Al-Muhajiroun (, "The Emigrants") is a proscribed terrorist network based in Saudi Arabia and active for many years in the United Kingdom. The group was founded by Omar Bakri Muhammad, a Syrian who previously belonged to Hizb ut-Tahrir; he has been denied permission to enter Britain since 2005. The organisation has been linked to international terrorism, homophobia, and antisemitism. In its September 2002 conference "The Magnificent 19", it praised the September 11, 2001 attacks. The network mutates periodically so as to evade the law; it operates under many different aliases.
The group in its original incarnation operated openly in the United Kingdom from 14 January 1986 until the British Government announced an intention ban in August 2005. The group preemptively "disbanded" itself in 2005 to avoid this; two aliases used by the group were proscribed by the British Home Secretary under the Terrorism Act 2006: Al Ghurabaa and The Saviour Sect. Further proscriptions followed with the Terrorism Act 2000 where Islam4UK was proscribed as an Al-Muhajiroun alias and Muslims Against Crusades followed in 2011. More recent aliases have included Need4Khilafah and the Shariah Project, proscribed in 2014, just before prominent members, including Anjem Choudary, were sent to prison.
The organisation and its activities have been condemned by larger British Muslim groups such as the Muslim Council of Britain. In the United Kingdom, Al-Muhajiroun is the most notorious of the domestic Salafi-jihadist groups and its public spokesman Anjem Choudary has significant name recognition; it is considered more radical than its initial parent organisation the Hizb ut-Tahrir, whose British-based branch does not advocate violence against the United Kingdom and were not proscribed until January 2024.
Individual members of Al-Muhajiroun have been implicated in a number of terrorist attacks, including the murder of Lee Rigby (Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale), the 2017 London Bridge attack (Khuram Butt), and the 2019 London Bridge stabbing (Usman Khan). Some members, such as Zacarias Moussaoui, have been implicated in controversies surrounding Al-Qaeda.
It has also operated a Lahore safe house for visiting radicals. Another member, Siddhartha Dhar, became an executioner for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). The organisation has used the following names; Al Ghurabaa (2004–2006), The Saved Sect (2005–2006), Ahlus Sunnah wal Jamaah (2005–2009), Islam4UK (2009–2010), Muslims Against Crusades (2010–2011) and since then Need4Khilafah, the Shariah Project and the Islamic Dawah Association.
History
Origins in Hizb ut-Tahrir: 1983–1996
The network originated in the Middle East, inspired by the life and works of Omar Bakri Muhammad. Born in Aleppo, Syria, to a wealthy Sunni family, during his youth the state was taken over by the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party – Syria Region; it was an organisation which promoted Arab socialism and Arab nationalism, rather than having an Islamic ideology. Although the Ba'ath Party was nominally secular, and Syria was a majority-Sunni country, many of the ruling Ba'athists were drawn from the Shia Alawite minority; these included Hafez al-Assad, who became President of Syria in 1971. Some of the religiously inclined Syrian Sunnis, including Omar Bakri, joined the Muslim Brotherhood of Syria; although Bakri was a member during the uprising which led to the 1982 Hama massacre, Bakri himself played no part.
Omar Bakri lived for some time in Beirut, Lebanon. He joined a number of other Islamist organisations while he studied. In Beirut, this included the Hizb ut-Tahrir (where its founder Taqiuddin al-Nabhani had died in 1977). Omar Bakri then lived in Cairo, Egypt. He moved to Mecca, Saudi Arabia, to study at Umm al-Qura University and the Islamic University of Madinah. In the Saudi Kingdom, Hizb ut-Tahrir was a banned organisation. According to Omar Bakri's account of events, by 1983, he had gathered some 38 followers who endorsed creating a Saudi Arabia-based branch of the organisation—but the nearest branch, based in Kuwait, would not allow him to create a branch in Saudi Arabia, and suspended his membership. Subsequently, on 3 March 1983 at Jeddah, he created the group Al-Muhajiroun. That date was "the 59th anniversary of the destruction of the Ottoman Caliphate." Sadek Hamid, a scholar of Islamic politics, has claimed that this new organisation was just a front for Hizb ut-Tahrir. While Omar Bakri lived in Saudi Arabia he worked for Eastern Electric (owned by Shamsan and Abdul-Aziz as-Suhaybi), first in Riyadh, and then at its Jeddah branch. In January 1986, Al-Mahajiroun was banned in Saudi Arabia and Omar Bakhri was arrested in Jeddah, but he was released on bail and he fled to the United Kingdom. After spending some time in the United States to study, he returned to Britain where he became head of Hizb ut-Tahrir Britain. Omar Bakri Muhammad and his group was the subject of a Channel 4 documentary entitled the Tottenham Ayatollah in 1997, in which Jon Ronson, an investigative journalist of Jewish-background followed Omar Bakri and Al-Muhajiroun around for a year. A young Anjem Choudary also featured as the group's Deputy. The documentary mentions mainstream Muslim groups (who felt that their activities were leading to a demonisation of all Muslims), Conservative MP Rupert Allason, the Board of Deputies of British Jews and even Hosni Mubarak, President of Egypt criticising the group. The sitting Foreign Secretary in the Conservative Party government; Malcolm Rifkind; responded to international concerns by saying as Al-Muhajiroun had not broken any specific laws they could not be prosecuted. Omar Bakri openly discussed living on Jobseeker's Allowance and the group publicly protested in favour of the Sharia, against homosexuality and other aspects in contemporary British society that it considered to be immoral. The group claimed that they were collecting donations for groups in conflict with the State of Israel, such as Hamas, Hezbollah and Egyptian Islamic Jihad, but none of these groups have ever confirmed connections or if any money came to them. Yotam Feldner of the Middle East Media Research Institute, a pro-Israeli group, cites reports from Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram Weekly in November 1998, whereby Omar Bakri is alleged to have presented himself as a spokesman for Osama bin Laden's "International Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders."
thumb|right|260px|[[Finsbury Park Mosque in Islington, under Abu Hamza from 1997 until 2003, was an important centre for Al-Muhajiroun. The Mosque has since been reopened under unaffiliated authorities.]]
During the 1990s, a number of radical Islamists who were wanted by the authorities in a number of Middle Eastern countries sought refuge in the United Kingdom, particularly London, leading some such as the French intelligence services to ridicule the situation as "Londonistan". Particularly close to Al-Muhajiroun was the Egyptian Abu Hamza al-Masri, who was the imam of Finsbury Park Mosque from 1997 until 2003 (since that time the mosque has been reopened under new authorities who are not affiliated to these tendencies). Abu Hamza had previously been an adviser to the Algerian Armed Islamic Group and had his own group called "Supporters of Shariah" which held joint protests with Al-Muhajiroun. Abu Qatada; who was associated with the Jordanian group Jaysh Mohammad and would later write sympathetically about the activities of Osama bin Laden; spoke at a Al-Muhajiroun meeting in November 1999 to raise funds for mujahideen fighters in Chechnya (as part of the Second Chechen War). Contacts were also maintained between Omar Bakri's group and other London exiles who spoke at Al-Muhajiroun gatherings; Yassir al-Sirri of Vanguards of Conquest and Mohammad al-Massari of Hizb ut-Tahrir. In the first two years of its new existence, the group did not advocate violence against the United Kingdom; Omar Bakri claimed in London-newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat, this was because he had a "covenant of peace" with the British government when they granted him asylum (though while still part of Hizb ut-Tahrir, Omar Bakri had earlier made comments in 1991 about a potential assassination of Prime Minister John Major, during the Gulf War). to a newly formed Race Relations Forum. Tony Blair, who was the Labour Party's Prime Minister at the time of the arrests, two decades later in 2017 accused al-Sibai of having radicalised members of the so-called "Beatles" group of ISIS militants, including "Jihadi John" (Mohammed Emwazi) and El Shafee Elsheikh.