We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books
Radical is subtitled My Journey From Islamist Extremism to a
Democratic Awakening, and is very much what the subtitle says. This memoir,
or autobiography, is the story of a man who once followed a destructive radical
philosophy, has left it, and now wishes to recant publicly. It has a preface by
Kate Allen, Director of Amnesty International UK, saying “what is most fascinating is the evidence that radical extremists can
change”.
Born in the
late 1970s, Maajid Nawaz came from a Pakistani family who had immigrated to
England from the Punjab. His Muslim parents were socially liberal although his
father believed in arranged marriages. Living in Southend, the boy Maajid was
part of a small minority in what was then an overwhelmingly white area. He says
there was some mild racism at the English primary school he attended, but it
didn’t become really aggressive until he was at intermediate and secondary
schools. This was at a time when working-class English skinheads and neo-Nazis
were becoming more visible in the streets, so Asian or Caribbean kids were
often targeted for attacks by thugs.
The
teenaged Maajid reacted against his parents by becoming a hip-hop “B-boy” and
playing gangsta rap which appealed to harassed Muslim kids with its anti-police
message, though at first the “B-boys” were a mixture of Pakistani Muslims and
Afro-Caribbean Christians. As an adult he now says that gangsta rap provided a
“critique” of what was wrong – police indifference to white thuggery - but didn’t offer any solution. As a teenager
he thought he had found the solution in radical Islamism.
First there
was the way-cool image of the (extremely racist) black American “Nation of
Islam”, so that “the faith I had
inherited was no longer some backward village religion to be ashamed of, or
apologetic about. It had been re-branded as a form of resistance, as a
self-affirming defiant identity.” [Pg.44] Then there was the fact that the
reputation of Islam could make white racist yobbos back off. Young Maajid was
impressed when his brother Osman told a larger gang of skinheads that the
backpack he was wearing had a bomb in it. So awed were the skinheads by the mystique
of Islamic suicide bombers that they hastily skulked away. This was enough to
convince young Maajid and his mates of the raw power of Islamism, and to turn
him in the direction of becoming its propagandist.
There
follows an account of his years as a recruiter for Hizb al-Tahrir, a
pre-Jihadist Islamist group. When he left school, he and his Islamist mates
were able to take over the Student Union of an English community college,
largely because white and non-Muslim students hadn’t the faintest idea of what
their movement intended and what its real objectives were. As he explains it:
“Unlike the student protests in the 1960s, by
using religion and multiculturalism as a cover, we brought an entirely foreign
lexicon to the table. We knowingly presented political demands disguised as
religion and multiculturalism, and deliberately labelled any objection to our
demands as racism and bigotry. Even worse, we did this to the very generation
who had been socialist sympathizers in their youth, people sympathetic to
charges of racism, who were now in middle-management posts…… It is no wonder
that the authorities were unprepared to
deal with politicised religion as ideological agitation, and felt racist if
they tried to stop us.”[Pgs.114-115]
Maajid
Nawaz witnessed the murder of a non-Muslim student by an armed Islamist student
on the college’s London campus, but he himself was not prosecuted by police as
he had been a witness only.
By his
early twenties, Hizb al-Tahrir sent him off, always in the guise of a student,
to recruit in his parents’ home country of Pakistan. By now the movement was
radically Jihadist and no longer presented itself as a sort of Muslim “defence
league”. Maajid recruited members of the family of the young woman he had
married.
The
organization then sent him to recruit in Egypt, but here he got caught out.
Ever since the assassination of Sadat in 1981, the
dictatorial secular Muslim regime of Mubarak had no sympathy for Islamist
extremists. After the 9/11 attacks on New York, Britain held back from
complaining when British citizens abroad were mistreated, should those citizens
happen to be known Islamic extremists.
At the age
of 24, Maajid was arrested in front of his wife and infant son, in their
apartment in Alexandria. The Aman
al-Dawlah (Mubarak’s secret police) carted him off, threatened him with torture, interrogated
him, put him in solitary for three months and only then charged him with
belonging to a banned organization. He ended up spending four years in a Cairo
jail and was often tortured and interrogated. From the Aman al-Dawlah’s lines
of questioning, he now suspects they were sharing information with British and
other security services. Maajid presents Gordon Brown, the British consul who
was supposed to represent his interests, as an amiable but ineffectual man who
had to play along with power politics at a time when Britain supported
Mubarak’s “War on Terror”.
Altogether,
Maajid Nawaz tells us of thirteen years as a member of an Islamist
organization, and he offers many valuable insights en route.
He says
Islamism flourished among Muslims in Britain on the back of refugees from
war-torn Bosnia. He therefore sees the post-Yugoslavia wars as the defining
moment for British Muslims.
He notes
that “we witnessed a shift from ethnic
communalism, where only a brown person is assumed able to represent brown
people and so on, to religious communalism, where only a Muslim is assumed to
be able to represent other Muslims. Such entrenched communalism and its
advocates, who have abused the original intentions of multiculturalism, have
brought nothing but division and the balkanisation of Western and other
societies.” [Pg.73]
He explains
that the ultimate aim of Islamism is to revive the Caliphate [Khilafah] – that is, a unified empire of
all Muslims under imposed Shar’ia law, which is how Islamists fantasise that
the old Turkish Empire must once have been. Maajid Nawaz makes it clear that
this geo-political goal is not what the religion of Islam is itself about. [The
book does not add – but could have – that the difference between Islam and
Islamism is very much the same as the difference between Christianity and
defunct Christendom.]
Thus far we
get in his story before he begins to re-consider his whole political belief system.
The process
of how he ceased to be a radical extremist is not described in as much detail
as the process by which he became one in the first place, but we are given
hints throughout that he sometimes had misgivings about radical Islamism. Even
in his English years, when he was new to the movement, he was given pause for
thought when a well-meaning white guy intervened, and got stabbed in his place,
when skinheads were threatening him. For just a fleeting moment he understood
that an exclusivist, communalist morality was not a satisfactory morality.
Then there
was the simple fact that in the Egyptian jail, he found himself mixing with
Muslim prisoners who did not think the way he did:
“For me,
with its rich mix of prisoners from the assassins of Sadat all the way through
to the liberals and even homosexuals, Mazrah Tora [the jail] became a political and social education par
excellence. The studies, conversations and experiences I gained in Mazrah
Tora, over months and years, were crucial in overcoming my dogmatic allegiance
to Islamist ideology. Having entered prison as an extremely idealistic
24-year-old, full of rage against society, over the course of four years, and
for the first time in my life having nothing to do but study, I came to re-evaluate
everything I stood for.” [Pg.275]
One key to
his change was his awareness that Amnesty International, a totally
disinterested group who shared neither his religion or his politics, took him
up as a Prisoner of Conscience. The A.I. member who chiefly put him on the
agenda and argued his case was an elderly English Christian, John Cornwall.
Again, something overrode a communalist mentality. Amnesty International were
fully aware that Maajid’s politics were extreme and potentially threatening to
others; but he had not himself committed, or participated in, acts of violence
and was therefore a legitimate object of their concern.
As he now
considers this, Nawaz preaches earnestly that Westerners should understand what
Prisoner of Conscience status means. Too often, he says, the status is
misunderstood as suggesting that the prisoner’s views are being endorsed or are
themselves worthy of respect. As a result, naïve admirers sometimes give
released prisoners platform time to expound very dodgy ideas. It should be
understood that “Prisoner of Conscience” means somebody who is persecuted for
peacefully promoting ideas, regardless of how worthy or how obnoxious those
ideas may be.
When Maajid
was at last released and returned to England, he at first went back to being a
spokesman for Hizb al-Tahrir. But his heart was no longer in it. He decided to
leave the organization and work towards integrating Muslims into a pluralist
society. He is now a spokesman and publicist for the Quilliam Org., an outfit
that affirms Islam while preaching against Islamism. The two things are, after
all, not the same.
As he
expounds his new creed, the former radical Islamist notes two things. First,
there is the understandable hostility of his former Islamist comrades, who feel
he has betrayed them. His marriage broke up partly because his young wife
stayed true to the creed that he now forswears. Second, there is his
incredulity that there are still non-Muslim liberals who do not understand that
Islamism is not Islam, and who still insist on seeing suicide bombers and the
like as “victims” of Western colonialism. He reports:
“On many occasions after my talks, people –
usually white liberals – would stand up and declare that I had no idea what it
was like to suffer as a victim of society. They would assert that there was no
way someone like me, educated, speaking articulate English and wearing a suit
and tie, could ever understand people who felt so desperate that suicide
bombing was their ‘only’ option. Terrorists’ reactions cannot be separated from
their social causes I was told; blame lies squarely on society. It was as if
their brains were malfunctioning. I had invariably just spent half an hour
telling my entire story, of violent racism and police harassment in Essex, and
of torture and solitary confinement in Egypt, but because my conclusions didn’t
align with the angry ‘monkey’ they were expecting to see, it was as if they
hadn’t heard any of it.” [pp.340-341]
As my whole
report should convey, Radical is a
timely and informative book, and certainly one which tells us much more about
Islamism than the superficial snippets of our news services.
I do note,
however, that across its 380 pages of text, it does sometimes show signs of
being in part ghost-written and lapsing into journalese. As the title page
says, it was written “with Tom Bromley”,
presumably being put together from Maajid Nawaz’s notes and interviews with
him. This is suggested by the style, which sometimes makes references that are
improbable from the mouth of an English Muslim of Pakistani background, and
gives lengthy explanations of concepts that are clearly meant for a non-Muslim
readership. There are also such techniques as a “Prologue” which is basically a
“preview of coming attractions”, whetting our appetites by contrasting scenes
of Maajid in 1992 [street rumble with “Paki-bashing” skinheads in Southend]
with Maajid in 2002 [being threatened with torture in an Egyptian prison] and
Maajid in 2011 [at a conference in the US discussing fate of post-Mubarak Egypt,
and emphasizing need for constitutionality].
To put it
simply, then, this is no great shakes as a piece of confessional literature,
but it is a very good and worthwhile journalistic read.
Important footnote – As the book’s
bibliography indicates, many interviews and debates involving Maajid Nawaz are
available on Youtube, including one horrendous one (which I have accessed) in
which he is confronted with the shouting Islamist fanatic Anjem Choudary.
Maajid Nawaz is now a dapper and highly articulate person, as fully in command
of the English language as any other English university graduate. I am sure
most of Radical is his own work, but
there are still passages where his co-writer seems to have taken over.