How Britain exports Islamist extremism to Bangladesh

SINCE THE first wave of Bangladeshi migrants arrived in Britain in the 1970s, foreign-born preachers have held sway in the community. For a while the most visible consequence to outsiders was when Bangladeshi restaurants stopped selling alcohol, after conservative clerics such as Delwar Hossain Sayeedi came to preach temperance to the diaspora in the 1990s (some curry houses found a theological loophole in the form of “bring your own booze”). Recent years have seen more serious worries about the influence of foreign extremists. In February Shamima Begum, an east-London schoolgirl, was stripped of her British citizenship after running away to join Islamic State (IS) in Syria.

Yet in Dhaka, amid a rising tempo of terrorist attacks, officials are asking who is radicalising whom. Bangladesh’s government often blames outsiders for its problem with radical Islam. But here it has a point. British citizens have been implicated in the planning, funding and promotion of terrorism in Bangladesh, to the alarm of the country’s security services. “We do not know what is driving radicalisation in Britain,” says a senior officer in Bangladesh’s Counter-Terrorism Intelligence Bureau, “but it is contaminating our society.”