Enigma of the Lyrical Terrorist
Updated on 09 November 2007
Samira Ahmed analyses the trial of Samina Malik convicted under anti-terror legislation this week.
Timing is everything.
Three days after I found myself in the front row to hear the head of MI5, Jonathan Evans give his assessment of the terrorist threat in Britain in a surprise apperarance to journalists at the Society of Editors' Conference, came the conviction of the self-styled Lyrical Terrorist.
What might Britain's chief spook have had to say about Samina Malik?
She had, it emerged in the trial, changed her online identity from the gangsta-rap influenced Lyrical Babe to the Lyrical Terrorist after turning to radical Islam.
The case of the Heathrow Airport worker, who's become the first woman to be convicted in Britain under new anti-terrorism laws reveals the real dilemma for M15 in assessing the terrorist threat: the phenomenon of the self-groomed radical.
Twenty three year-old Samina Malik didn't go and hang out with radical preachers and their macho followers.
She wasn't groomed as an impressionable 15 year-old, which, Evans had told journalists, Islamist militants were increasingly doing.
She found all their preachings and a mujahadeen poisons handbook on the internet.
The young woman who turned up to court in a glittery hijab and tight jeans claimed she wrote extremist poetry and kept a library of jihadist material because she thought it was 'cool'.
She had, it emerged in the trial, changed her online identity from the gangsta-rap influenced Lyrical Babe to the Lyrical Terrorist after turning to radical Islam.
The move from one to the other is not insignificant; both youth cults which have, on their fringes, cost lives with their glorification of violence.
Malik's distraught mum (who doesn't wear a hijab) sat in court watching her daughter. Had she failed to monitor her child for signs of radicalisation, as the former Home Secretary John Reid had recommended?
The evidence presented in court showed Malik wrote her nasty beheading verses in her bedroom and scribbled about the burning desire for martyrdom on the back of till receipts.
Malik (along with two jurors) burst into tears after being found guilty of possessing records likely to be used for terrorism.
Not a holy warrior, just a very naughty girl (to misquote Monty Python's Life of Brian) was the defence; but it failed.
In the lunchtime discussions that followed Jonathan Evans' speech, one newspaper editor told me our profession grossly underestimated just how much ordinary Muslims were being unfairly hounded.
Doubtless there are people who think Malik is such a victim.
But how sympathetic would we be if she were a lyrical neo-Nazi, posting racist views on the web, and then claiming she hadn't meant any harm?
Though we might ask if the intelligence services are devoting as much time as they should to monitoring white supremacist postings.
With M15 increasingly relying on monitoring and intercepting jihadi internet chatter, we can undoubtedly expect to see more trials of people like Malik.
Prosecutions like hers may deter others who venture into the virtual world of Islamist terrorist ideology and bomb making manuals; but they also reveal the shady netherworld of some young British Muslims. Was she more stupid than anything else? Possibly.
Interestingly Malik's not in custody now. She's been bailed rather than held in jail on remand, awaiting sentencing. We'll know about that on 6 December.
With the internet providing an inhibition-free welcome for many lonely and shy young people, does it make you feel at least a little uneasy that M15 are increasingly a form of thought-police monitoring people's fantasy worlds? Maybe.
The judge described her as an "enigma" to him.
Perhaps, the right analogy is with child pornography on the net. It may be easy to wander into that world, but whatever your reasons for doing so, it will be taken very seriously if you do.
