The Islamist

by Ed Husain

  Another of my tutors was Professor John Tosh, author of The Pursuit of History. His lectures forced me to question my approach to history. One thing history was not was an idle intellectual pastime. Professor Tosh argued that the past created the present, and the past was open to multiple interpretations. What seemed like blasphemy at first slowly began to make sense.

  The book that posed the most intriguing challenge to my conceptions and thinking was E. H. Carr’s What is History? Carr’s pungent lines about the role of a historian made me wonder how his approach to the subject compared with my approach to Muslim history. Carr disputed ‘facts’, and argued that we knew only what those who went before us wanted us to know. Historical records do not necessarily tell us what happened, but only their authors’ perception of what happened, or what they wanted others to believe had happened.

  Carr also argued against hero worship, the backbone of Islamism. I believed that men such as Mawdudi, Qutb, Nabhani and others swam against the tide, stood separate from the milieu in which they found themselves, and thus sought to guide us to a better, purer age. Carr hoped to ‘discourage the view which places great men outside history and sees them as imposing themselves on history in virtue of their greatness, as jack-in-the-boxes who emerge miraculously from the unknown to interrupt the real continuity of history’.

  Were my intellectual heroes cardboard men? My halaqah training in the Hizb had always been that Nabhani resisted socialism, capitalism, and other ideas and formulated his own pure Islamic response to the ‘onslaught against Islam’ at the ‘hands of colonizers’. I was to put this idea to the test.

  Nabhani had argued that his ijtihad, or scholarly reasoning, was based purely on Islam and not influenced by any other source, particularly Western philosophical thought, which he abhorred. This hatred of Western intellectual development was widespread in the Hizb, and we prided ourselves on our ‘intellec tual purity’ as ‘carriers of deep enlightened thought’ derived from Islam. Away from the halaqah, in a free intellectual atmosphere, I now sought to understand Islamism’s most intelligent ideologue: Nabhani. Was he really ‘pure’, as he claimed? Or was Carr right to suggest that we were all products of our time?

  Nabhani was most vociferous in arguing that Muslims, under no circumstances, should accept kufr influences in their religion, and, by extension, coexistence with the wider world. In his vitriolic rejection of kufr, Nabhani was perhaps second only to his fellow Islamist, the Egyptian radical Syed Qutb. While Qutb wrote about the contemporary Muslim world and advocated the violent overthrow of Arab regimes, Nabhani argued for a deeper intellectual reformation of Muslim minds: the overthrow of what he considered ‘un-Islamic ideas’. More than any other Islamist ideologue Nabhani concentrated on the mind and intellect. The goal, however, was the same for both men: Islamist domination of the world.

  As a Hizb foot soldier I had been most impressed with Nabhani’s diagnosis and prognosis. How great, I marvelled, were the ‘systems’ of Islam. Now I discovered that Nabhani was not as ‘pure’ as he and his followers claimed. His ideas were derivative, fully formed by Western political discourse but presented in the language of Muslim religious idioms, offering European political ideals wrapped in the language of the Koran in order to gain mass appeal in the Arab world.

  My new reading of Nabhani’s writings suggested that his conceptual framework of a so-called Islamic state was not the continuation of a political entity set up by the Prophet, maintained by the caliphs down the ages (however debatable), but in fact Nabhani’s response to the circumstances he encountered: secular modernity. Of the Western thinkers who influenced Nabhani most, it seemed to me, Hegel was of vital importance.

  Hegel was a very systematic thinker; he developed a system of thought based on ‘ideas’. In addition to Hegel’s emphasis on ideas and thought in human life, he emphasized the role of ‘the state’ over every other social organization.

  Like Hegel, Nabhani did not believe that the state was an end in itself, but rather a means. Hegel’s emphasis on the importance of ideas had obviously greatly influenced him. Nabhani, by adopting Hegel’s thinking, learnt from the same source as Karl Marx.

  Hegel has been criticized for laying the conceptual framework for a totalitarian state, but that was not a cause for rejection in Nabhani’s view. Hegel’s writings, particularly phrases such as ‘The state is the march of God through the world’, only emboldened Nabhani.

  I also discovered that many of the criticisms of democracy I had heard in the Hizb were not new and original, but based on writings of Rousseau and others. Rousseau called for God to legislate, because man is incapable of legislation. Where Rousseau was unclear in his mind as to how God would legislate, Nabhani, a Muslim cleric, had the answer: the Shariah and Islamic law. Rousseau wrote, ‘How can a blind multitude, which often does not know what it wills, because it rarely knows what is good for it, carry out for itself so great and difficult an enterprise as a system of legislation?’ Islamists regard (their own) interpretation of the Koran as ‘God’s law’. Problem solved.

  The worst expression of man-made law, according to Hizb ut-Tahrir, was democracy. Yet before the Hizb pilloried freedom and democracy among Muslims in Britain and elsewhere, even Islamists generally accepted that democracy was a positive development in human history. Indeed, at East London mosque I was taught that democracy was a Muslim invention!

  Bertrand Russell, writing in the late 1930s, suggested that ‘Hitler is an outcome of Rousseau; Roosevelt and Churchill, of Locke.’ It seems to me that Nabhani was also a product of Rousseau.

  I was not, I had discovered, a believer in any distinct ‘Islamic’ political system. Nabhani’s ideas were not innovatory Muslim thinking but wholly derived from European political thought. In and of itself this was not a negative development. My objection was, and remains, the deception of the Hizb ut-Tahrir in claiming that it was ‘pure in thought’, not influenced by kufr. In their attempt to maintain ‘ideological purity’ they claimed to have disowned all kufr influences. For it was those influences, Nabhani wrote, that had caused the gradual decline of the caliphate. Nabhani had singled out Greek philosophy as a major perpetrator of corrosive influence on Muslim minds, and went as far as declaring renowned Muslim philosophers such as al-Farabi, Ibn Rushd (Averroes), Ibn Sina (Avicenna) to be kuffar. For Nabhani, accepting Greek influences and, more recently, European impact on Muslim thinking was a ‘surrender to the West’ and detrimental to the superiority of Muslims.

  Having established the prominence of the state, placed God at its centre, rejected democracy, and developed a political system of rule from a misreading of the Shariah law, Nabhani now needed to develop a strategy to bring it all to pass, the dream Zion of Islamists.

  In an attempt to verify the existence of a single Islamic state throughout fourteen centuries of Muslim history, Nabhani argued that all Muslims had sworn allegiance to the Umayyad, Abbasid, and Ottoman dynasties. However, that simply ignores the historical fact that millions of Muslims living in Indonesia, India, China, Spain, Africa, and Iran, had not pledged allegiance to these ruling castes. Indeed, the Persians were at war with the Ottomans for at least two centuries.

  Now, Nabhani wanted to revive this mythological Islamic state, and he turned, it suddenly seemed to me, not to Islam but to Gramsci, an Italian Marxist ideologue. The role of the political party was crucial to Gramsci’s understanding of bringing about political change. In addition to learning about the strategies of ‘destroying and building’ new ideas for a political entity, Nabhani also learnt that the political party was an ‘organism, or complex element of society’. Little wonder, then, that Farid often spoke about the Hizb being ‘organic’ and the ideas of the Hizb as being a precursor to mass political change.

  Where Hegel outlined the importance of thought in the progress of a nation, Gramsci explained how these thoughts were to be inculcated in the masses, or ummah as Nabhani preferred to call them. It was not sufficient to propagate new ideas, but old i
deas had to be ‘destroyed’ and supplanted by new ones. And that is exactly what I was taught in my halaqah, and what I tried to execute on the streets of London. Nabhani shrewdly linked Gramsci’s concepts to the life of the Prophet Mohammed, and in Muslim ears this found greater acceptance. Just as Jesus had spoken out in harsh tones against the Pharisees, Mohammed had spoken out against the pagans in Mecca. Was this an attempt ‘to destroy ideas’ and replace them with ‘new thoughts’? Did this make Jesus and Mohammed role models for political strategy in the twentieth-century Middle East? In Nabhani’s mind, the answer was a resounding yes.

  Nabhani’s major mistake was to accept an emphasis on the state over other social structures, and then assume that the Prophet Mohammed had struggled to establish a political entity. Rather than approach the life of the Prophet in its proper context of seventh-century pagan tribalism, which the Prophet marvellously reversed to the belief in the one God of Abraham, Nabhani saw only the political office of the Prophet and gave this precedence over all else.

  In my mind, Nabhani had fallen from his pedestal. And with him all of Hizb ut-Tahrir’s claim to political purity, intellectual superiority, deep thoughts, and the dressing up in religious terms of a political agenda born in the 1950s Middle East. Islamism became an empty, bankrupt ideology. However, its cultural attitudes to the world still resided deep within me. I had shed its intellectual grasp through my studies and my rejection of Hizb halaqah, but not its behavioural traits. Thoughts, I learned, were not always linked to action.

  10.

  Entering the World: Which Life?

  The life of this world is but play and passion.

  The Koran

  The Saudi government funded the Muslim World League, the head office of which is in Mecca. It also occupied a three-storey office building on London’s Goodge Street which served as a mosque and funding centre for various Islamist activities in Britain. I had every reason to disagree with the Muslim World League, but heard that they taught Arabic. There, I met a young Tunisian man with a trimmed beard and an artificial smile.

  I do not remember exactly what I said to him but he seemed somewhat impressed. He asked me to accompany him to his office on the second floor and quietly closed the door behind him. Within moments he had offered me a full scholarship to study Arabic and full financial assistance in any degree programme of my choice at a university in Saudi Arabia.

  ‘Where does the money come from?’ I asked.

  ‘Don’t worry about that,’ he said. ‘Just think about it.’

  From being anti-Saudi to being recruited by Saudi agents was not something I had anticipated, even on a visit to the missionary arm of the Saudi government. I excused myself and left. I wonder, though, how many others the Tunisian did recruit. Years later I was to meet British agents of Saudi Islam in Jeddah.

  Disgruntled but not demoralized by my encounter at the Muslim World League, I attended evening classes in Arabic at the Muslim Welfare House in north London. In a crammed classroom there were around ten young Muslims studying Arabic with a teacher from the University of Westminster, Dr Shayyal. He was a chubby, warm-hearted, and smiling instructor, but again I knew that my fellow students were no ordinary Muslims taking a language course. One in particular gave the game away.

  Zahid Amin was a committed activist of a newly formed group called the Islamic Society of Britain (ISB). Their headquarters were in Leicester at the Islamic Foundation, Europe’s leading Islamist think tank. The ISB was bold in that it broke away from Jamat-e-Islami, particularly its Pakistani arm in Britain: the UK Islamic Mission. Mawdudi himself had attended an Islamic Mission conference in London in 1974. In breaking with its Pakistani Islamist heritage, the ISB was entering new territory. To me at the time, the ISB was a new organization about which I had heard very little.

  Islamists in Britain are a diverse and complicated phenomenon. They are divided by age, ethnicity, class, geography, and their allegiances to Islamists in Southeast Asia or the Arab world. Unravelling the formation of ISB meant going back to 1962, and the creation of the UK Islamic Mission as the British arm of the Pakistani Jamat-e-Islami. In 1971, after Bangladesh divided from Pakistan, the Dawatul Islam was created to cater for Bangladeshis in Britain, who felt increasingly isolated in a Pakistani-dominated UK Islamic Mission. In 1979 the Dawatul Islam created its own youth wing, the YMO, with strong working-class roots.

  In east London, meanwhile, differences based on Bangladeshi regionalism, essentially a form of racism, led to the creation of the Islamic Forum Europe (IFE) in 1990, with YMO siding with IFE in the conflict with Dawatul Islam over East London mosque.

  In the 1990s the ISB emerged as a home for predominantly middle-class, professional Muslims who, in the line of fire from the Hizb, closely aligned themselves to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and Palestinian Hamas for educational training and international kudos. If the Hizb was global, well, so was the ISB.

  The close association of ISB personnel with Arab Islamists led to the 1997 formation of the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB), a breakaway from the ISB. A bitter relationship has existed between these organizations ever since. MAB maintains close ties to the Arab Muslim Brotherhood.

  But though internally divided, they are all in agreement in their veneration of Mawdudi and Qutb. In different but unquestionable ways, they are affiliated to the Jamat-e-Islami of the subcontinent, the Muslim Brotherhood of the Arab world, or Hamas of Palestine. And in recent years they have united as the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), formed in 1997 at the request of the Tory home secretary Michael Howard. What were isolated, competing, often bitter enemies have come together to present a united front as spokesmen for British Muslims, though the majority of British Muslims are not Islamists.

  I remembered Zahid Amin from my days at Newham. When we had demanded a prayer room, and the college principal refused our request, it was Zahid Amin who had advised the principal as a representative of a local mosque. Now that I was no longer an activist of Hizb ut-Tahrir, Zahid was not an enemy. We could and did talk amicably, though I refused to answer any questions about my time with the Hizb, having vowed to avoid the subject. I had no regrets about leaving and pursuing my studies, I never missed any of the activities, except to wonder occasionally if I was neglecting my religious duties. One thing that I certainly didn’t miss about the Hizb was its obsession with secrecy. We were always being told that any time now the caliphate would be established, but never when or how.

  ‘In ISB we’re totally open,’ he said. ‘You’re welcome to come along any time and see for yourself.’

  We exchanged phone numbers and soon Zahid called me. I had dinner at his place and we spoke about the life of young Muslims in Britain. He knew how active I had been earlier with the Hizb and before that the YMO and said that I was foolish to keep away from all Muslim organizations simply because of my experiences with the Hizb.

  ‘At ISB we are not waiting for a caliph to appear in the Middle East. Some of our members are close to the Muslim Brotherhood, but most are British and want to make Britain more of an Islamic country, to introduce Islam in Britain.’ At Hizb ut-Tahrir we believed that the army of the Islamic state would conquer Britain and that ‘the flag of Islam will fly over Downing Street’.

  Zahid invited me to a three-day camp in Leicester to see what the ISB was all about. At first I refused, simply on the grounds that I wanted nothing to do with any Muslim organization again. Besides, by Zahid’s own admission there were people in ISB who were influenced by Islamists, especially by Mawdudi and the Muslim Brotherhood. My Hizb days had given me a particular dislike for all organizational forms of Islam.

  But it was difficult to say no to a person like Zahid.

  ‘Just come along and compare us with the Hizb,’ he said. ‘Give us a chance.’ I knew Zahid was keen to recruit me to the ISB, and believed that, broadly speaking, it was part of the same Islamist movement which I had left: activist Islam. But Zahid disagreed. He was genuinely convinced that the ISB
were moderate Muslims.

  I assessed my choices: I could continue to live in isolation, away from all Muslim organizations with Islam playing a very small role in my life, or I could draw closer to a transparent Muslim organization, and thus try to live as a better Muslim among Muslim friends. At university, all ‘practising Muslims’ were either part of an organization or associated with a movement. I was the only loose cannon. I dared not admit openly to my Hizb past, and in the absence of clear association I was always suspect. I stood out. For now, I decided to give Zahid and the ISB a try.

  The ISB was proudly British. My aversion to nationalism, a result of my Hizb indoctrination, made it difficult for me to accept this at first. I used to believe in One Nation, and Muslims had no nationality except Islam. Seeing these young, educated people increasingly defining themselves as ‘British Muslims’ rather than Hizb ut-Tahrir’s preferred ‘Muslims living in Britain’, was irksome. I might have left Hizb ut-Tahrir, but had the Hizb left me? As Farid used to say, ‘You will carry the concepts for ever.’ Well, perhaps not for ever, but they were certainly proving difficult to shed.

  One of the major attractions for me of the ISB was their vehement stance against Hizb ut-Tahrir. Among their ranks they had several vociferous critics of the Hizb, not least Sarah Joseph (later editor of Emel magazine), the outspoken community leader Ajmal Masroor, and the provocative lawyer Omar Faruk. I had crossed swords with all of them as a Hizb member. Now I felt it was my moral duty to support them. I was twenty years old and needed to flush out the Hizb from within me. Zahid and I had many conversations about the failure of the Hizb, its complete lack of spiritual connection with God. More than any other, Zahid understood me. His own sister and brother were key Hizb people. His sister was later to marry Hizb leader Jalaluddin Patel.