When I was a teenager I used to upset my father by telling him I thought it would be really glamorous to die young in a car crash. The stupid thing was, I believed it. The corollary of feeling immortal is that you have no real understanding of the finality of death. That’s why you can count on the fingers of one hand the number of 40-plus suicide bombers.
In My Brother, the Islamist (BBC3, Monday), a likeable Dorset tree surgeon called Robb Leech set out on a quest to discover why the blond, perfectly normal-seeming stepbrother Rich with whom he’d grown up in Weymouth had ended up as a member of the group Islam4UK. That’s the now-banned radical group led by the obnoxious Anjem Choudary which you see doing tasteful, multicultural things like burning the US flag outside the American embassy on the 9/11 anniversary and gathering in Luton to yell ‘babykillers’ at the Anglian regiment returning from a tour of duty in Iraq.
Though I’m sure it wasn’t his intention to use his stepbrother as a pretext for infiltrating this vile organisation, Robb nevertheless landed himself an apparent scoop. For the first time on television we got to see Islam4UK — or Al Muhajiroun or whatever they call themselves now — not just at work (shouting through megaphones; burning flags; upsetting passers-by) but also at what constitutes for them play.
The things that Islamists can do for fun are actually quite limited: if the Prophet didn’t do it, nor can you, so while you’re allowed archery and riding, pretty much everything else is haram (i.e., forbidden). In one of the most pathetic, but also slyly charming scenes, we saw Rich (or Salahuddin, as he now styles himself) and his beardie mates cruising the streets of London in the small hours during Ramadan in search not of sex, drugs or rock’n’roll but of a groovy extremist mosque in which to pray.
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