ISIS recruits are often portrayed in the West as having been ordinary people prior to some sudden moment of radicalisation, shortly before they carry out their attacks. This is sometimes a false impression. The Manchester bomber Salman Abedi was reported, after the attack, to have had a “wild youth”; but on closer inspection, it turns out he had been reported to the authorities five years before the attack. Not such a sudden conversion.

The researcher Mubaraz Ahmed, at the Centre for Religion and Geopolitics, found that 51 per cent of prominent jihadis had graduated to violence from organisations that were radical but non-violent – most especially, the Muslim Brotherhood. “Non-violent” in this context means not actually practising violence, but these organisations do tend to glorify and promote the concept of violence while saying that it would be politically inopportune at this moment in time.