Which is the true face of suicidal jihadist terrorists? Are they ultra-conservative, pious devout Muslims who pray five times a day, eschew music and all contact with the opposite sex, reject alcohol, cigarettes and drugs of all kind, while trying to be charitable and forgiving? Or are they hedonistic partygoers who take drugs, frequent strip clubs and are given to sexual promiscuity, both heterosexual and homosexual?

Based on 30 years’ experience as an imam within British Muslim communities, and as a former Islamist who knew and met several people who went on to become convicted terrorists, the simple answer in my view is: both of the above pictures are true, except that all terrorists forget the core Islamic teachings of compassion, forgiveness and humanity that would preclude any act of terrorism.

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Groups such as al-Qaida and Isis attract people from many different backgrounds: the leaders of these movements are often highly intelligent and fanatically religious, in an outward sense, attracted by the intellectual appeal of revolutionary ideology and sacred utopia. The foot soldiers, on the other hand, are often the opposite, motivated primarily by a love of violence and a sense of anger and revenge against societies in which they were misfits and sometimes exposed to racism.

Some of the Paris attackers were known to run bars selling alcohol, take drugs, sleep around and, according to some reports, even frequent gay bars in Brussels. Amedy Coulibaly and Hayat Boumedienne, the Isis-linked couple who attacked the kosher supermarket in Paris in January, had previously been photographed in swimwear on a French beach, with Boumedienne in a bikini – not your usual Islamist day out.



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On the other hand, the British 7/7 bombers followed the leaders of al-Qaida in trying to live a pious Muslim lifestyle. Ayman al-Zawahiri was always a formally religious Islamist from his days at medical school in Cairo. Osama bin Laden was similarly pious, and once recounted how his father Muhammad, founder of the hugely successful Saudi Bin Laden construction business, held contracts to work on Islam’s three holiest mosques in Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem, sometimes managing to pray at all three sites within a single day. Footage of him watching al-Jazeera Arabic’s “From Osama to Obama”, recovered from his compound after his assassination in 2011, sees Bin Laden repeatedly bringing up a teletext menu to avoid seeing Hillary Clinton and other unveiled women, notwithstanding his alleged stash of porn.

Similarly, some of the British women who have joined Isis recently were academic high achievers: this includes the three London schoolgirls Amira Abase, Shamina Begum and Kadiza Sultanathe; Manchester twins Salma and Zahra Halane; and Aqsa Mahmood, the privately educated Glaswegian who is now thought to be one of the senior westerners in Isis’s female morality police, the Khansaa Brigade. Others, such as converts to Islam Sally Jones and Khadijah Dare, had more troubled pasts. The British men in Isis show similarly diverse backgrounds, including restaurant workers and rappers on the one hand, and bright students and young professionals on the other.

I know from personal experience the internal tensions caused by fanatical faith and extremist ideology in the context of post-religious, globalised postmodern society: this explains some of the inconsistent and erratic behaviour of suicidal, religious terrorists. The brave testimony of one young British former terrorist-sympathiser shows that homosexuality and Islamist extremism can sometimes co-exist within the same person.

However, there is also the moral absolution offered by the “martyrdom” of suicidal terrorism. For some relatively pious terrorists, the impending martyrdom means that they are able to enjoy a last night of sinful pleasure, in the belief that their “jihad” will atone for this relatively minor indiscretion. Furthermore, this approach helps them blend in to the surrounding society and avoid detection, a tactic endorsed by some jihadist ideologues.

Other young Muslims are so guilt-ridden by hedonistic lifestyles that they will do anything to redeem themselves, thus becoming vulnerable to terrorist recruitment: rather than killing and being killed in a final act of explosive, selfish rage, what is needed is the traditional religious approach of a lifetime of selfless service to others. Stopping the anger and rage of would-be suicidal terrorists, then channelling and transforming it into charitable virtue, is one of the most difficult tasks we face.