By SHAHZAD AZIZ

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away (west London to be precise) there lived a group of Muslim students who were eager to gain wisdom and learn the ways of life. Then one day, there arrived on their doorstep a funny-looking wise man. He came from across the seas, from a distant land somewhere in the Arabian Peninsula and he brought with him that most sought after entity, “truth.” The students invited him to deliver the Friday sermon. He accepted. In his sermon he told us about warfare, the Islamic way. “Everything in Islam is done ethically, even fighting,” he told us. The wise man stressed that even weapons must be designed and used ethically. Above all, he argued, every attempt must be made to ensure that non-combatants are not affected by their use. We were all impressed. The name of that wise man? One Omar Bakri.

Bakri’s more recent utterances on the acceptability of noncombatants as collateral damage in certain circumstances (“self-sacrifice missions” he calls them) make that sermon he delivered all those years ago really seem like a fairy tale. Those were the days before he became an international celebrity, before he was unexpectedly cast in a minor, but not altogether insignificant role in that lead drama of our times, “The War on Terror.”

There exist two Omar Bakris. There is the living, breathing Omar Bakri, the one who lectures Muslims on the virtues of self-sacrifice missions but then flees the country once he is aware that the game is up, that in the political climate following the London bombings on July 7, 2005, his brand of politics is likely to end him in prison. Then there is the other Omar Bakri, the one whom you and I have created, the one who lurks in the darkest recesses of our minds, feeding off our fears and anxieties.

Don’t get me wrong; the real Bakri was no Gandhi-type pacifist before fame came knocking on his door. In the early 1990s he took his newly formed British branch of Hizb-ut Tahrir on the road, visiting the university campuses of London and beyond to preach his unique form of firebrand politics. We had never seen the likes of him before. Our response? We hated Bakri, we despised Hizb-ut Tahrir, we argued with their supporters, but most of all, we flocked (in the thousands) to see the Hizb-ut Tahrir traveling circus. Why? Because at each stop on their tour, they would throw down the gauntlet and let out a battle cry, a challenge to take on all comers in a fight to the death over, Your God versus My God, Your Ideology versus My Ideology. These debates (in the loosest sense of the term) threw up mouth-watering, tantalizing contests: The Islamic Society versus The Christian society, The Islamic Society versus The Gay and Lesbian Society, The Islamic Society versus The Socialist Society, etc. Enticed, seduced, intoxicated, we simply couldn’t resist succumbing to that part of the human condition tucked far away in some remote corner of the human psyche, the one that we would rather pretend does not exist. It is that part of us that feels a perverse sense of enjoyment at seeing the humiliation of another. It is the reason why so many flocked to see a man hanged. It is the reason why so many watch Simon Cowell (of “American Idol”). Omar Bakri and Hizb-ut Tahrir (and later Al-Muhajiroun) might think we attended to observe an intellectual debate; we convinced ourselves that this was the reason we went. Who were we trying to fool? We went to such events for the same reasons that people watch talk-show host Jerry Springer. We went as voyeurs of human humiliation, to watch a verbal duel between two combatants who’d agreed that their weapon of choice was that part of them that they considered most sacred, most dear, and that which the other would attempt to violate. In doing so we began to feed the monster, little by little, bit by bit, until it grew large enough to register on the radar of that most unique of British institutions: the tabloid press.