It was a wet, blustery day in Birmingham and Shahid Butt was on the street broadcasting to TikTok. “‘So many hate comments, brave keyboard warriors’,” he said, looking at his phone, which was standing on a tripod outside a pizza shop. “I know, bro. What can I say? I mean, you know, we’re here. We’re live. I’m standing here. Come and say it to my face instead of giving me the big one on the old keypad.”
Butt, who is a tall, broad man, had been forced to bend a little to look into the camera. He was wearing sandy chinos, a white shirt and a blue worker jacket, the anonymous uniform of the modern office. He has creamy white veneers and a dark, wrinkled spot at the top of his forehead, a zabiba, formed by the lifelong impression of skull to prayer mat. He drives a Mercedes and manages twoHMOs.
He was also once convicted for terrorism, jailed in Yemen in 1999 for plotting to blow up the British consulate, an Anglican church and a hotel on Christmas Day. It is this last fact that has attracted the hate comments to his TikTok and drawn an unusually intense level of interest in his campaign to win a council seat in a poor ward in the south of Birmingham.
One Saturday afternoon in April, Butt set up a stall along the area’s central artery. I had been speaking to him for weeks by this point, trying to understand who he was. Birmingham Yardley’s Labour MP, Jess Phillips, had called his candidacy “absolutely appalling”. The Daily Telegraph had dubbed him a “terror tormentor”. Sharon Osbourne had threatened to stand against him. Butt insisted he was innocent, stitched up by the Yemeni authorities and abandoned by Islamophobic British officials.
Those around him sympathised. “You hear the name Shahid Butt growing up,” said Sami, an imposing young man who had travelled from Wolverhampton to volunteer. “It’s a symbol of resistance for us really. The issues that we went through in the Eighties and Nineties weren’t small.” Butt had helped the Pakistani community stand up to racism and defend themselves, Sami said. Now he was teaching young people that they could enter politics.
When I arrived, Butt had been speaking into his mobile phone. But he is 60 and not particularly adept at social media. He likes to make videos that are five or ten minutes long in which he talks patiently to the camera from the front seat of his car. “If you don’t have the attention span of more than 30 seconds, then maybe you just need to listen to Akhmed, innit,” he suggested jokingly when we stepped away from the camera.
Though they are both 38, Akhmed Yakoob and Shakeel Afsar, the men under whose banner Butt is standing, seem to have been locked in a dark room as children and allowed to scroll TikTok for 16 hours a day. In barked dispatches to hundreds of thousands of followers they condemn rival politicians and dispense pearls of blokeish wisdom. “As a man, learn to read people, manage money, and stay calm under pressure,” announced Yakoob in one recent blast. “Remember that.”
The pair lead the Independent Candidates Alliance (ICA), a loose pro-Palestine, anti-Labour coalition. It is not a party, but it may become one. Yakoob previously came third in the mayoral election, tilting the balance of the contest and cutting Labour’s margin. Afsar was within a few thousand votes of winning a seat at the last general election. Neither are standing for the council, having decided to build their power base by getting others into office. Thanks to a deal cut with George Galloway’s Workers Party they hope to make significant gains on 7 May, when all 101 of the city’s seats are up for election.
Labour, which has run Birmingham since 2012, looks ready to crumble. A rolling series of crises – bin strikes, bankruptcy, overspending – has reached a critical mass. Muslim voters are furious about Keir Starmer’s complicity in Israel’s slaughter. In Sparkhill, the rubbish has been piling up. And a candidate who once went to jail for terrorism has a serious chance of victory.
During Ramadan, the ICA paused its campaign. It was tiring to canvas during a period of fasting and the voters wanted to be left alone with their families. One bright day in late February, I walked from the centre of Birmingham to Sparkhill, past overflowing bins and a “wanted” poster showing Benjamin Netanyahu. “Please STOP DUMPPING RUBBISH” was written in white paint on the side of one terraced house.
Located close to factories and heavy industry, Sparkhill sucked in workers in the 20th century – first Irish, then Indian and Pakistani. It is now almost 80 per cent Asian and 80 per cent Muslim, according to the latest census figures. Ragged Palestinian flags flapped from lamp posts. Two large white banners displayed the Shahadah, the Islamic declaration of faith, and declared: “O Allah you are the one who forgives greatly and loves to forgive, so forgive us.” As Butt would later put it to me: “You’re looking at this and you’re thinking, ‘Oh my goodness. It’s like bloody Pakistan here.’ You know? Spot the white man. You’re the only white man we’ve probably seen all day.”
I met Butt and Afsar by the bandstand in Sparkhill Park. Afsar is younger, with spiky hair, but the men were dressed similarly in black jeans and jackets. Butt was born in Lahore but came to Britain as a baby. The park was where he had played, where he fought, where he drummed up support for Muslim causes abroad. When he was a child it was also much whiter. Graffiti reading “APL” – Anti-Paki League – was scrawled on walls. Women would stand outside their houses, he said, and racially abuse passing kids.
At 11 years old, Butt was on his way to school when he was attacked by a group of skinheads and beaten up. “That’s when I started to become a lot more aggressive,” he told me. His fight or flight instinct kicked in, and he chose to fight. “I was like that because everywhere around me it was, ‘Fuck off, you Paki – go back to where you came from.’ Why am I being called a Paki?”
So Butt and his mates went to a local army-surplus store and bought matching Italian combat jackets. They patched red eagles on the left arm and formed a gang that they named the Lynx. One early recruit was Moazzam Begg, who lived nearby and would go on to become one of the most high-profile victims of the war on terror, held in Guantanamo Bay for nearly two years before being released without charge. (Begg denies that he was ever involved in terrorism.)
His father had integrated into British society in an almost Tory style, Begg wrote in his autobiography, Enemy Combatant, embracing Victorian values and sending his son to a Jewish school because it offered the best education. Things changed in his teenage years. He had English, Irish and Afro-Caribbean friends, but the Lynx were mainly Kashmiri. These boys, who came from strict, traditional families, began playing truant, drinking and taking drugs. “Once we dealt with all the skinheads and the National Front then unfortunately we just started fighting each other,” Butt told me. Soon the gang devolved into petty criminality.
It was not until 1989 that Butt woke up. The year before, Salman Rushdie had published The Satanic Verses, a surrealist satire of Islam that provoked fury across the Muslim world. The anger was ignited not by the Ayatollah Khomeini, whose fatwa would come later, but by Jamaat-e-Islami, a hardline Islamist group based in Pakistan. In Bradford, the local council of mosques organised a book burning. Then, thousands of British Muslims, including Butt, demonstrated in Hyde Park.
It was a pivotal moment in the relationship between Western nations and their Muslim minorities. Liberal multiculturalism had pushed up against something hard edged and intransigent. Both sides found themselves reshaped by the encounter. “I always say I am one of Rushdie’s children,” one secular raver turned Salafist told the BBC decades later. “I was radicalised by white liberals.”
Today, Butt remembers the protest as an invigorating day out. It was perhaps the only time he had been to London since visiting Buckingham Palace with his parents. And he has no regrets about taking part. “In my opinion he’s a vile piece of work,” he told me as we sat on a park bench. “I understand that people have freedom of speech, but you don’t have the freedom to insult.” He would happily demonstrate against The Satanic Verses again.
In the wake of these protests, someone showed Butt a video of atrocities in Bosnia and Croatia. It was nasty stuff: death, destruction, severed genitals. “How can a human being be so evil to another human being?” he asked himself. And so he hitched a ride on an aid lorry and slipped into the warzone. It proved a revelation.
“I’ve had a bit of a, you know, fucked up life, as they say. You know what I mean? I got kicked out of school. I don’t really have an education. I don’t really have any skill sets,” he said. “My parents are always like, ‘You’re useless. You’re never gonna, you know – you’ve ruined your life,’ and all that sort of stuff. Getting in trouble with the police. And here I was now, doing this good deed.”
Butt signed up with the foreign fighters brigade of the Bosnian army, he told me, and spent several years dipping in and out of the conflict. In Sparkhill, he stood at the bandstand and spread the word about what was going on. In Bosnia, he fought and grew closer to God and became a real man.
It is not an exaggeration to say that violence has defined Butt’s life. As a teenager, he fought every day. When explaining his decision to stay in Bosnia, he held his fists up at me. “I just went back to my basic instincts, which were these,” he said. Later, on the campaign trail, he would tell me he admired something Jordan Peterson had said. “In order to be a good person you have to be capable of extreme violence. You have to become a monster.” Anyone not capable of committing extreme violence was not capable of rejecting it.
Butt was firm that he had never endorsed violence against civilians, though. “All my life, even though I’ve spoken about fighting and doing jihad and fighting, you know, to protect Islam and the Muslims, it’s been under the rules and regulations of Islam,” he said. Killing women and children was forbidden.
“You can’t even destroy a tree,” said Afsar.
“You can’t destroy a tree,” repeated Butt.
After Bosnia, Butt travelled to Pakistan. He had been before, but on this trip a family member suggested going to a big talk. The big talk was organised by Jamaat-e-Islami, who had whipped up the fury against Rushdie. Butt introduced himself to some of the guys on stage and soon he was travelling into Afghanistan to train at one of their camps. This was the second Afghan Civil War, in which the country splintered into bloody fragments. Butt had dreamed of being a dog of war. Now he was living it.
On his return to England in the late 1990s, Butt was transformed. He had become, he said half-jokingly, the “big mujahid guy”. Butt’s braggadocio, which seems to come as naturally to him as fighting, can be a little difficult to parse. At one point, he told me he had been the Che Guevara of British Islam. London’s rival Islamist factions had battled to recruit him. “I’m a group in myself,” he said on another occasion. “I don’t need to join anybody. It’s like when I used to do my presentations and they would say, ‘Have you got a PowerPoint presentation?’ I’d go, ‘Mate, I am the bloody PowerPoint presentation.’”
This was a fecund period for radical Islam in the UK. There was Omar Bakri Muhammad, the “Tottenham Ayatollah”; Abu Hamza, with his hooked hand; and Abu Qatada, though he was more for the Arabic-speaking brothers, Butt told me.
Butt met Abu Hamza and they got along. Both men had fought in Afghanistan and both resented the American-aligned dictators of the Muslim world. He said the things that others did not have the guts to say. Abu Hamza would later be jailed for life in America for supporting terrorism. Butt insisted he had never heard the cleric speaking about such things when they were together: his focus was on the Muslim dictators alone, he told me.
Then came Yemen. First, Butt’s own account. After Bosnia and Afghanistan, he was 33 years old and a real warrior. He wanted to set up a security firm for Muslim countries, but he could not get weapons training in Britain. So he travelled to Yemen because, he was told, it was like the Wild West. “I thought, ‘That sounds good.’”
But the Yemeni authorities, upset at the depiction of their nation as a hub of terror, decided to frame Butt and his companions as jihadis to get back at the West, and he was tortured into confessing. “I became a bargaining chip between Yemen and Britain,” he told me ruefully.
His trial came to a different conclusion. After six months, the judge dismissed the claims of Butt and his co-defendants that they had been tortured. Prosecutors alleged that the men, who included the son and step-son of Abu Hamza, had been sent from Britain on Hamza’s orders. Once in Yemen, they had trained in a camp run by Zein Al-Abidine al-Mihdar, an Islamic militant, and were found with rocket-propelled grenades, TNT explosives, anti-tank rockets and mines. Butt got five years. As their sentences were read out, the men shouted “Allahu akbar”.
By the time we finished talking, Butt and Afsar and I had been in the park for hours. The winter sun had dipped low into the trees. They held bundles of leaflets they were yet to deliver. We agreed that I would come back when Butt’s campaign was in full swing.
When I spoke to David Pearce about Yemen, he conjured faded scenes of Arabist glamour. His friendship with the former prime minister Abdul-Karim Al-Iryani; chewing khat with local businessmen; driving across the country with no minder. The Yemenis were friendly people, he said. And a diplomat was only as good as his contacts. In 1998, he was Britain’s consul-general in the country. When I passed him my phone number through a network for former diplomats, it did not take long for him to call me, eager to talk about Shahid Butt.
Pearce was based in Sana’a, the capital, but often stayed at the consulate in Aden. It was a basic house, with a wall around it and a statue of Queen Victoria in the front garden that he had rescued from a scrapyard. That year, he planned to celebrate Christmas there with his wife and children, who would visit from boarding school. Had the bomb plot come off, they might have all been killed.
Instead, Butt and seven others were arrested. Pearce told me he visited them every day in prison as part of his consular duty. He attended every day of their trial. And he saw no signs of torture. Butt, he said, seemed like a bully. Pearce believed that he was the group’s ringleader and he remains convinced of his guilt.
Then, while the case was being heard, another group, the Aden-Abyan Islamic Army, kidnapped 16 tourists and demanded the release of Butt and his co-defendants in exchange for their lives. It was for masterminding this plot that Abu Hamza would later be jailed in America.
Butt denies any connection to the kidnap scheme. He told me he knew nothing about them, as he was in prison at the time they took place. From what he had heard later, he said, the perpetrators had carried them out to release “their own Yemeni friends” from prison.
When the Yemeni army went in to rescue the hostages, four were killed, including three Britons. Before the victims’ bodies could be repatriated, Pearce had to see them. He remembers watching an orange-haired mortician pluck out bullets from the corpses with what looked like a metal clothes peg, a grotesque image that has since lingered in his mind. In the aftermath, his marriage broke down and he was diagnosed with PTSD.
Pearce is now retired and living in Crewe. He still has nightmares about what he saw in the morgue, though they are less frequent. Recently, he has been rewatching the press coverage of Butt’s trial on YouTube. He cannot understand why he was allowed back into Britain while Shamima Begum had her citizenship stripped. He has also joined Reform UK and he told me that he had approached them to see if its home affairs spokesperson, Zia Yusuf, would like to accompany him to Sparkhill to confront Butt. He has not heard back.
While I was away from Birmingham, the ICA seemed to keep getting into trouble. In early March, after Ayatollah Khamenei was killed, Yakoob, Afsar and Butt went to a vigil where people held photos of the autocrat and set an Israeli flag on fire. (Butt would later tell me he only tuned up to confront Zionist protesters.) At another protest, Yakoob was arrested on suspicion of racially abusing a police officer. Then Sky News filmed him telling a voter that “Zionists control everything” and he was accused of being an anti-Semite.
It is unclear what exactly the ICA will do if they win a significant number of seats. With Labour’s vote share likely to collapse, power could fragment within the council chamber. Unwieldy new coalitions may be built. But each ICA councillor will, in theory, be free to act as they wish. One could be fighting for Kashmiri independence while another takes on the 30-mile-an-hour speed limit, Afsar told me. “Our aim is to bring the power back into the community,” he said.
Labour is trying to present the election as a straight fight between itself and Reform, an echo of the party’s national strategy. It hopes this will be enough to deter its supporters from flirting with the independents. When I spoke to Birmingham’s Labour council leader, John Cotton, he put on a brave face. Much of the city’s problems were thanks to years of Tory austerity; voters recognised the tough choices they had been forced to make; Reform and the independents would only bring division. I struggled to believe this would have much effect.
In Sparkhill, I met exactly one person who planned to vote for Labour: an elderly Pakistani man selling electronics from a wooden stand. “In my opinion, Labour alive then we alive,” he told me. “Labour is neither rightist nor leftist. Migrants like us, then we feel safe.” As we chatted, a man wearing a full Hugo Boss tracksuit, who insisted I call him Hugo Boss, butted in. “It’s pointless voting,” he said, his mouth studded with gold teeth. “Two grand we pay in council tax. What do we pay for?” He was jabbing his hands about as he spoke. Both men agreed that the rat population had boomed during the bin strike. “Mate, come here in the evening you’ll see they’ll be racing,” said Hugo Boss.
During Butt’s day canvassing on the street in April, the rain turned into hail. Afsar and I stepped under a plastic awning to talk and I asked him about Yakoob being caught on camera discussing Zionist influence. Sky seemed to think it was a gotcha moment, but Afsar was blasé. Yakoob had not meant they control everything.
“My grandma used to say to me, ‘Oh, if you mess about, the boogeyman will come after you,’” he said. “And now in societies it’s become, if you say something that’s anti-Israeli establishment it’s like, the Zionists will come after you.” The Zionists would try to shut down the ICA, he said, but that was OK. He and Akhmed had been working on a plan.
When Butt joined us, I asked him if he knew who David Pearce was. An entirely blank expression passed across his face. Then he remembered. “He always had a cigar in his mouth,” he laughed. “We called him Roger Moore.” Both men dismissed Pearce’s claims out of hand. “One of the torture methods is that they beat your feet,” said Butt. “Did he check my feet? ’Cos I had sandals on.” He could not have shown his injuries, he said, because he feared his jailers’ wrath.
Then Afsar left and Butt and I stepped into an Indian café. I ordered us sweet, spiced coffees and when we sat down he said his mind was racing. He spent some time tapping in silence on his phone before showing me a scanned PDF. The document, which he later sent me in full, was a collection of letters sent between British officials.
Most significantly, it contained one written by Patricia Scotland, then a Foreign Office minister, in which she said that there appeared to have been “fundamental violations” of the rights of Butt and his co-defendants and that their verdict may therefore be unsafe. When I showed the files to a British official involved in the case at the time, who did not wish to be named, they said their recollections were that the letters were accurate. As far as they could remember, the British government had felt a lot of sympathy for the men’s families.
By now the hail had stopped and the sun was beaming through the window. Butt eased back in his chair. He seemed relaxed. I felt relaxed. We talked about Iran and racism and the 2024 riots. And then, Butt started talking about Jews.
“If you wanna do a comparison, we are being attacked more than the Jews,” he said. Three ambulances had been burnt out in Golders Green and the whole country had gone into meltdown. He did not realise the Jews had their own ambulances, but now he knew they had their own police force as well and their own segments of hospitals.
“Hold on a minute,” he said. “But I thought we were taking over the country. I thought we were Islamicising the country. Actually, this is becoming a Jewish state, not a Muslim state. But why isn’t that spoken about? You know why. Because who controls the media? They do.” By now he had taken his glasses off and was waggling them around in his left hand.
Clips of Nick Fuentes, the Holocaust-denying white nationalist, had been popping up in Butt’s social media feed. And while Fuentes was a “flipping psycho”, he was also saying what everyone was thinking but nobody had the guts to say. “Fair play to him,” Butt said. “He’s telling you who the enemy is.” Why were we getting involved in someone else’s war? Christians ought to side with Muslims because the Jews say in their Talmud that Jesus is in hell being boiled in his own excrement.
“Really?” I asked. “I haven’t read it.”
“You see, this is the problem that we have, yeah, is unfortunately people just absorb everything that they’re told but they don’t fact check things,” Butt said. He had not read the Talmud himself but he knew the Jews believe Jesus is being boiled in his own excrement, he said, because he had seen a Christian preacher explaining it online.
“I want you to go on to Google and type in ‘what does the Talmud say about Jesus being boiled in his own excrement?’” he said to me.
So I went to Google and typed in “what does the Talmud say about Jesus being boiled in his own excrement?”. And when I watched a video from Rabbi Daniel Rowe, a director of the Jewish educational charity Aish UK, I discovered that Butt was wrong. The figure said to be burning in hell is a man named Yeshu, a superficially similar but different name to Jesus. He was, Rowe said, likely not even a Christian at all.
In the café we talked a little more, then Sami came in to sit with us and Butt hailed his maturity. British Muslims were vilified in the press, he said. Their story was not told. “People might say, ‘Well, yeah, but Shahid, you’re not the best person to fight our cause,’” he said. “You’re probably right – maybe I am not the right person. But I see myself as I always have, and I always use this term. I’m like a stormtrooper. I’m special forces. My job is to open the way. So right now I’m opening the door.”
[Further reading: The Palestine hunger striker standing for election]
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