A former mill town in Lancashire has emerged as a recurring source of jihadist violence in Britain. Nelson—once known for looms, pubs, and labor militancy—has become an ideological incubator for Islamist extremism, producing multiple terrorists and exposing the consequences of long-ignored segregation and radicalization in northwest England.
With a population of just 35,000, Nelson illustrates how even a small English town can become a persistent source of jihadist violence when segregation, ideological radicalization, and official reluctance to confront extremism converge.
The deep segregation in parts of our country are fueling widening divisions and can create a permissive environment for Islamists to foster extremism.
Nelson’s status as a hotbed of jihadism was cemented on October 2, when Jihad al-Shamie, a British citizen of Syrian descent, attacked Manchester’s Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation synagogue. He reportedly pledged allegiance to ISIS before he perpetrated an attack that resulted in the death of two synagogue members and injured three others.
Investigators quickly traced Al-Shamie’s radicalization back to Nelson, reporting that he had begun attending Masjid Sunnah in 2022 and had told one of his three wives that he “really loved” the mosque. Masjid Sunnah had drawn criticism for its imam Abul Abbaas Naveed, who linked the Gaza conflict to “the plotting of the kuffar against Islam”—a term denigrating all non-Muslims.
The National Secular Society filed a complained against the mosque, calling for its charitable status to be revoked. The Charity Commission issued formal guidance to the mosque’s trustees following complaints about these sermons. Such guidance appears to have little effect with Naveed subsequently describing Jews as “treacherous.”
Al-Shamie is not the first jihadist to emerge from Nelson, whose population is 55 percent Muslim. Another Nelson resident, Muhammad Bilal, 19, was charged in February this year with six terrorism-related offences. A few months later, he pleaded guilty “to planning a gun attack and travelling to Somalia.”
In 2018 Husnain Rashid, an Islamic State supporter from Nelson, was jailed for life with a minimum term of 19 years for running an online channel named “Lone Mujahid” that provided an “e-toolkit for terrorism.” Rashid encouraged lone wolf attackers to engage in indiscriminate violence at public venues football stadiums and to target Prince George, 4, at his primary school. His sentence was reduced after appeal. According to the BBC, Rashid “suggested injecting poison into supermarket ice creams and bringing down an aircraft using lasers.”
In 2019, Victoria Layla Webster, 28, of Pine St., Nelson, pleaded guilty to two counts of providing money for purposes of terrorism and one count of inviting another defendant—a former girlfriend of a footballer—to provide money for purposes of terrorism, and was sentenced to 17 months in prison. According to The Lancashire Telegraph, Webster “spoke about extremist groups including so-called Islamic State (IS)” on Telegraph, the internet communications app.
Clearly, Islamism is taking root in Nelson and the surrounding Lancashire County, where 18-year-old Maheen Kamran, was elected as a pro-Gaza counselor in May 2025. Kamran publicly called for gender segregation — a position that sits in direct conflict with British equality law and liberal democratic principles.
Nelson’s attraction to ideological extremism has deep roots. In the early twentieth century, the town embraced Communist agitation so fervently that it earned the nickname “Little Moscow.” Nearly a century later, Nelson’s ideological landscape has shifted, but its susceptibility has not. The same town that once championed revolutionary socialism has now become fertile ground for a different form of extremism—radical political Islam—with consequences that extend far beyond Lancashire.
Nelson’s case should not be dismissed as an isolated anomaly; it is the foreseeable outcome of official neglect. After the 2017 jihadist-perpetrated London Bridge attack that cost eight people their lives, Prime Minister Theresa May acknowledged that Britain had shown “far too much tolerance of extremism” and warned that confronting it would require “difficult, and often embarrassing, conversations.” Nearly a decade later, those conversations remain largely unspoken, deferred in favor of managerial complacency and political risk-avoidance.
Nelson demonstrates the cost of that failure. Deep segregation, weak charity oversight, and the routine toleration of extremist preaching have created a permissive environment in which jihadist ideology can take root and metastasize. As Lord Walney, the government’s former adviser on political violence and disruption, told Focus on Western Islamism, “The deep segregation in parts of our country are fueling widening divisions and can create a permissive environment for Islamists to foster extremism.”
Reclaiming towns like Nelson will require the state to abandon its reluctance to act—enforcing the law evenly, confronting ideological radicalization directly, and ending the pretense that social cohesion can be achieved without challenging those who actively undermine it.
