Finsbury Park: Inside the British Jihad By Pratik Chougule

Stepping off the subway at Finsbury Park, the change in scenery could not have been more acute. Just an hour earlier, I had been awed by the grandeur of Big Ben, towering over the British Houses of Parliament. It is the symbol of the England in our history books: a beacon of liberty, tolerance, and stability.

Finsbury Park is different. Small shops and ragged apartments line the streets of this working class area of North London. More pronounced than the socioeconomic inequality is the cultural discrepancy. Grocery stores feature Middle Eastern foods and advertisements for cheap phone calls to the East while women clad in veils and burkas stroll with their young children wearing kufis. As Christopher Hitchens remarks of Finsbury Park in the June 2007 issue of Vanity Fair, “Returning to the old place after a long absence, I found that it was the scent of Algeria that now predominated.”1

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