By Sam Knight

In the middle of Rochdale is the Milkstone Road. It is the sort of street that runs through ethnically mixed British towns. There is a halal butcher; a travel agent cum bookshop cum general store, its windows lined with razors and pictures of the hajj; two pubs that face each other across a narrow intersection. And, behind a set of wooden gates, is a mosque.

On a school night in November, the mosque’s imam, a spectacled, energetic man called Irfan Chishti, was teaching in an upstairs room. Two dozen boys were spread out on the floor before him. Most wore white skullcaps and hoodies with logos from other parts of their lives: gold dollar signs and the springy letters of “Lonsdale”. A single light bulb shone over their heads. Chishti, who used to be an RE teacher, was trying to make the boys concentrate on the whiteboard behind him, which he was using to explain the different strains of Islam.

“So which path is the straight path?” he asked, as he coaxed the class to consider questions that have vexed Islamic scholars over the centuries: does Allah actually sit on a throne? Can Allah lie? Amid this, a more prosaic question, directed at the boys: “Can you stop talking?” Then he wrote a word in Arabic on the board. “Have you heard this word before?” A few boys nodded. “Takfir,” Chishti said. “This is where the dangerous bit comes in.”

Giving takfir, Chishti explained, is proclaiming another person a non-Muslim. A dire theological act, comparable to excommunication from the Christian church, takfir crops up with forbidding frequency in militant Islamic ideologies like al-Qaeda’s. The “takfiri jihadi mindset”, as security experts call it, has few qualms about declaring great swathes of humanity, Muslim and otherwise, beyond the protection of God, and so punishable by death.

“We all know there are suicide bombings and attacks going on all across the world,” Chishti said. “And it’s happening because of this principle here. That’s the essence of it all: that your belief is not the same as my belief … And because you’re not a Muslim and you’re fighting my Muslim brothers, I’m going to kill you.”

One of the boys put his hand up. “Yes?” said Chishti.

“Is that allowed?”

Chishti was dumbstruck. “Is that allowed?” His Lancashire accent filled the room. “Is that allowed for me to say that just because I don’t believe in your opinion, can I just turn around and say you’re not a Muslim?” He asked the class. “Can I do that?”

There was a chorus of glum “No’s”.

“No matter how knowledgeable I am, if I was the greatest and most amazing imam on the whole planet, I am not allowed to do that,” Chishti continued. “And why not?”

“Because you’re not Allah,” the boys said.

“And where did we learn that, what verse?” Everyone tried to remember.

. . .

Muhammad Irfan Faizi Chishti is the model of a modern mainstream Muslim. The son of a Sufi imam, he is the Official Chaplain to the Borough of Rochdale, a post traditionally held by a Christian. He is also a former adviser to the erstwhile communities secretary, Hazel Blears, and last year became an MBE for his work in prisons, where he counsels inmates and takes Friday prayers. He is also the sort of person you meet in the world of “Prevent”, a strange, much-contested landscape of policy initiatives, community projects and spies that has been forming between the state and Muslim communities since the London bombings in July 2005.

“Prevent” – the full title, “Preventing Violent Extremism”, was shelved last summer – is an attempt to get to the roots of terrorism and hateful ideologies in Britain. “Addressing people who are vulnerable to the message that could end up in a terrorist atrocity,” is how Sir Norman Bettison, chief constable of West Yorkshire and counter-terrorism lead at the Association of Chief Police Officers, describes it. In the financial year 2008-09, that meant spending £140m across departments ranging from the Foreign Office to the Department for Children, Schools and Families. Most of the money is spent opaquely: on the security services, the Office of Security and Counter Terrorism at the Home Office, which oversees the Prevent programme, and the salaries of more than 300 dedicated Prevent police officers. A relatively small proportion, some £60m from 2008 to 2011, is markedly more visible, and is being disbursed to an array of community-based projects aimed at preventing terrorism and improving community relations at the neighbourhood level. In 94 local authorities across the UK, Prevent is currently paying for interventions aimed at diverting young people from violence – supporting mosques such as Imam Chishti’s, alongside pop concerts, youth discussion groups and interfaith choirs.

In the process, Prevent has caused merry hell. Although ministers insist that it is aimed at “violent extremism in all its forms” – from anti-Semitism to militant animal rights – Prevent labours under the fact that violent extremism in one form, Islamic-inspired terrorism, threatens the UK like no other. As a result, the funding is often allocated according to how many Muslims live in an area, targeting that has alienated the very people the government is trying to reach. In the past year, Prevent has been called a spying operation, a state attempt to concoct a new “British Islam”, and a waste of money and/or a source of funds for the kind of extremist groups it should be stamping out. It has been condemned by think-tanks on the left and the right, in newspapers from The Guardian to the Mail on Sunday. “You can’t win either way,” admits Shahid Malik, the minister who runs Prevent programmes at the Department for Communities and Local Government. “You get the critics of Prevent who say it is too soft and it doesn’t really do what it says on the tin. Then you get the people who are the subjects of Prevent in many ways – Muslims – who say it criminalises and stigmatises the whole community.”

And yet, in several weeks of interviews with those taking part in the programme, mainly in London and the north-west, very few people thought Prevent could be disbanded, even when they were critical of it – which most were. Instead, people tended to talk about Prevent as a necessary social experiment that must continue into the foreseeable future, even with no guarantee of brilliant results. “Frankly, I don’t mean this to sound negative, I just mean it to sound realistic,” Bettison, the chief constable, said. “This is a generational policy. It’s not a start and finish policy.”

. . .

o what does preventing violent extremism entail? In Imam Chishti’s mosque, it has meant a new set of soundproof doors. After the class was over, he showed them to me. Chishti believes that Britain’s mosques and madrassahs, and classes like the one I saw, are the best way to inoculate young people against hostile ideologies later in life. “This is your captive audience,” said Chishti – and he told me about an “Islam and Citizenship Education” curriculum that he helped write, and which is now being taught in 300 mosques around the country.

But when it came to funding for his own mosque, Chishti got only a fraction of the £20,000 in local Prevent money he applied for. He spent it on the doors, so girls’ classes could be taught at the same time as the boys’. “It was a handout,” he says. He puts the snub down to local politics. But there was also a principle at stake. Councils have considerable freedom in how they deliver Prevent, and officials in Rochdale didn’t want to put too much funding into solely Muslim institutions, for fear of making community relations worse. “The purpose of the money,” Mohammed Sharif, Rochdale’s lead councillor on Prevent, told me, “is to bring all people together.”

This disagreement – whether preventing violent extremism is a matter of “bringing people together” or a more targeted, ideological battle – is one you hear again and again in Prevent. It derives from the policy’s central conundrum: whether you can knit together mistrusting communities while weeding out troublemakers at the same time.

These dual aims have shaped Prevent from its earliest days, in the summer of 2001. The four months from May to September presented the government, and particularly the Home Office, with two frightening and all but unheard-of problems: racially motivated rioting in northern British towns and the terrorist attacks in the US. Over the next two years, the two phenomena were addressed separately. In an influential inquiry for the Home Office into the riots in Oldham, Burnley and Bradford, Ted Cantle, the former chief executive of Nottingham Council, described “the parallel lives” of white and Asian people, and popularised the concept of “community cohesion” as a way of bringing them together. Community cohesion is now a statutory duty for local authorities and schools in England and Wales, and emphasises increasing contact between different social groups. During the same period, in response to September 11, officials in the Cabinet Office wrote Britain’s first counter-terrorism strategy, known as CONTEST. Its four Ps – Prevent, Pursue, Protect and Prepare – have guided policy since.

Sir David Omand was in charge of drawing up the four Ps. A former director of GCHQ and permanent secretary at the Home Office, he became the UK’s first security and intelligence co-ordinator in 2002, with overall responsibility for national security. He is now teaching at King’s College London and I met him one afternoon in Holborn. Omand explained that while three of the Ps came with ready-made programmes of work, Prevent was, by its nature, open-ended.

The first phase was research. “One of the first questions I asked was, ‘Who are these people and why are they trying to kill us?’” recalls Omand. “‘What do they want?’ ‘How do they think?’” Militant ideologies were studied and psychiatrists were called in to explain the radicalisation of young jihadis. At the same time, socio-economic data were compiled, which showed high levels of deprivation, unemployment and social exclusion among Britain’s Muslim communities. Even now, around 30 per cent of young Muslims leave school without any qualifications, about twice the national average, and a third of Muslim households have no adult in work. According to Omand, the task of preventing terrorism in the UK quickly began to split in two.

One track of Prevent, officials decided, would be “individual diversion from violence”. Inspired by “deradicalisation” programmes in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and leavened with experience from drug interventions and removing young people from gangs, this is now and up and running at 28 sites in the UK. Known as the “Channel Project”, it is normally jointly administered by the police, youth offending teams, schools and community-based mentors. More than 400 young people, overwhelmingly male, have been referred to Channel programmes since 2007 and none has gone on to commit a terrorist offence.

“The other part of Prevent, and there is no evidence that I know of that this has had any substantial success,” said Omand, “was changing people’s radical mindset.” The reason for trying to do so – despite the deep reservations of some officials and the warnings from Muslims – was the difficulty in identifying the difference between those who hold hostile, intolerant views and those who are prepared to act on them. “The security authorities’ actual evidence was that people shuffled in and out of violence fairly easily,” said Omand. “In other words, once someone had a fairly strongly radical mindset, it didn’t take that much.”

Predicting who will cross over into violence has not got any easier since then. The four July 7 bombers and the 200 or so other people convicted of terrorist offences in the UK since 2001 have come from a wide variety of backgrounds. There has been a doctor from Glasgow and a 22-year-old from Exeter with the mental age of 10. “Really, what is it that connects these guys?” asked the former civil servant. “I mean, Sidique Khan – we’d have given him the CBE if we’ve heard about him before he blew up King’s Cross.” (Sidique Khan was responsible for the bomb at Edgware Road.)

Being unable to identify dangerous individuals with any precision meant trying to reach them by association. How to do this, however, was highly uncertain. Officials decided that this experimental wing of Prevent should be run by the Department for Local Government (now DCLG) but that its goal was counter-terrorism. “There is one point that I think it is important to register,” Omand told me. “It was about diverting people from terrorism, not in the first instance to build healthy communities. Although we could see there could be a close link between the two.”

The relationship between “community cohesion” and preventing terrorism is the sore heart of Prevent. Uncertainty about whether they are the same thing, hunches that one follows from the other or that one, ultimately, is more important, have confused the policy. Right from the beginning, some local authorities, including those with large Muslim populations such as Leicester, did not see the merit in separate Prevent initiatives. Instead, they used the money to fund existing community projects. Kirklees, the local authority that contains Huddersfield and Dewsbury, homes to two of the July 7 bombers, did the same. “We didn’t like the strategy,” Mehboob Khan, the council leader, told me. “Part of the radicalisation process is that sense of isolation, that feeling that grievances aren’t being addressed. But aren’t those common factors of poor cohesion too?” This overlap means that many Prevent-funded projects are indistinguishable from the general community and youth work that has been going on for years. A study of 261 Prevent projects in 2007-08 found that just four (1.5 per cent) were aimed primarily at those “justifying or glorifying violent extremism”.

A failure to talk about violent extremism is a striking characteristic of many Prevent projects. The most vague and tangential initiatives have been branded useful in the fight against terror: a DVD about life as a Muslim in Rochdale by the “Don’t hate us, rate us” youth group; invitations to Muslims in Dewsbury to take up rugby; motivational speakers in Birmingham. “People will say they are positive about Prevent,” said Paul Thomas, a lecturer at the University of Huddersfield who has studied the policy since its inception. “But when they are prodded, the reason they don’t have a problem with it is because they are a million miles off the agenda. So one, they’re not using the money right, and two, we’re kidding ourselves, aren’t we?”

. . .

This kind of dismay is often strongest among those entrusted with what the government calls the sharp end of Prevent: identifying and turning back those who have taken steps towards terrorism. One evening, I drove to Walthamstow in north-east London to meet Hanif Qadir, one of the country’s best-known deradicalisers. Qadir, a bearish man with a soft Geordie accent, was on his way to fight with the Taliban in 2001 when he turned back in Pakistan. Nowadays, with his two brothers, he runs the Active Change Foundation, which, with the help of a gym and some pool tables, seeks to rescue young people from gangs, prostitution and the lure of violence. We went into an empty hall. Qadir let his constantly vibrating BlackBerry go unanswered for a few minutes and lit a cigarette. He began by telling me about a case he was working on – “the mother contacted us … he’s fell over the edge into a terrorist network” – and how he tries to redirect young people away from extremism. “What you’re not doing is calming him down,” he said. “You’re trying to divert his energy more positively.”

Qadir spoke like the only man who could see the danger threatening Britain. “There’s been a lot of fluffiness going on. The way local authorities have been looking at this, they’ve had their heads buried in the sand more than the Muslim communities … They don’t realise we are at war in Afghanistan, we are at war in Iraq, and that we have got a war in our streets, in the UK.” Qadir said he had run out of patience with those who complained that Prevent was aimed too squarely at Muslims. “If you’re going to look at Prevent and say immediately, ‘This is all about me and my faith,’ then quite frankly, and this is where a lot of people don’t like me for saying this, well, yeah, actually, it is,” he said. “We have to accept that we’ve got a problem, and accepting Prevent is accepting that we’ve got a problem.”

Before I left, Qadir told me what can happen when Prevent doesn’t work. One of the young men who used to come to his gym was Ahmed Abdullah Ali, a 28-year-old from Walthamstow who is now serving a 40-year prison sentence for leading the plot to bring down seven trans atlantic airliners in 2006 with bomb-making ingredients hidden in fizzy drinks bottles. “I knew Ahmed Abdullah very well,” said Qadir. “I personally didn’t think … ” He paused. “It was an error, a miscalculation on my side … But it does haunt us, and I’m just thinking, ‘What would have happened if he hadn’t been arrested?’ We would still be feeling the repercussions of that.”

. . .

By its nature, Qadir’s work can’t apply to many people. But the logic of Prevent is that his brand of intervention sits at the far end of a spectrum that begins with community cohesion – choirs, sports days and citizenship classes. Yet the three-year history of Prevent is littered with harmless initiatives turned toxic by the idea that these activities should be connected in any way, and the suspicion that security is their underlying aim. One of the recommendations of the taskforce of Muslim leaders convened after the July bombings, for instance, was to improve the socioeconomic data held on their communities. The 2001 census, which asked citizens to identify their faith for the first time, was a watershed moment for many Muslim charities, because it proved their concerns about some endemic educational, economic and social problems.

“Mapping” and data collection by Prevent, however, have been among its most controversial activities. Last April, An-Nisa, a Muslim women’s charity in north London, complained about Prevent-funded surveys that combined questions about public services with inquiries about terrorism and politics. Six months later, a front-page article in The Guardian accused Prevent of being an intelligence-gathering exercise, seeking information on the political and religious views, mental health and sexual activities of “innocent Muslims”.

The problem for people who work in Prevent or accept funding cannot deny entirely its ambiguity. “If you’re the MI5 man looking for terrorism in Manchester you’d be mad not to get alongside these guys [Prevent-funded groups] and get some information from them,” said a former Home Office civil servant. Sir David Omand, the man who came up with Prevent, agreed. “Is one saying that the state should divide its activities into one set of activities in which it takes notice of individuals and one set of activities in which it doesn’t? That’s a very naive point of view.”

. . .

In one of my last interviews in Yorkshire, I met Sabiha Iqbal, one of 24 members of the Young Muslims Advisory Group (YMAG), a body set up in 2008 to advise the government on delivering Prevent. We met at the entrance of the University of Bradford, where Iqbal, who is 19, is studying law. Wearing boots, a backpack and a headscarf, she explains that she was a fluent navigator of the sensitive waters of Prevent. But after two years in YMAG, she was tired of having the same conversations again and again. “I’m at the stage now where I feel I can do more without Prevent because then I won’t be confining myself to always talking about extremism,” she said. “Always having to talk about the BNP, or al-Qaeda or whatever.”

The fatigue of someone like Iqbal does not sit well with the ambitions of Prevent, and the idea of a “generational policy”. Although a Conservative government could well reform the programme, there is a sharp dissonance between Prevent’s plans for the future – further funding of £100m by 2011 and export to countries such as Pakistan – and the frayed nerves of those expected to deliver it. I stayed in touch with Iqbal and two days after Christmas, she e-mailed me to say that she had decided to step down from YMAG. “While I remain willing to work with those who are involved, I don’t personally feel I can work for an agenda I find divisive,” she wrote.

“The reason I initially agreed to work on Prevent was because I do not agree with terrorism and division and I wanted to help in any way possible. But I no longer feel this is true of my role. As Noam Chomsky rightly put it: ‘The best way to stop terrorism is to stop participating in it.’”

Sam Knight is a regular contributor to the FT Weekend Magazine.