Omar Bakri Muhammad (1958-), nicknamed the "Tottenham Ayatollah", was a Syrian Islamist militant leader and the founder of al-Muhajiroun. He was a highly divisive cleric who turned Hizb ut-Tahrir into an extremist street gang, founded an al-Nusra Front affiliate in Lebanon, and fathered two sons who died while fighting for ISIL.
Biography[]
Omar Bakri Muhammad was born in Aleppo, Aleppo Governorate, Syria in 1958 to a wealthy family, and he joined the Muslim Brotherhood as a young man and moved to Cairo, Egypt in 1979. He left al-Azhar University due to disagreements with his teachers, and he joined Hizb ut-Tahrir in Beirut and maintained contacts in Cairo before starting an HT cell in Saudi Arabia. He was arrested in Jeddah in 1984 but released on bail, and he moved to the United Kingdom on 14 January 1986. He became the spiritual leader of Hizb ut-Tahrir in the UK and defended Islam in public debates against Christian apologists, all while encouraging HT to engage in vigilantism against non-Muslims and Muslim women. HT operated like street gangs, fighting Indian Sikhs in London's West End and African Christians in the East End, while forcing Muslim women to wear hijabs. In 1996, he left Hizb ut-Tahrir and split off to form al-Muhajiroun, serving as its Amir until 2003. He praised the 9/11 attackers as "magnificent" and supported the theology and philosophy of al-Qaeda, becoming a Salafist. Muhammad encouraged terrorist attacks abroad while forbidding attacks in Britain, and, in 2004, he disbanded al-Muhajiroun to focus on uniting Muslims against "a hostile West". He left Britain in 2005 to evade a rumored investigation into extremist clerics, and he was banned from returning. He later claimed that the 7/7 suicide bombers were in "paradise". He called for kidnapping-terrorist attacks against British Army soldiers during the War on Terror, and Muhammad also called for the Islamic black flag to be raised over Downing Street, for fornicators to be stoned, and for pubs to be closed. In April 2014, he was arrested in Tripoli, Lebanon for encouraging anti-Alawite violence in the city, and, in October 2014, he was sentenced to six years in prison for founding a Lebanese affiliate of the al-Nusra Front. Two of his sons died while fighting for ISIL.