THE TELEGRAPH: As part of the bohemian scene in swinging sixties London, Ian Dallas inspired Eric Clapton to write Layla and counted George Harrison and Edith Piaf among his friends.
Born into a landowning clan in Ayr, south-west Scotland, he had left the family estate for London and quickly fell in with a host of stars after writing and directing a series of television hits.
He directed a play starring Albert Finney, wrote versions of the classics Jane Eyre and Vanity Fair for the BBC and even acted in the Federico Fellini classic 8½.
But these days Mr Dallas is famed for very different reasons as the leader of an extreme Islamic group with thousands of followers across the world.
He has called for Britain to be run by a Muslim council and likened the war in Afghanistan to the Holocaust.
During the Sixties, he became increasingly disillusioned with his London life and began exploring Islam. In 1967 he met Shaykh Abdalkarim Daudi in Fes, Morocco, converted to Islam and took the name Abdalqadir.
He spent years travelling north Africa, learning from various leading Muslim scholars before founding the orthodox Murabitun Worldwide Movement in the early 1980s.
It now has more than 10,000 committed followers across the world – spread from Denmark to Indonesia – and thousands more who support the movement.
Shaykh Abdalqadir as-Sufi, as he is now known, believes the Islam world will conquer the "Jewish dominated" West with an [sic] hardline interpretation of Islamic law.
"(Israel) knows that without its massive defence subsidy from the USA it could not last one financial year," he states.
Abdalqadir's teachings range from the claim that movies and football "degrade the proletariat" to calls for Middle Eastern-style monarchical rule in Britain supported by a moral body of Muslims. >>> Barney Henderson | Saturday, February 20, 2010
