'Terrorists' favourite bookseller' has conviction quashed Police carried out a number of raids on the Maktabah Islamic bookshop in Birmingham, out of which he was operating. The shop was originally founded by Moazzam Begg, who was arrested in Pakistan in 2002 after fleeing from Afghanistan during the fall of the Taliban and held in Guantanamo Bay. Faraz, 33, grew up in Birmingham with Pakistani parents. He has worked in administrative positions for the car manufacturer Rover, the stock broker Charles Schwab and British Gas but became involved with the bookshop at the age of 23, editing texts and producing DVDs. At Maktabah, he wrote a foreword to a book called Milestones by Sayyid Qutb, one of the main influences on al-Qaeda, circulated books by Abdullah Azzam, who mentored Osama bin Laden, and produced and distributed a DVD called "21st Century Crusaders." After he was arrested in 2007 and then released without charge, Faraz claimed that Britain was on its way to becoming a police state for Muslims. Defending his book-selling trade, he told the Cage Prisoners organisation in September: "We are a people of principles, and that's what we at Maktabah have always been. And we are neither an extremist bookshop, nor do we keep lop-sided material. What we wanted to do was present Islam as a whole. We didn't have 10 bookshelves on Jihad, we had many shelves on different matters from jurisprudence to spirituality. His appeal against his convictions was upheld last month.