Robb Leech Takes You Inside Britain's Largest Mosque in His New Documentary

In 2010, Robb Leech—an ex-tree surgeon turned filmmaker—made the documentary My Brother the Islamist. It is an intensely personal film following his step-brother Richard's conversion to Islam. Not only was Richard a white Muslim convert from a middle-class family in Weymouth, but he had been converted, or radicalized, by Jihadist hate preacher Anjem Choudary—the fundamentalist Muslim cleric once dubbed "Britain's most dangerous man" and the driving force behind the now banned radical organization, Islam4UK.

"It felt like he'd been brainwashed," Leech says, recounting his brother's radicalization. "Making the film was genuinely my way of trying to understand it, what had happened, and trying to reconnect with him."

My Brother the Islamist gave an emotive insight into Richard's (now renamed Salahuddin) new life as an extremist propagator, a role which he wholeheartedly threw himself into. Richard's subsequent arrest in 2012, and his conviction in 2013 for six years (he pleaded guilty in March 2013 to traveling to Pakistan for terror training) showed just how irrevocable his radicalization had become, and spurred Leech on to make another documentary (My Brother the Terrorist) trying, somehow, to comprehend his brother's actions.

Now, Leech has returned to the topic of Islam for the third time in order to make his new documentary, released this week, Welcome to the Mosque. Though the subject matter is familiar, Leech has approached this film from a wholly different perspective than the first two. "I'd spent the last five, six years hanging out with extremists," Leech explains. "I felt like I'd done so much about extremism, spoken so much about it, that I really should find out about the everyday Muslim community."

Despite this, he admits it took real effort getting to the stage where the mosque would allow him full access. "There's always a worry when it comes to the media, especially within the older generation, and obviously the mosque has been attacked time and time again in the past. So there was an anxiety and to be honest, I thought the odds were stacked against me.

"In the end, I spent as much time as I could in the mosque and convinced them [the trustees] that I was going to be fair and truthful; this wasn't going to be an investigation or a Panorama or anything like that. That took a bit of time and effort and persuasion, but they're trying to be more open, to engage with the wider society. Gaining the trust was the difficult part. But once I was in, they were very welcoming and warm."

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Granted unprecedented access to the East London Mosque in Whitechapel (the largest in the UK, with its own gym, nursery, two private schools, old people's home, funeral parlor, and £14 million-center [$21 million] built exclusively for women), Leech takes us inside to see what it's like to be an everyday Muslim living in Britain. Gone are the vitriolic sermons, anti-soldier protests, and burning of American flags as witnessed in the first two documentaries. Here we see the day-to-day lives of Muslims as they pray, study, and even visit the third floor's matchmaking service in hopes of finding a wife.

The contrast in mood between this documentary and its predecessors is apparent from the outset. Tonally, there's a lightness and humor that, though evident in his first two works, was always overshadowed by the darkness and tragedy of the content. Leech strikes up a friendship with Salman, the charismatic media communications manager of the mosque, as they perform Wudu (or ablution—the ritual washing before prayer) together and chat about how breaking wind can negate the ritual. He also meets up with old acquaintance Alyas Karmani, "a straight-talking imam from Bradford," who chats with Leech about the perils of the government's changing, and somewhat arbitrary, definitions of extremism.

From Islamists to EDL members, Leech seems to get along with pretty much everyone he meets, in a style reminiscent of Louis Theroux's affable brand of investigative journalism. It's a successful way of going about things (and talking to him, I see that it's a sincere reflection of his own amiable manner) and allows us to get a true sense of a place most of us have never really encountered, and wouldn't have a clue about knowing how to navigate.

"The reason I made the film, and the reason why I'm a filmmaker," Leech says, "is to provide insight rather than to make a [specific] point. It's about allowing people to see something they normally wouldn't be able to see, in a palatable way that they can engage with and then talk about.

"The mosque is viewed by a lot of people as this kind of scary, unknown place that radicalizes people… so the point for this film in particular, for me, is to help humanize the Muslim community and Islam."

For Leech, humor plays a big part in this process. "Humor in a film helps to humanize people," he says. "If you connect with someone about something that's funny, or someone makes you laugh, it's that shared moment.

"You connect with them in the same way as when something sad happens," he adds. "Being able to do that on both ends of the spectrum is powerful and I think having the humor and the tragedy, having that range, allows you to connect on a deeper level with the characters."

It's not long before this tragic element works its way into the narrative: During the filming of the documentary, the "Syria Schoolgirls" story breaks and the East London Mosque becomes linked (via a rather nebulous article in theMail on Sunday) to the schoolgirls' radicalization.

"Déjà vu," is how Leech describes it when I ask him about that moment. "In the sense that I've spent all these years in that world of radicalization and extremism, and then I come to the mosque trying to escape that and within a couple of weeks of being there, this story breaks."

I assume Leech is referencing his brother's own radicalization and its repercussions on his family, but he's adamant that isn't the case: "It was a very different thing to what happened with my stepbrother. I wanted to say to them [the families of the missing girls], 'Look, I know how you're feeling… I understand what's going on here,' but I didn't, because it was so different. These girls, they were 15, 16, at the time, and as far as anyone can tell, they were completely normal kids, no different from any other East London schoolgirl. The family knew nothing about it, and as far as I'm aware there wasn't a big change in behavior."

The Mail on Sunday's report unsurprisingly provoked some strong reactions from readers. "Blow her and her terrorist family up, job done," read one comment. "Mosques where this indoctrination goes on should be razed," said another. And with a 70 percent rise in Islamophobic attacks reported in the UK in the past year, it's clear that Britain has a very real discrimination problem.

"As an outsider to the Muslim community, I didn't really think Islamophobia was a big deal," Leech tells me when I ask if his own views changed when making the film. "I thought, it's just people feeling victimized. But the [more] time I spent in the mosque, [the more] I started to pick up on things: the way someone in a news report would talk about Muslims, politician's speeches… and I realized how much there is a focus, a negative focus, on the Muslim community."

For Leech, one of these moments of realization came when an Ofsted report was carried out at the mosque's Islamic school: "What really shocked me [was] the fact that these kids were being asked what they thought about ISIS. I couldn't see how an official body like Ofsted could come into an Islamic school and ask kids those kinds of questions.

"The impact on their [the kid's] psyche… we're making these kids question who they are. The fact that Ofsted and the government and whoever it is asking these questions and perpetuating this Islamophobia are unaware of what they're doing—you're trying to fight this massive crisis in society, but you're fundamentally making it worse."

And is this how racism's gradually developed over the past few decades, into this more insidious and less flagrant form? Leech seems to think so: "Racism, in terms of skin color, isn't acceptable anymore. You've got groups like Britain First, the BNP, EDL, they just can't be racist anymore. In terms of, you used to get that [explicit racism] in society… Whereas, being Islamophobic is almost acceptable. It's someone to blame and, because of world events—9/11 and all the things that have happened since—Islam and Muslims make a great scapegoat. And obviously it's people purporting to be Muslims who are doing these terrible things, so it's natural for ignorant people to assume that all Muslims are trying to do the same thing."

As the conversation comes to an end, I ask Leech what his brother would think about Welcome to the Mosque. Understandably reluctant to speak on Richard's behalf, Leech tells me he hasn't spoken to him since his arrest. After some careful consideration, he does offer this thought: "He may have changed his views since he's been in prison, but the Richard I knew before he was arrested, he would have said quite possibly that it wasn't a real mosque anyway, because they were teaching the wrong kind of Islam, [that] the Muslims who prayed there probably weren't real Muslims. He probably would have been critical of it."

Welcome to the Mosque airs this Wednesday on BBC2 at 8 PM.