The rise of the Muslim Boys.

Winston emerges menacingly from the kitchen, a meat cleaver in one hand and a kitchen knife with an eight-inch blade in the other. “I love knives,” he says, his eyes gleaming as he begins to slash the air inches from my face.

“Guns make a f***ing noise, but knives go in,” he pauses, “ silentlike, easy.” He begins stabbing the wall and hacking the plaster, and then, just as suddenly, stops, seemingly sated, like an addict who has had his fix.

He holds up his blades to inspect them. “F***ing quality,” he says, and deposits them unceremoniously his trousers. Winston, 21, black and from south London, licks his teeth as he paces around the stripped-bare flat on a Peckham estate that serves as one of his gang’s many secret hideouts. He speaks in his gang’s uniquely coded lingo.

“Knives is f***-all. Later, my bruvs will be back from their robberies with our skengelengs [guns] and cream [money]. Later there be MACinside-10s [sub-machine guns] all over the floor, laid wall to wall. And moolah! We count it - 10 grand, 20 grand. Then, after midnight,” he adds, matter-of-factly, “me and my bruvs go to mosque to pray.”

Winston’s casual depiction of a lifestyle of crime tightly bound up with religious observance would normally be regarded as paradoxical, but in his case it is what defines him. For Winston is a member of the Muslim Boys, a gang, the black community says, unlike any that has operated before in south London.