When it comes to dealing with the threat presented by Islamist extremism in the UK, banning al-Muhajiroun is just a fraction of what we need to be doing. For a start, this ban only covers five names (in addition to the previous two banned in 2006) under which al-Muhajiroun operate. Quilliam, the organisation that I work for, has previously listed no fewer than 15 different names used by al-Muhajiroun to disguise their activities, a list which is far from exhaustive. No doubt they will continue booking meetings in venues across London using those front groups and new ones yet to be concocted. A ban will only go some of the way towards disrupting al-Muhajiroun’s activities and it will do nothing to address the group’s ideology.
For that, what we need is for people in society, Muslims and non-Muslims, to present a challenge not just to the activities of al-Muhajiroun but to the ideologies of Islamism: a spectrum of ideologies running from the purely political to the violent, with al-Muhajiroun standing firmly at the end which glorifies and even engages in violence. This challenge should not necessarily take the form of inviting the leadership of al-Muhajiroun to debate; when Quilliam’s co-director Maajid Nawaz debated Anjem Choudary,UK leader of al-Muhajiroun, on British television recently, Choudary simply shouted over Maajid. Reasoned debate about ideas was impossible because Choudary had no intention of allowing it to happen. What we need, then, is for people within society to challenge extremist ideologies whenever and wherever they come across them.
If a student expresses racist views in a seminar, their lecturer will challenge them. There are too many lecturers who, on being asked to challenge violent Islamism being expressed by their students, say that they are not prepared to “spy” on their students, that it is not their role to challenge students’ radical views. People who use Islamised language to express genocidal ambitions about Jews, homosexuals, people who have chosen to leave Islam or Israeli citizens are no less reprehensible and need to be challenged no less than people who express those same ambitions but couch them in 1930s fascistic terminology.
This is not a hypothetical point, Michael Rimmer, whose former student Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab attempted to detonate explosives on board Flight 253 to Detroit on Christmas Day 2009, remembers Abdulmutallab defending the actions of the Taliban as long ago as 2001. If Abdulmutallab’s extreme and intolerant attitudes had been challenged at the time then perhaps he would not have gone on to become involved in terrorism.
What complicates the matter is that Islamists often wrap up their views in the language of liberal democracy and civil rights, in so doing they hope to inoculate their ideology against criticism. For example, when I attended al-Muhajiroun’s re-launch debate last year they had stationed thugs outside the venue to prevent women from sitting in the main part of the hall. Women were forced to sit in a women-only area upstairs. When my female friend and I informed one of those thugs that we would not be complying with his demands and that we would be sitting together, he complained that we were discriminating against him. Not even a flicker of irony crossed his face.
If it hadn’t been so depressing, it would have been hilarious. The man standing before me was as British as me. Like me he had attended a British school and received a British education. Yet he has so little respect for the values that make me proud to be British, such as freedom of speech, equality of the sexes, a secular public space and, crucially, democracy, that he had joined an organisation devoted to abolishing them. How had he been able to benefit so much from life in a country which enshrines those values without wanting to defend them?
Where groups break the law, and most Islamist groups do not, then they should be banned. But the most effective challenge to the ideologies lying behind groups like al-Muhajiroun is not a ban, nor is it to challenge their leaders to a debate. Instead, we have to change the mood music which allows their ideologies to flourish. It is through encouraging society in general to understand, respect and defend those shared values which are essential for its pluralistic nature to survive (values which are, by definition, inimical to Islamism) that al-Muhajiroun and its fellow-travellers will be defeated.

George Readings is Quilliam’s Communications Officer. Quilliam is a UK-based think tank with the objective of countering extremism. Its founders are former leading ideologues of UK-based extremist Islamist organizations