Was Westminster University a breeding ground for extremism?
Joe Shute and Helen Chandler-Wilde report on how radical views were able to flourish on British soil
Languishing in a Syrian jail, Zakariyya Elogbani took a moment to consider his predecessors at his alma mater, London’s Westminster University. “They kind of opened the way,” he said in a BBC interview last week, claiming that he was one of at least seven students and ex-students from Westminster to have joined Isil.
Those alumni include Mohammed Emwazi, the Isil executioner known as “Jihadi John”, who studied information systems at the university and left for Syria in 2013; Akram Sabah, a recruitment consultant who graduated in 2011 with a degree in biomedical sciences; and Qasim Abukar, a hardened jihadist who had previously fought for Islamist group Al-Shabaab before studying at the university in 2012 – despite MI5 warning that allowing contact with other students would increase the risk of him engaging in terrorismrelated activity. People close to Elogbani have claimed that Abukar was one of the people involved in radicalising him.
Elogbani, who grew up in east London, abandoned his degree in business management to travel to Syria in 2014 with Ishak Mostefaoui, a fellow Westminster student. He has claimed that three other students left at around the same time, all of whom have since been killed. As for Elogbani, he was captured by Kurdish forces nine months ago and is now confined to a wheelchair, his legs having been blown off in an airstrike.
“Obviously we came here intending to fight,” he told the BBC. “That’s the honest truth. But I don’t think it was a love for blood.”
So how can this pattern of former Westminster attendees turned Isil fighters be explained?
It is not the first time that former students of the university – spread across four London campuses
– have been highlighted for
harbouring extremist views. When it emerged in 2015, that Emwazi had studied there, the university commissioned an independent report from a four-strong panel, including Lord Kenneth Morgan and Fiyaz Mughal – a former adviser to Nick Clegg, and director of an organisation called Faith Matters.
Speaking to The Telegraph,
Mughal criticised Westminster for what he sees as its lack of a response to his report, which raised significant concerns over hardline ultraconservative views on campus, something he believes is an ongoing problem across British universities.
“For me it should have been the start of an introspective process and a systems check,” he says, adding he has seen no evidence that the report was more than a “box-ticking exercise”.
Jamie Wareham was at Westminster from 2011-14. As a student journalist and member of its LGBT society, he regularly crossed paths with its Islamic Society (Isoc). He recalls members of Isoc and another group who called themselves “The Global Ideas Society” hanging around the Cavendish campus (in London’s Fitzrovia) and Regent Street campus – and in particular the brooding presence of the bearded, heavy-set Elogbani.
“I followed a lot of the ultraconservative Islamic meetings,” Wareham recalls. “He was always there and he never spoke to me; he was always silent. He would just smile, shrug his shoulders and walk off. I was very skinny and small, I remember standing next to him; he was tall, large and had this smile of deceit.”
While Wareham says that some Isoc members privately reached out to him, in an attempt to build bridges between groups on campus, the hardcore element prevailed. During meetings, Wareham recalls regular discussion of the punishments that should be meted out to “apostates and homosexuals”.
“I felt somewhat scared in that room when they said it was not OK to be homosexual,” he says.
At the time, Dr Alexandra Stein, a social psychologist specialising in extremism and the author of Terror, Love and Brainwashing, worked as a visiting lecturer, based on the Regent Street campus. She arrived in 2008 from the University of Minnesota, where she had lectured on the psychology of cults. In her 20s, she had been a member of a political cult in the US, before breaking out and embarking on an academic career.
At Westminster, she noticed posters around campus under the branding of Isoc and the Global Ideas Society. Around the same time, young women in her seminar groups approached her, claiming they were being bullied and intimidated in the lavatories by fellow students; told to “cover their hair”.
“They were clearly saying there’s a problem,” she recalls.
As well as reporting her concerns to departmental seniors, Dr Stein started attending the talks. In one, “Does God Exist?”, she says Isoc members on the door told her they were “encouraging women to sit at the back” (a request she ignored), while burly young men had been posted to stand in intimidating fashion by the exits.
During the debate, attended by up to 100 students, she recalls “a charismatic, handsome young Asian guy who knew how to deliver a speech ... holding up his mobile phone and saying, ‘I’ll prove to you the existence of God with this phone’. It was captivating. Almost hypnotic.” When she looked him up afterwards, she found he was affiliated with Hizb utTahrir, the extremist Islamic group.
In 2010, Dr Stein made several attempts to meet with the then dean of social sciences to raise her concerns and, in correspondence seen by
The Telegraph, proposed to launch a series of educational workshops designed to respond to “campus-based extremist recruitment”. She feels her suggestions were ignored.
“They adopted the ostrich approach: put your head in the sand and ignore it, and this will go away,” she says.
“I felt like a lone voice. There was a wall of silence that greeted me whenever I tried to raise this stuff.”
Dr Stein eventually launched her own education event, inviting Maajid Nawaz, the founder of Quilliam, the counter-extremist think tank, to speak. At the end of the lecture, she recalls a group of 10 or so young men lining up to remonstrate with him, before forming two rows and kneeling down to pray.
“It was obviously not a religious thing, but a political statement to all of us there,” she says.
The 2015 report into Westminster highlighted a number of concerns among its student body, 40 per cent of whom were Muslim. While it did not go as far as calling it a “breeding ground for extremism” (as was previously claimed), it did note the extent to which ultraconservative views had flourished unchecked.
Members of the Islamic Society acted as “apostles of a self-contained faith, concerned very largely with matters of religious orthodoxy and perceived heresy”, it claimed, while noting university officials tacitly tolerated a “sometimes hostile or intimidatory” attitude towards women on the campus, which it described as “totally unacceptable”.
In a statement released this week, the university “absolutely refutes” the claims that the concerns raised in the report were ignored, stressing it has “a strong pastoral and interfaith focus providing care and support” to its 20,000 students from more than 150 countries. “Where the panel did highlight points for action, the university took steps to address these in line with its absolute priority to safeguard its community,” a spokesperson said.
According to Mughal, universities across Britain have now grown savvier at banning more controversial speakers from campus, but he says there remains an issue of those propagating extremist viewpoints remaining unchallenged.
“In my opinion these guys should not be allowed anywhere near young minds,” he says. Such blinkered viewpoints remain all too common on campus, he adds. And every year brings a fresh wave, whom the terrorists already have in their sights.
As Zakariyya Elogbani said last week: “It’s a gang. A lot of people are tricked. Don’t fall into the same trick.”
‘In my opinion these guys should not be allowed anywhere near young minds’