Justice has finally been done. The notorious hate preacher Anjem Choudary has been forced to pay for his record of vicious divisiveness and dangerous extremism, and faces a jail term of up to ten years under anti-terrorism legislation.

It is the sentence he deserves. Choudary is not some foolish clown or irrelevant loudmouth, as some like to pretend. He is a cunning propagandist for a warped but increasingly influential brand of militant Islam.

Through his violent rhetoric and bogus religious justifications for conflict, he is believed by the security authorities to have inspired 15 terror plots and more than 500 British Muslims to join the cause of jihadism in Iraq and Syria.

The notorious hate preacher Anjem Choudary has been forced to pay for his record of vicious divisiveness and dangerous extremism, and faces a jail term of up to ten years

Choudary is a self-styled ‘preacher’ without any recognised credentials in Islam who has done severe damage to Muslim communities by promoting a bleak, negative and brutalised image of the religion.

He might pose as a ‘true Muslim’, but his bigotry causes as much harm to Islam as the racists in the English Defence League or Britain First. He is the ultimate enemy of tolerance and integration and now he is behind bars, Britain might become a more harmonious society.

But I have two hopes about his imprisonment. The first is that he has to serve out his time, a minimum of ten years, given that he has been a potent apologist for some of darkest crimes known to modern humanity.

Lavish

My second hope is that he is kept isolated. There is already too much Islamic radicalisation in our jails, not least because more than 20 per cent of the inmates in high security are Muslims. Allowing Choudary to associate with other prisoners would be a recipe for trouble.

Choudary (pictured) is believed to have inspired at least 110 Britons into committing terrorist acts

But, while his incarceration might be welcome, Choudary’s case also raises profoundly disturbing questions for Muslim communities and the British political establishment.

It cannot be right that he was allowed to roam across the airwaves and in the streets for two decades, spreading his toxic dogma. Why was he not challenged more effectively by other Muslims or the security forces?

Why did parts of the British media present him as a spokesman for mainstream Muslim opinion, given that he neither held any public office nor had any proper theological qualifications?

Why did the British state continue to lavish him with welfare and legal support?

On the issue of Muslim collusion with Choudary, part of the answer lies in the nature of British Islam, which has come to be dominated by the austere Wahhabi-Salafi creed imported from Saudi Arabia.

Barbarous

Heavy funding from the Saudi regime ensures Wahhabism is now the most powerful force in most British mosques, faith schools, Muslim organisations and pressure groups like the Muslim Council of Britain.

The outward symbols of this primitive doctrine, like the burka and the niqab and bushy beards, are increasingly seen as integral to British Islam, though they stem from archaic Arab life and have no theological basis in the Koran.

Yet, tragically, it is the stranglehold of Wahhabism that has enabled figures like Choudary to flourish in our midst.

While most Muslims are decent and peace-loving, characters like Choudary long went unchallenged by Muslim organisations because so many of them shared a similarly doctrinaire outlook, reflected in dress codes, the need for Sharia courts, the rejection of women’s equality, and disdain for liberal values.

Police also think he helped encourage up to 850 fanatics to travel to Syria to fight for ISIS, but Dr Taj Hargey wonders why more Muslims didn't challenge him

Groups like the Muslim Council of Britain do not do nearly enough to root out extreme versions of Islam here because they too have come under the influence of Wahhabism, whose logical progression is to end up with a barbarous theocracy not dissimilar to that of Isis.

Rather than doing more to confront extremists, the MCB acts defensively whenever the all-too-valid link between terrorism and Islam is made. When Eric Pickles, then Communities Secretary, wrote to 1,100 Imams and Muslim leaders after the terror attacks in Paris on the satirical Charlie Hebdo magazine in January last year, saying they should do more to expunge ‘men of hate’, the MCB’s ludicrous response was to accuse ministers of behaving like the far Right. David Cameron, in turn, was robust and correct to say the council had a ‘problem’ with extremism.

Yet there is an entirely different point of view of Islam from that of the MCB — and one to which I subscribe — which holds that Wahhabism is antithetical to the faith, and that Muslims should integrate and embrace Western liberal values.

Groups like the Muslim Council of Britain do not do nearly enough to root out extreme versions of Islam preached by Choudary

There is no foundation in the Koran to prop up Wahhabism’s theological extremism. The concept of Sharia, for example, is just the concoction of Medieval clerics which is now well past its sell-by-date.

Similarly, the idea of the caliphate — so beloved of Choudary and ISIS — is barely mentioned in the Koran, while the term ‘Jihad’ is not a call to war, as the extremists pretend, but a reference to the inner, personal quest for true spirituality.

Nor is there anything anti-Islamic about democracy. Chapter 42 Verse 38 of the Koran stipulates that governments are required to consult the people they rule, the very essence of democracy.

So it is Choudary and his ilk who are the real phonies. They should have been confronted on the basis of their perverted theology. Their pretence to religious expertise is a sham.

But this brings us to the disgraceful role of Britain’s civic institutions in raising Choudary’s profile. Through the irresponsibility of key players in the state and media, he was given the unmerited position as a spokesman for British Islam.

The BBC and other major stations gave him huge amounts of airtime, rarely confronting him with a competent Muslim theologian who could tear apart his pretensions. ‘I have hundreds of interviews with the BBC, CNN, you name it,’ Choudary once proclaimed.

That boast should be a badge of shame for broadcasters. Even when confronted with evidence of his crimes, the media colluded with him.

After the murder of Lee Rigby, the BBC’s Today programme granted him a 12-minute interview in which he would not condemn the murder, while Twitter refused to comply with police requests to remove his account, with 30,000 followers.

After the murder of Lee Rigby, the BBC’s Today programme granted him a 12-minute interview in which he would not condemn the murder

This has nothing to do with freedom of speech. Twitter has proved in the past willing to shut down accounts of neo-Nazis and racial extremists. The same failure to act against Choudary could also be found on Facebook and YouTube.

Just as disturbing was the supine approach of the Government, which gave Choudary benefits, legal support, education allowances and police protection, on top of reluctance to prosecute him despite evidence of his criminal extremism.

At one stage, his immediate family was reputed to be taking more than £25,000 a year in social security

At one stage, his immediate family was reputed to be taking more than £25,000 a year in social security, while he lived in a subsidised £320,000 house in London and ran several cars.

Collusion

So great was the financial backing, so absent any sign of prosecution, that many critics, including large numbers of Muslims, felt Choudary must be in the pay of MI5, as an informer or agent provocateur.

His conviction may have confounded this theory, but the stench of collusion remains.

Some argue the state should deport Choudary, but he was born in Britain. Others say he should be paid to go and live in the ISIS-controlled parts of Syria or Iraq.

But no, the best place for him is solitary confinement in prison. And after his conviction, the strongest proof of the Government’s willingness to take on radical Islamic fundamentalism would be to challenge the lethal Wahhabi philosophy and ideology.

This is the only practical way to neutralise the odious cancer of Choudary and his cronies and promote a tolerant and inclusive Islam in the UK.