Anjem Choudary - face of Islam in Britain?

The wonderful thing about Twitter is that you can get such a wide range of views. The number of people followed by @anjemchaudary is zero.
— Tom Holland (@holland_tom) October 21, 2012

Jim Rohn once said "You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with". This unprovoked assault on English grammar contains a concept with which I agree, and if we apply this maxim to Twitter accounts followed by Anjem Choudary's we are left with the impression he is a nobody.

There is little I can do to analyze zero accounts followed. I can, however, examine those 2,186 folk who choose to follow Anjem. Who are they?

First I checked their locations. My efforts were hampered a little by those who chose to describe their location as "Dar-al-Kufr" (land of unbelievers), kuffrland, Londonistan and other spoof locations, but there was enough to give a representative sample and countries Anjem may wish to consider should he wish to further his career abroad are listed to the left.

Those outside the UK fell outside my interest; I was curious only to see if he enjoyed support of many British Muslims. With that I took a closer look at the 57% and noticed something of a trend:

Filtering out Allah and Muslim, then doing a wordcloud of a sample of those remaining revealed quite a few EDL fans. While I must admit a lack of familiarity with all of Anjem's published works I'm of the strong opinion that he and the English Defence League have not collaborated an any projects to date. I feel it safe to say they do not warm to each other, and assume many of these followers are not also fans.

But how to check further?

I fed Anjem's account through another script, and checked to see what his followers also follow. I reproduce for your entertainment most popular 31 accounts amongst those that follow Anjem. I've taken the liberty of highlighting a few I feel Anjem may not endorse. The percentage of his followers that follow each account is listed to its left.

22.22%	BBC Breaking News
21.56%	Al Jazeera English
19.48%	WikiLeaks
16.39%	Barack Obama
16.13%	Reuters Top News
15.83%	Tommy Robinson EDL
15.32%	Breaking News
13.55%	HSM Press Office
13.55%	George Galloway
12.89%	Islamic Thoughts
12.73%	UK Prime Minister
12.73%	EnglishDefenceLeague
12.48%	Salman Rushdie
12.33%	Piers Morgan
12.33%	BBC News (World)
12.13%	Joseph Barton
12.08%	CNN Breaking News
12.02%	Bill Gates
12.02%	Robert Spencer
11.62%	The Economist
11.42%	Lord Sugar
11.42%	Dalai Lama
11.16%	Wayne Rooney
11.01%	yvonneridley
10.81%	The New York Times
10.65%	Rio Ferdinand
10.40%	YouTube
10.40%	Ricky Gervais
10.30%	Imran Khan
10.25%	Frankie Boyle
10.15%	Stephen Fry

Filtering out the news websites, it seems the EDL is inordinately popular amongst his followers. Anjem feels gays should be stoned to death, but over 10% of his followers enjoy the work of Stephen Fry.

UK Muslims do not like the chap. His followers are not fans. So why do I keep seeing him on TV as a voice of Islam?

A young Anjem "Andy" Choudary