He does not have a metal hook for a hand. Nor does he have a glass eye. Nor, even, does he have a long beard.
In fact, few people could cut a more completely different figure from that of Abu Hamza, but these are the shoes that Ahmed Mohamed Saad has to fill as Imam of Finsbury Park Mosque since late 2006.
Aged only 29, Sheikh Saad is fresh-faced and full of optimism.
And his optimism is well founded. He has just completed his first year as leader of the most notorious mosque in Britain, from whose pulpit the infamous Abu Hamza al-Masri spat his vitriol and allegedly turned dozens of young men onto a path to terrorism.
“Taking over such a notorious mosque was not easy,” says Sheikh Saad. “Abu Hamza was only here for a few years but he made a big fuss. In fact, I think it was part of the challenge - I could use the bad name of the mosque and establish a change.”
It is a pivotal time to be in charge of the most notorious mosque in the country.
Events in the last six months have cast an ever-more probing spotlight on the role of Islam in Britain. Terror trials abound in the courts, extremism proliferates on the internet, British troops remain in Iraq, and even the Archbishop of Canterbury has recommended implementing Sharia law in the UK.
Home Secretary Jacqui Smith recently spoke out against extremism on the internet, and vowed to tackle it in the same way as police currently target online paedophilia. Sheikh Saad agrees that young Muslims need protecting from these radical voices online.
“The internet is very, very dangerous,” he explains. “It is like an open space. An extremist with no real knowledge [of Islam] can spit whatever is in his mind and put it on the internet. For advice you cannot just go to the internet unless you know from a scholar or someone who specialises in this area. When your car breaks down, you don’t just search the internet, you go to a mechanic.”
But the danger for young Muslims comes not only from extremist voices within Islam, but also from a stereotyping of Islam on the internet.
When researching a presentation for the local council, Sheikh Saad typed the word ‘Islam’ into Google: “The first picture that came to me was of Osama Bin Laden. So I actually took the picture and put it in my presentation and said this is what you get when you put the word Islam into Google. It is really dangerous.”
As leader of so infamous a mosque, Sheikh Saad has had to get used to battling prejudice.
The mosque gained notoriety as the parish of radical cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri, whose disciples include shoe-bomber Richard Reid and alleged 9/11 hijacker Zacarias Moussaoui.
Police raided the mosque in 2003 to find equipment including chemical warfare protection suits, three blank-firing pistols, a stun gun and CS spray. Even after he was evicted from the mosque, Abu Hamza famously continued his sermons on the street outside, before his arrest under the Terrorism Act in 2004. He is currently awaiting deportation to the US to face charges of kidnapping.
“When I say I’m from Finsbury Park Mosque, people think that’s something dodgy,” explains Sheikh Saad. “I’ve had to change the totally negative image that was widespread about it.”
He blames the creation of this image not only on the “damage” caused by the extremists, but also on the exaggeration in the media, whose cartoon-style demonisation of Abu Hamza and his activities at the Mosque has depicted the North London Central Mosque (as it is now known) as a hotbed of radicalism.
“If you let yourself be haunted by talk of radicalisation you’ll never do anything,” explains Sheikh Saad. “So we get on with our work and let people judge the outcome. We are working against the radicalisation of children.
“What we are doing is very obvious, we are not doing any underground work or secret things. If we aren’t doing it, no-one else will reach out to the youths, because they feel that they have been intimidated by the media, so they need our trust.”
Although it seems that the mosque is winning the fight against extremsim, the battle is far from won. Sheikh Saad’s moderate views have won him enemies as well as friends. The extremist followers of Abu Hamza’s ancien régime still lurk in the shadows of the local community.
“There are so many people who want to dominate this mosque, people from extremist backgrounds who want to make use of the mosque, because there was no permanent English-speaking Imam before I came.”
“Even the local Somali, Algerian and other communities want to dominate the Mosque, but the mosque cannot belong to one group alone, it is for everybody. Keeping everyone happy and belonging to nobody and everybody at the same time is hard.”
He seems unperturbed by this, however. His composure reflects his position as part of Islam’s mainstream, the voice of moderation in a time of extremes.
“I have come across quite a few extremists in my year here. For example I was speaking about the Glasgow events [last summer] and saying it could not be accepted under any name or cover.
“I was attacked verbally by one of the people who stood up in the middle of the speech and started shouting and then left. He said ‘you are pleasing the non-Muslim government. He was only one of a thousand people sitting there. One of the astonishing things was that I got a letter from one of the congregation afterwards thanking me for being strong enough to stand up and speak the truth in front of these people. He even gave me a box of chocolates!”
He stresses the need to be watchful for people who have been seduced by radical ideas.
“When you dig in their past you will find there is always extremism in their background. Some of them are very very dangerous criminals. All of a sudden, because of a change, they have started practising – or what they call practising – so they grow their beard, they grow their hair, they wear a turban or anything and they start acting. But before you start practising the religion, you have to be brought up, to be trained on the morals of religion, rather than just the appearance of religion.”
He blames this lack of understanding on their lack of contact with true Islamic teaching, and says that many people are growing increasingly concerned about struggles abroad.
“When they see that Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine are three Muslim countries that are occupied and they see the atrocities that are happening there, they become frustrated. They are justified in being angry and voicing that anger, but they have to do it in a positive way.”
His mobile phone vibrates on his desk. He has been politely ignoring it for half an hour, but answers it now. It is his wife, waiting downstairs with his young son, who have arrived to go with him to the airport to catch a flight to Cairo.
Ahmed Mohamed Saad was born in Egypt in 1979 and grew up in a religious family. He excelled in his studies and gained a place at Cairo’s al-Azhar University, the oldest educational institution in the world. The al-Azhar University has a worldwide reputation for schooling many of the world’s most venerated Imams, and is known for the moderate stance of its graduates.
After leaving Egypt, Ahmed Saad went on to tour Europe, Asia and America before visiting Britain and falling in love with London.
At the end of 2006, the trustees of the mosque, many of whom came from the Muslim Association of Britain, were keen to make Finsbury Park Mosque a flagship of moderate Islam in Britain, and appointed Ahmed Saad as Imam of the mosque to help “work against radicalisation”.
Part of his role as Imam is to help educate the younger members of his congregation and teach them about the dangers of the radical minority within Islam.
The example of Samina Malik, who was convicted under the Terrorism Act in Jaunary, should act as a potent reminder of the danger of being seduced by extremist propaganda.
She wrote:
Continue to slice back and forth,
You'll feel the knife hit the wind and food pipe,
but don't stop, continue with all your might.
This is an excerpt from a poem called How To Behead, posted on an online forum by Samina Malik under her moniker the ‘Lyrical Terrorist’.
When police raided her flat in 2006, they found manuals on poison-making, terrorist training and firearm maintenance, all of which she had easily downloaded from the internet. On her profile on the social networking website Hi5, she lists her interests as: “Helping the mujaheddin in any way I can”.
But were her words evil, or simply naïve? Radical Islamist groups such as Hizb-ut Tahrir have condemned her trial as an indictment of free speech. However, under the letter of the law, her poems were deemed to be glorifying terrorism, which is now a crime.
“I’ve read her poems online,” says Sheikh Saad, “and I don’t think it is poetry. These are almost words of hallucination, said by a crazy woman at a time of craziness. I don’t know why it was taken in this way, though, or why was she treated so harshly.
“But why did she write things like this? Before you ask people not to judge you, you’ve got to think ‘what am I supposed to say’, ‘how am I supposed to say it’? Will my words be an instigation? I might say something I don’t believe in, but someone else might take me literally and start believing in it.”
Malik’s seduction by extremist propaganda online becomes less surprising when you discover the extent of radical material on the world wide web. The accessiblity of radical information on the net is remarkable, as the briefest investigation reveals.
For instance, a Google search for the term ‘beheadings’ returns over 800,000 results. The majority of these are links to legitimate informational websites, however, three of the first ten results alone offer “beheading videos”, “Real Faces of Death” clips and footage of the execution of Daniel Pearl. One such video on YouTube, showing the killing of an American soldier in Iraq, has been watched 30,000 times since it was posted five months ago.
However, the position of Islam in Western society exists in a delicate balance, following a counter-surge of anti-Islamic propaganda. The infamous drawing by Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard depicting Mohamed with a bomb in his turban sparked worldwide protests. Now, Dutch MP Geert Wilders has posted a video online which says: “Stop Islamisation. Defend our freedom.”
Sheikh Saad, too, has been the target of anti-Islamic voices.
“I received a very offensive caricature, depicting me as the Imam with women around me, describing all Muslims as radicals and polygamists – it was really obscene. On many of the things I get sent, people can’t even spell Imam – it’s addressed to ‘Iman’ or ‘Aman’ or ‘Amam’. It shows the lack of understanding and education there is between Muslims and others.”
Beyond the rows of neatly stacked shoes and traditional wash-basins, the Imam’s office looks out onto the biggest Muslim prayer hall in North London, where bare-footed men kneel in silent prayer in the half-light of a winter’s sunset. Despite his youth, Sheikh Saad commands great respect at the mosque, and this is clear from the respectfully hushed tones in which a member of his congregation addresses him as we leave his office.
“I need to put a barrier between myself and the people, and keep it up at all times,” he explains.
“They should not treat me as a normal person. They have to trust me as their Imam and bring their most intimate secrets to me – they have to feel they are my friends, but must not forget that I am their Imam.
“They cannot joke with me, because if they get behind this barrier, my image as an Imam would be broken and I would no longer be effective. You have to keep people in awe and respect. But with love as well. It is not about fear, but respect.”
He leads us down the stairs where I find my shoes in the foyer. As we stand in the fading sunlight, he talks of his vision for the progression of Islam in the UK.
“The future for Islam in the UK is improving,” he explains, “and I am very optimistic. Muslims have a better chance of doing well here than almost anywhere in the world, possibly even more than in their home countries.
“This country has a lot of freedom and space for Muslims. The only thing they need is to start self-investigation, to analyse the causes of extremism and start a dialogue within Muslim circles.”
Back outside, Ahmed’s wife stands with their son on the pavement, where the fading sunlight casts a long shadow of the mosque’s minaret over the spot where Abu Hamza held his infamous outdoor sermons.
She smiles, safe in the knowledge that her children will grow up in a neighbourhood made safer by her husband in what seems to be a new era for Finsbury Park Mosque.
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