A year before [Umar] Abdulmutallab arrived, Maher was at the Regent’s Park Mosque on a very important night in the Muslim calendar ”” the night Muslims believe the Quran was revealed. He remembers that the mosque was packed that evening. Worshippers were flowing out of the mosque and into the courtyard.
It happened to be the same night that U.S. forces launched the Fallujah offensive in Iraq. It was 2004. As the crowd grew, members of Maher’s group, Hizb ut-Tahrir, began making fiery, anti-American speeches.
“There was a lot of anger, a lot of chanting and sloganing, and essentially a lot of recruiting, as well,” Maher says. “On an event like that, what you would do is you would have your speakers giving their talks, but the crowd would be filled with your members. They would be speaking to other people assessing who is there to just listen but doesn’t agree, and those who are listening and getting increasingly interested.”
That is the initial step in the recruiting process: identifying possible recruits. They would be people who are joining in the chanting; people who seem angry.
Read or listen to it all.
NPR–Wooing Recruits To Radical Islam Like 'Dating'
A year before [Umar] Abdulmutallab arrived, Maher was at the Regent’s Park Mosque on a very important night in the Muslim calendar ”” the night Muslims believe the Quran was revealed. He remembers that the mosque was packed that evening. Worshippers were flowing out of the mosque and into the courtyard.
It happened to be the same night that U.S. forces launched the Fallujah offensive in Iraq. It was 2004. As the crowd grew, members of Maher’s group, Hizb ut-Tahrir, began making fiery, anti-American speeches.
“There was a lot of anger, a lot of chanting and sloganing, and essentially a lot of recruiting, as well,” Maher says. “On an event like that, what you would do is you would have your speakers giving their talks, but the crowd would be filled with your members. They would be speaking to other people assessing who is there to just listen but doesn’t agree, and those who are listening and getting increasingly interested.”
That is the initial step in the recruiting process: identifying possible recruits. They would be people who are joining in the chanting; people who seem angry.
Read or listen to it all.