bangladeshi chapter of
Hizb-ut-Tahrir, an Islamist movement that
is banned in Bangladesh but not in Britain,
was introduced to the organisation while
studying in London in the early 1990s. In
2015 Sheikh Hasina Wajed, the prime min-
ister, complained to her opposite number,
David Cameron, that British citizens were
promoting radicalism in her country. Her
comments came after religious extremists
targeted gay activists, atheist bloggers and
religious minorities. Touhidur Rahman, a
Briton of Bangladeshi origin, was accused
of (but never charged with) planning the
murder of two secular bloggers.
Earlier this year Bangladeshi police ar-
rested Rizwan Haroon, who had previously
lived in Britain, on suspicion of using a
school in Dhaka to recruit youngsters to is.
He is awaiting trial. According to America’s
fbi, Siful Haque Sujan, a Bangladeshi-born
British citizen believed to have been killed
in Syria in 2015, was a leading figure in is
who used eBay to send money to operatives
in Britain and America. An American mili-
tary report found that he had set up shellcompanies in Bangladesh, Britain and
Spain to move funds and drones on behalf
of the terrorist organisation.
Britons are by no means the only diffi-
cult part of the Bangladeshi diaspora. One
of the perpetrators of a deadly attack in
2016 on the Holey Artisan Bakery in Dhaka
was Canadian. But intelligence agencies
are particularly interested in Britain,
whose 600,000 people of Bangladeshi ori-
gin make up the largest Western chunk of
the diaspora. Some half a billion dollars in
remittances are sent to Bangladesh from
Britain each year, according to the World
Bank, more than from any other Western
country (though much less than from the
Gulf states, where many Bangladeshis toil).
Cash from Green Crescent, a now-de-
funct British charity, was connected by
Bangladeshi security services to the Holey
Bakery attack. In 2009 Bangladeshi forces
raided a madrassa funded by Green Cres-
cent and found weapons and extremist lit-
erature. They claim the charity’s British
founder, Faisal Mostafa, has links to Ja-
maat-ul-Mujahideen, a terrorist outfit,
which he denies. He has twice been acquit-
ted of terrorism offences in Britain. “Green
Crescent is likely just the tip of the iceberg,”
says Rakib Ehsan of the Henry Jackson
Society, a think-tank. “We have no way of
tracing even a fraction of the charitablefunds that go from the ukto Bangladesh.”
The home and away communities are
“surprisingly linked...much more so than
other diaspora communities,” says Kamal-
deep Bhui, an extremism expert at Queen
Mary University of London. Most British-
Bangladeshis come from a single region,
Sylhet, and 70% live in London, so ties are
strong. This has fostered the continuity of
cultural norms and for a long time “shield-
ed” Bangladeshis from extremist ideas, ar-
gues Tahir Abbas of Leiden University.
“British Bangladeshis weren’t so much on
the map in terms of these issues—until Is-
lamic State,” he says. Perhaps 100 of the 800
or so Britons who have joined isare of Ban-
gladeshi origin. Bangladeshis are dispro-
portionately represented on Britain’s terro-
rist watch-list, according to officials in
both countries. Last year one, Naa’imur
Rahman, was convicted of plotting to kill
the then prime minister, Theresa May.Terror without borders
Ali Riaz of Illinois State University argues
that the government’s response to 9/11
lumped together all Muslims, making
many identify more with their religion
than their nationality or ethnic origin. This
has made them vulnerable to the univer-
salist messages of groups like is. Disillu-
sioned youngsters “try to reclaim elements
of their past, of their country of origin—re-
ligion can be the easiest thing to grab hold
of,” says Mr Bhui. Some become more or-
thodox than their parents. Orthodoxy is
not the same as extremism, he notes, “but
extremist groups can hide easily in ortho-
doxy.” It does not help that Bangladeshis
are the poorest ethnic group in Britain.
In Dhaka, keeping tabs on happenings
in Tower Hamlets is hard. Some suspects
are wanted in Bangladesh but operate free-
ly in Britain, a source of frustration for Ban-
gladeshi intelligence services. Despite
what counter-terrorism chiefs describe as
a high level of co-operation, the flow of in-
formation is hindered by the two intelli-
gence services’ very different cultures.
Bangladeshi spooks freely haul people in
for questioning, tap phones and tail suspi-
cious folk (including Economistcorrespon-
dents). Torture is common; extra-judicial
killing is neither unusual nor even much
covered up. This reduces Britain’s willing-
ness to share information. “We respect the
cultures of the countries we work with and
we limit our expectations,” says the Ban-
gladeshi counter-terrorism officer.
The ideas, money and recruitment es-
sential to extremism no longer move neat-
ly from one country another, notes Mr Riaz,
but in a “confusing whirlwind”. The chal-
lenge facing British and Bangladeshi intel-
ligence is far more complex than when
preachers such as Mr Sayeedi, who is now
behind bars in Bangladesh, were banishing
booze from east London’s curry houses. 7DHAKA
Britain has long worried about importing extremism. Now it exports it tooIslamist extremismRadicalisation in reverse
A new line of inquiry