The Origin of Revolution Muslim

In December 2007, Younus Abdullah Muhammad and Yousef al-Khattab, two prominent figures within the Islamic Thinkers Society, split off and established Revolution Muslim. In doing so they changed the jihadist ecosystem through a more explicit advocacy of terrorism and a more adept online propaganda effort while establishing the United States, previously thought of by many as immune to radicalization, as an important node in international jihadist networks.

Yet, Revolution Muslim did not emerge out of nowhere. Instead the group was the product of a series of splits within the Islamist Hizbut-Tahrir (HT) movement and a long tradition of Islamist organizing. Revolution Muslim’s history as having emerged from these splits to transform existing networks illustrates the potential for online communities to sustain jihadism even as terrorist groups overseas face setbacks.

The rest of this section provides a history of the path to Revolution Muslim’s emergence.

Omar Bakri and Revolution Muslim’s Roots in Hizbut-Tahrir

The origin of Revolution Muslim traces back to Omar Bakri Muhammad, a radical cleric who played a key role in developing Hizbut-Tahrir in Britain and then created a spin-off organization, al-Muhajiroun (ALM), the predecessor of Revolution Muslim in the United States.

Bakri was born in Aleppo, Syria, in 1958 and studied Islam formally from the age of 5. According to his own account, he was radicalized through his relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood, a relationship that “really took off from the age of 15.”¹

After two years of study in Lebanon amid Muslim Brotherhood circles, Bakri joined HT.² Founded in 1953, HT describes itself as a “political party whose ideology is Islam.”³ The group calls for the establishment of a caliphate and pursues its Islamist politics on a global scale.

By 1979, the year a small group of Wahhabi extremists stormed the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini led the overthrow of the shah of Iran, Bakri was residing in Mecca. However, HT was officially banned by the Saudi government.⁴ On March 3, 1983, Bakri inaugurated the first manifestation of a new, clandestine group, al-Muhajiroun. Despite his covert efforts, Saudi authorities arrested Bakri in 1985 for teaching HT literature and deported him.

Bakri ended up in London, where he established an HT presence and became a controversial figurehead for the group.⁵ In 1991 Bakri called then British Prime Minister John Major a “legitimate target” for assassination.⁶

Decades before the establishment of Revolution Muslim or the rise of ISIS to global prominence, the outlines of the politics that would structure these later groups were already visible. Today HT and ISIS are ideological competitors, with ISIS criticizing HT as insufficiently violent and as passive faux-intellectualism.⁷ Nevertheless, HT and ISIS share similar visions for the future of the Muslim-majority world in which Muslims reestablish the caliphate. What would distinguish Revolution Muslim and later ISIS from HT was a series of splits in the movement that enabled more radical tactics, strategies and visions of the caliphate.

The first split that set the stage for the emergence of Revolution Muslim and later ISIS occurred on January 16, 1996, when Omar Bakri split from HT due to a dispute over the proper strategy and tactics to achieve the goal of bringing about a caliphate.⁸ Bakri embraced a more radical and expansive approach than that of HT’s core leadership. HT was hesitant to challenge the West directly and focused its efforts on Muslim-majority countries, using the refugee status of many of its members and the free speech protections available in the West to project its platform abroad. In contrast, Bakri believed that the party’s call to establish a caliphate should appeal to Muslims residing in the West as well as those in Muslim-majority countries.

Maajid Nawaz, a member of HT while Bakri was preaching on behalf of the organization, described Bakri’s approach in the year before he split from the organization: “We were encouraged by Omar Bakri to operate like street gangs and we did, prowling London, fighting Indian Sikhs in the west and African Christians in the east. We intimidated Muslim women until they wore the hijab and we thought we were invincible.”⁹

HT ordered Bakri to end his controversial and combative approach because of the negative publicity and scrutiny it generated. Bakri instead relaunched ALM as a separate organization.¹⁰ As Bakri explained it, ALM “engage[s] in the divine method to establish the Khilafah [Caliphate] wherever they have members, whereas HT works to establish the Khilafah only in a specific Muslim country … and restrict their members’ activities outside [that country].”¹¹ HT explains that “Omar Bakri was expelled from the party and went on to establish his own organization, with its own distinct aims and methodology.”¹²

Unbeholden to HT, ALM replicated the practices and tactics of HT: street demonstrations, pamphleteering, and preaching at mosques and universities. However, Bakri embraced even more radical tactics that HT had rejected. To antagonize the British public, ALM proclaimed slogans such as “The Black Flag [of the caliphate] will one day reign over Downing Street” and “Islam will dominate the world.”¹³

By provoking the media with its radical pronouncements, Bakri’s ALM gained publicity, which it used to expand its following. As Bakri explained in Tottenham Ayatollah, a 1997 documentary, when the media reports on the movement, “They make for us very nice publicity. When [British Muslims] hear, ‘Omar said he is against Israel,’ they say, ‘Oh, very good. God bless him.’ When they see Omar he don’t accept homosexuality, ‘Oh, very good. God bless him. Let our children study with his group.’”¹⁴

ALM urged Muslims living in the West to become the frontline for the coming caliphate, “to become strong and united in order to become the fifth column which is able to put pressure on the enemies of Islam and to support the Muslim ummah worldwide.”¹⁵ That global outlook required what scholar Kylie Conner, a specialist in the development of Islamism in the West, has explained as “a rejection of secular law based upon the belief that restoration of the Caliphate can, and should, begin outside the traditional lands of Islam.”¹⁶ ALM and Bakri’s calls presaged those to come from ISIS years later in Syria and Iraq.

By September 11, 2001, ALM was organizing public “dawah stalls”—proselytization centers where ALM street preachers displayed posters and handed out pamphlets that drew passersby to engage with the group members—across the United Kingdom. ALM held provocative conferences and rallies, including one entitled “The Magnificent 19” praising the 9/11 hijackers.¹⁷ Bakri also led weekly classes and study circles, protests and street demonstrations. In private, he groomed new leaders, including Anjem Choudary, who would sustain ALM’s influence and maintain the platform far into the future.¹⁸ ALM also expanded beyond the United Kingdom, launching a website that was impressive for its time and declaring branches in Pakistan and Lebanon.¹⁹

Bakri’s ALM also expanded into the United States, ushering in the next set of developments that would enable the rise of Revolution Muslim.

In 1996, just after Bakri split from HT and established ALM in the United Kingdom, one of his followers in the United States established the first American ALM offshoot in New York City.²⁰

The American branch operated for several years, but it proved incapable of attracting the publicity and interest that Bakri generated in Britain. Nevertheless, ALM-NY did attract a handful of followers, many of them university students.

Some ALM-NY members found the group to be useful as a means of reaching jihadist terrorist organizations abroad. A few days after 9/11, Mohammed Junaid Babar, a young Pakistani-American with connections to ALM-NY, traveled from the United States to Pakistan with the ultimate destination of Afghanistan. His intention was to wage violent jihad against American troops he believed would soon be present there. Babar stated later that he was heavily influenced by the ALM-NY’s study circles and readings, saying, “They had representatives in New York. So, I was able to meet them. I was able to communicate with them, you know, over the internet, and we also spoke numerous times over the phone, and there was also a lot of literature they had readily available on the internet that I was able to see.”²¹

While on his way to Pakistan, Babar stopped in London to visit Omar Bakri.²² While Bakri claims that he advised Babar to return to New York, Babar was arrested three years later for participating in a foiled 2004 al-Qaeda plot in London via Pakistan to utilize 1,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate fertilizer—commonly used in explosives—in what a U.S. law enforcement official explained “was a serious plot to be launched in England, and this guy [Babar] was supporting it from this country and other places.”²³

After his arrest, Babar admitted responsibility and became a key government witness.²⁴ During the trial for the 2004 plot, the prosecution explained that Babar was given money by ALM in 2001, not to return to the United States, but with the promise that he would receive “more when he got to Pakistan.”²⁵ ALM subsequently released a statement that admitted Babar had studied in the movement until he departed for Pakistan, but it denied involvement or knowledge of his activities after 9/11.²⁶

Babar represents the earliest known example of an American traveling abroad to fight on behalf of al-Qaeda post-9/11, and he came from the same radical Islamist network that would launch Revolution Muslim in New York City six years later.

Despite connections between ALM-NY and terrorist recruitment in the case of Babar, ALM continued to avoid explicitly endorsing jihadist terrorism and denied having played a key role in Babar’s having joined al-Qaeda. The next split within the movement provided the bridge between ALM-NY’s activities and the more explicitly radical approach embraced by Revolution Muslim.

After operating for a few years, ALM-NY encountered leadership struggles, resulting in a split and and the founding of Muslims for Justice, which in October 2002, renamed itself the Islamic Thinkers Society (ITS).²⁷ According to Abdullah Muhammad, members of the group later told him this name change was done to obscure the organization’s continued ties to ALM.²⁸ It was a tactic that ALM-core in London would replicate years later to circumvent proscription.²⁹

The Islamic Thinkers Society spin-off did not result from an innovation in tactics or form in the way that Bakri’s ALM split from HT over different views on tactics and approach. Instead ITS continued to engage in activities similar to those of ALM-NY and maintained its affiliation with ALM, just under different leadership. Meanwhile, the original ALM-NY faction slowly fizzled out as the university students it targeted increasingly opposed its message in the post-9/11 context.

The leaders of ITS took their orders from Anjem Choudary of ALM in London and retained ties with Bakri.³⁰ Choudary, who by then had risen to become Bakri’s chief disciple, described New York as one of ALM’s “main hubs.” He stated that dozens of New Yorkers tuned in to ALM’s online sermons, although he claimed that ALM’s connection to ITS was merely a loose affiliation.³¹

The members who departed ALM-NY formed a nucleus of dedicated and passionate youth. One of them, Syed Hashmi, a Pakistani-American, pleaded guilty to conspiring to provide material support to al-Qaeda.³² Another member of the new ITS, Arif al-Islam, a Bangladeshi-American, became a leading speaker for the group.³³ They gave ITS a young face while its original leader remained a key organizer, but slid into the background.

ITS ran its own website and online forum. It uploaded its “dawah stall” activity onto YouTube after the video-sharing site launched in 2005.³⁴ Public dawah served as outreach and offered an opportunity to recruit a fringe segment of the local population. As in the United Kingdom, the dawah stall method encouraged religious and political awakening, but perhaps more importantly, it encouraged passersby to engage in online activity.

By 2006, Abdullah Muhammad, who joined the group in 2004 at the annual Muslim Day Parade and quickly rose through its ranks, had become ITS’ main speaker. ITS activities typically involved a small handful of individuals. Largely unwelcome in the mosques, they organized in neighborhoods populated by a Muslim majority as well as in public spaces such as Times Square on 42nd Street. The group operated with impunity in the United States and was perceived as an extreme fringe group.

It was only when ITS members ripped up and stomped on an American flag on a busy shopping street in Queens, New York, on June 8, 2005, that the group drew national media attention. In a New York Times interview shortly thereafter, Arif al-Islam stated:

“What they’re worried about is, are we recruiting for jihad. Through our past couple of years we have never recruited anyone to go to a foreign land. We have always made that clear through our activities. We have always stressed nonviolent means.”³⁵

Despite its emphasis on nonviolent means, like ALM-NY before it, ITS provided a network that enabled jihadist terrorist activity.

In November 2008, Bryant Neal Vinas, a young convert to Islam from Long Island, New York, was indicted for conspiring to commit murder outside the United States.³⁶ The United States alleged that Vinas joined al-Qaeda in Pakistan, fired at Americans on a Pakistani military base and provided expert advice to an al-Qaeda leader for a planned attack on the Long Island Rail Road and a Wal-Mart.³⁷ Vinas had extensive connections to the network around ITS. He had attended AK’s study circles and befriended two ITS members, Ahmed Zarrini and Ahmer Qayyum.³⁸ He also met Yousef al-Khattab, the future cofounder of Revolution Muslim and a popular convert to Islam from Orthodox Judaism.³⁹ Vinas eventually traveled to Pakistan with Qayyum before moving on to the North West Frontier Province in Pakistan and linking up with al-Qaeda operatives.

When Vinas’s homegrown radicalization and connections to ITS were exposed, many pondered whether the United States had finally caught the “British Disease” of homegrown terrorists traveling abroad for training.⁴⁰ For its part, ITS blamed American foreign policy and stated, “The Islamic Thinkers Society remains an intellectual, political, and non-violent organization calling people to Islam and participating in activities through an intellectual and political discourse.”⁴¹

However, at a trial of Belgian jihadists in 2012, Vinas described the assistance he received from Qayyum and two other Pakistanis in New York. He explained how they helped him plan his trip, arranged for him to stay with family members in Lahore, Pakistan, and connected him to an Afghan family that put him in touch with a Taliban commander, the “chief of a group of fighters who have fought the U.S., NATO and Afghan forces in Afghanistan,” as Vinas described it.⁴² Whether it was the group’s policy to recruit for jihad or not, the Islamic Thinkers Society members had provided the network for a former altar boy from Long Island to join al-Qaeda and plot terrorist attacks against the United States.

In December 2007, the final split that gave rise to Revolution Muslim occurred when Abdullah Muhammad, along with Yousef al-Khattab, split off from ITS to create the new group. This time, as was the case when Bakri split from HT, the split was the result of larger questions of strategy rather than questions of leadership.

By 2007, Khattab and Abdullah Muhammad, then a graduate student at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), were in conflict with  ITS’ leadership regularly. The disputes ranged from arguments about ITS’s method of proselytization to Khattab’s belief that ITS needed to enhance its online activities.

At the same time that Khattab and Abdullah Muhammad were drifting further from ITS’s leadership, “Sheikh” Abdullah Faisal, a radical Jamaican cleric, was set for release from incarceration in the United Kingdom and deportation to Jamaica. Faisal had been educated in Saudi Arabia and was notorious for radicalizing Muslims in Britain throughout the 1990s and into the post-9/11 era. Ultimately convicted for soliciting the murder of Jews, Christians, Hindus and Americans, Faisal served four years in prison in the U.K.⁴³

ITS refused to include Faisal under its umbrella.⁴⁴ Faisal had an extremist reputation, even in jihadist circles.⁴⁵ Abdullah Muhammad interpreted the refusal as a desire to retain complete adherence to Bakri, so he and Khattab started to contemplate splitting from ITS to launch their own independent alternative.

In May 2007, Abdullah Faisal was released from prison and returned to Jamaica. Abdullah Muhammad sought to leverage Faisal’s hard-core reputation and introduce his extreme message into the United States. The pair had corresponded through an intermediary while Faisal was imprisoned, and as soon as Faisal arrived in Jamaica, they started to discuss how to promote Faisal’s preaching in America. Faisal, in turn, taught Abdullah Muhammad directly. Abdullah Muhammad received guidance under Faisal’s tutelage in the “technique of radicalization (tarbiyya)” throughout the summer of 2007, a few months before they launched Revolution Muslim. It was a method more extreme than that of ALM, essentially in line with the doctrine of al-Qaeda.

In a September interview with Mitch Silber (the coauthor of this paper), Abdullah Muhammad described the message and method that Faisal conveyed to him on how to gain followers and radicalize them as revolving around promoting three ideological tenets:

“1) tawheed al hakimiyya – the belief that a proper understanding of monotheism in Islam required an absolute adherence to the notion that Allah is the only law giver, 2) kufr bit-taghout – rejection of false idols, and 3) al-walaa wal-baraa – that all loyalty and love was for the Muslims and that this loyalty necessitated hatred and enmity for the non-Muslims (kuffar). It is around these three principles that the culture of global jihad revolves. Without them, the ideology would not appeal. I could frame every current event in a way that pointed directly to them both explicitly and implicitly.”⁴⁶

In December 2007, Abdullah Muhammad and Khattab officially split from ITS and launched Revolution Muslim. Khattab was appointed to raise controversy and to communicate directly with anyone who expressed interest. As Khattab described it in court:

“[Abdullah Muhammad] said, I would like to make this organization with Sheikh Faisal.… So I said, what do I have to offer you? I’m a comedian, that’s all. I’m a wise guy, that’s what I have. You are the Columbia educated.… Okay. He said, that’s fine, just keep it up. Which is basically what I did. I was the clown.”⁴⁷

The split between ITS and Revolution Muslim concerned law enforcement, which properly perceived the fracture as a fault line that would result in a potentially more extreme splinter organization.

As Revolution Muslim finalized its split with ITS, the NYPD opened active investigations into both groups because of their “reasonable indication of links to unlawful activity,” as per the Handschu regulations, which governed terrorism investigations conducted by the NYPD.⁴⁸ The NYPD inserted deep undercover officers into both entities. A team of analysts assessed, vetted and tracked the groups’ links within the United States as well as overseas, and the NYPD worked with federal agencies and international partners.⁴⁹ ITS and RM were two of the highest profile investigations at the NYPD Intelligence Division between 2005 and 2011.⁵⁰

The path to the emergence of Revolution Muslim from Bakri’s radicalization decades earlier illustrates that Revolution Muslim was the result of turmoil in a larger tradition of Islamist organizing. Many expressions of that tradition had connections to jihadist terrorism, but it was the series of splits in the movement that opened space for Revolution Muslim to promote a new and more open endorsement of terrorism. This history emphasizes the importance of understanding broader trends in existing movements when assessing the terrorist threat and not merely the fate of particular groups.