by Maajid Nawaz
A discussion is already under way at the table, and I tune in to catch up on the debate. Bush listens intently to each person, interrupting frequently to ask questions and seek clarification. It’s Egypt’s future that’s being deliberated; the Egyptians are advocating passionately for swift justice for the ousted dictator, Hosni Mubarak. For them, his trial and incarceration will herald a new dawn for Egypt.
But I beg to differ, and feel I must give voice to my concerns. I try to explain why this single-minded focus on “justice” might be detrimental to Egypt’s long-term interests. “What is needed first and foremost is a constitution, followed by an election process, after which justice against Mubarak can be sought. If Egypt fails to define a constitution for itself at the outset, the first party to win an election will mold it in their own image. Justice cannot be arbitrary; it must be set in law.” I argue this not from detached interest but from a deeply personal place; the suspension of constitutional rights following the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in 1981 impacted my life in a way I cannot begin to explain. I have learned what Emergency Law and the overriding of individual liberties really mean. I have witnessed what Mubarak’s regime has been capable of: the paralyzing fear, the routine humiliations, the torture . . .
“Stop,” Bush sharply interrupts. He has now turned his full attention to me. “How do you define torture?”
I pause. Has George W. Bush just asked me for my definition of torture? I know immediately his interest isn’t merely academic—during his time in office, the question of what did and did not constitute torture was a vital component to the “War on Terror.” In 2002 Bush’s Office of Legal Counsel wrote a notorious memorandum on the subject of “waterboarding,” an interrogation technique involving the simulation of drowning by pouring water over the prisoner’s cellophaned face. The memorandum famously, and highly controversially, concluded that waterboarding was not torture but instead an “enhanced” interrogation technique, and thereby admissible by US law.
Where do I begin? Should I say how I feel about the overly militarized aspect of the “War on Terror” and what it has cost the world in terms of human rights violations, reinforcing the terrorist narrative, and widespread damage to countries? Should I bring up Iraq? I’ve been on record talking about these issues, but how do you respond when the leader of the “War on Terror” asks you for your opinion over a barbecued lunch in his own backyard?
I decide to deal directly with the question asked. “How do I define torture? What about electrocution?” I look back at Bush and wait to be asked about waterboarding. Instead, he nods and agrees solemnly. “Yes, that is torture,” and with a wave of a hand, “Please carry on.”
PART ONE
B-BOY
Notice to all passengers, please do not run on the platforms or concourses. Especially if you are carrying a rucksack, wearing a big coat, or look a bit foreign.
—ANONYMOUS GRAFFITI IN THE LONDON UNDERGROUND, AFTER POLICE KILLED AN UNARMED BRAZILIAN, JEAN CHARLES DE MENEZES, AT STOCKWELL STATION WITH SEVEN SHOTS TO THE HEAD, JULY 22, 2005
CHAPTER ONE
Memories of the Ghost Train
I was born in the late seventies, the same time hip-hop was busting its first moves in New York. The B-boys in the Bronx started it all, poppin’ and lockin’ to the original loops. Afrika Bambaataa, he was there at the beginning. So were the Sugarhill Gang, sampling Chic and hitting the mainstream with “Rapper’s Delight.” Then there was Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five; Melle Mel gave voice to their fury in “The Message.” A dozen years later, I’d find inspiration in this scene, discover my voice in its rhythms. Until then, I’d grow up in isolation on the other side of the Atlantic, my own fledgling years mirroring hip-hop’s early development.
Even so, my own beginnings could not have been more different from those of hip-hop. The Southend of my childhood was not at all like New York—it wasn’t, and still isn’t, a place of ethnic diversity. Of its present-day population of 160,000, 96 percent are white. When I was growing up, that percentage was even higher. There were few Asian families in Southend—literally a few hundred people, no more than 0.1 percent of the population. At that time if you saw a Pakistani, Indian, or Bangladeshi face in Southend, you would usually know their parents, where they had vacationed last year, and the latest domestic scandal in their family.
Growing up in such a minority community has an effect on you. It was a completely different experience from being brought up in a large Pakistani community. It meant that we had no choice but to engage with the wider community, and as a result, I grew up feeling far more equipped to deal with cultural differences.
Such communities are big enough for people to live their whole lives within them, never to venture out. For many people the only interaction they have with white kids is in a fight. And the only time they come into contact with white women is when they are chatting them up in the hope of a quick one-night stand. That has a corrosive effect on how each community perceives the other.
My family originally hails from Gujrat. This isn’t to be confused with Gujarat in India, which gives its name to the more prominent Gujarati community in the UK. There is another Gujrat, in Pakistan. It’s a district and a city in the province of the Punjab, in the northwest of the country, toward the border with Kashmir. It is near Islamabad, though given the bad roads, it is still a good two-and-a-half-hour drive away from the capital, and equally far from Lahore. Gujrat lies on the banks of the River Chenab, and my family is said to have settled in the area from the eighth century, coming to the subcontinent with the Arab armies of Muhammad bin Qasim.
Gujrat is a city with a disproportionate influence over Pakistani politics. The Chaudhrys are a local dynasty that has long held sway within the army, and the city has produced prime ministers and powerful political factions. Gujrat is also fabled for its clan, or biraadari-based gangsters, and beautiful women. In folklore, the tragic ancient love story of Sohni Mahiwal takes place in Gujrat. Sohni, a Punjabi word for “beautiful,” is said to have drowned in the River Chenab as she desperately tried to reach her forbidden lover Mahiwal. Infatuated by her beauty, Mahiwal jumped in to save her, and he too drowned alongside his lost love. This story has in turn inspired numerous poems, paintings, songs, and even two Bollywood movies. Family legend has it that my Nana Abu, my maternal grandfather, spent his childhood during the British Raj in close association with an English doctor, who resided on the hospital grounds with his family. Having grown extremely close to Nana Abu’s father, the doctor often invited his family over to share meals, festivals, and holidays. As a boy, Nana Abu, named Ghulam-Nabi, or servant of the Prophet, developed a deep fascination with this English doctor. Keenly impressed by his culture, education, and generosity, Nana Abu decided that when he was married and had children of his own, he would raise them all to be doctors, and run a hospital just like this one. This was to become his guiding dream.
A medical education wasn’t immediately available to Nana Abu. With a heavy heart he joined the army of the British Raj in the hope that this would give him the opportunity to follow his ambition. He pursued a demanding slate of extracurricular courses alongside his day-to-day routine in the army. He quickly succeeded in qualifying as an accountant and was appointed to manage the military accounts for food stocks. With his dream still seemingly attainable, Nana Abu got married. My Nani Ammi was a beautiful woman from Gujrat named Suraya, which means a constellation of stars. Newly wed and full of hope, Nana Abu took Nani Ammi across India to Lucknow for their honeymoon. That same week in India, history was about to take place.
In 1947 the British decided to create two countries: India, which would have a majority of Hindus; and Pakistan—at that time West Pakistan and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh)—in which the majority would be Muslim. This meant that vast numbers of people had to leave their homes and move across the new border to live: Hindus to India and Muslims to Pakistan. T
here was chaos and pandemonium. The great human exodus unfolded right before my grandparents’ eyes—on their honeymoon no less. In a panic they rushed to catch a train back to Gujrat, which was suddenly on the Pakistani side of partitioned Punjab. But it was too late. Mob violence and mass murder ruled on the trains. Bloodthirsty hordes, hell-bent on revenge, were boarding the carriages and indiscriminately killing all Pakistan-bound commuters. Train after train would pull into the station in Pakistan, everyone on board dead. These were the ghost trains.
Nana Abu was on one such ghost train. The mob had cut his train in two. The front carriage, where Nani Ammi and all the women sat, had been separated and taken off into the distance. The back portion, containing Nana Abu and all the men, was held captive to be massacred. By what can only be described as the grace of Allah, somehow Nana Abu escaped the massacre that followed. In that chaos, desperately seeking his new bride, Nana Abu ran from platform to platform, avoiding rampaging mobs while searching for his wife. He stumbled across her, frantically waiting for him at another station. Together, the traumatized newlyweds fled India, now a foreign country, back into Pakistan, now a new country.
Things changed so rapidly for Nana Abu after the Partition. Having been raised in a multiethnic and multifaith united India, he lost many of his childhood friends. Those who now belonged to the “wrong” faith were forced to immigrate to India; others left for England. Disturbed by memories of the ghost train, and having been torn from many of his friends, he became restless.
The British education system was seen as something unparalleled, and Nana Abu wanted his children to have that opportunity. In those early days, he often instructed his children, “Be not as strangers to the goodness and kindness of others. We must adopt as our own piety, truth, and goodness wherever it comes from.”
And so he took advantage of his right to live in the UK. Immigration, at that time, simply wasn’t an issue. It was Southend where they—we—ended up: a seaside town with no family links, no halal meat shops, no mosques, and no community. Nana Abu and his friends set all of this up. They created the first mosque in the town and organized space for Muslim burials in the town cemetery. Due to his education, good temperament, and thoughtful nature, Nana Abu quickly became a leader for his community.
Nana Abu was a traditional Muslim, which in those days meant being conservative, not extremist or fundamentalist. He expected his children to accept arranged marriages to other Muslims. Pakistan, like most of South Asian culture, was historically non-dogmatic. That comes from the way in which mysticism became entrenched across the Indian subcontinent. My grandfather was typical of that mind-set, liberal when he was young and more religious as he got older. That was a very Pakistani thing to do. I say “was” because of the rise of extremism among so many young Pakistanis today.
My mother was the third of nine children and was roughly nine years old when the family moved to Southend. They started off in a rented property for two to three months, then bought their own home. Despite being an accountant back home, Nana Abu found that his qualifications weren’t easily recognized in England. Undeterred, with dreams of the hospital spurring him on, he supported the family by getting a job as a bus driver, and drilled into his children the need to study, work hard, and make the most of themselves. He typified the stereotype of the hardworking immigrant and was determined to give his children the best chance; he made sure that they grabbed it with both hands.
The result was that his children excelled at school. They started off in some of the worst schools but ended up going on to universities. Every one of that generation in my family is an engineer or a doctor of some kind, apart from those, like my mother, who were married off before they could go to university. But Nana Abu, for all his forward thinking, still believed in arranging husbands for his daughters.
Before he could ever build his beloved hospital, Nana Abu collapsed and died from a double stroke. He was only fifty-eight years old. I was nine at the time, and I still remember how much I cried on that day.
My mother had been born and brought up in the UK and has always been very liberal and progressive in her outlook. Most Pakistanis in the UK had parents who grew up in Pakistan and then came over here. It was unusual, therefore, for me to have a mother who had been brought up in England, speaking in an English accent. It meant that her experience was similar to mine. I was brought up calling her Baji—a title for an older sister—and it was easy to relate to her. Until, that is, I became interested in political Islamism: almost immediately, she became representative of everything liberal and Western that I began campaigning against. How such an estrangement could occur is the rest of this story.
One way in which my mother—known endearingly to all as Abi—enlightened her children was through literature. She encouraged me to read from an early age, and I have many memories of the sort of books that I read at the time. Roald Dahl was a particular favorite: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, George’s Marvelous Medicine, and so on. C.S. Lewis was someone else I read, though I had no idea about the religious connotations of The Chronicles of Narnia until much later. I also used to love those Fighting Fantasy books, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain and so on, where you’d read a page and be given a choice as to what you wanted to happen next. The idea of being able to create my own story always appealed to me.
All of this was quite different from the old Pakistani tradition of storytelling. The old tradition was oral, most obviously represented to me by my Tai Ammi, my dad’s brother’s wife. When she visited, she would tell us stories at bedtime in Urdu, such as Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. My brother Osman and I would love hearing them because there was something magical in their telling, in the inflection of the story voice and the emotion each line would portray. Rather than putting us to sleep, they would awaken our senses to imagine a far-away land of flying carpets and genies, or jinn. We never told Tai Ammi that her stories woke us up rather than helped us sleep. There’s a lot of skill within that oral tradition: it’s all about telling stories in a way that is intriguing and suspenseful. Tai Ammi was very good at that: we’d sit on the edge of our seats, wanting to know what happened next.
But as wonderful as this oral storytelling tradition can be, it doesn’t necessarily encourage children to read themselves; even today reading in Pakistan is not as widespread as it should be. How expressive a child could be if parents were to combine these two methods, the old and the new. I believe that it was precisely this combination within myself that gave me passion during the most difficult times.
One book that particularly tested my mother’s liberalism, and my own changing views as a teenager, was Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. When this was published in 1988, it caused a huge furor among many Muslims around the world. Its depiction of the Prophet Mohammed, upon whom be peace, was deemed blasphemous, and the author was forced into hiding after the Ayatollah Khomeini issued his now infamous fatwa. True to her fiercely independent spirit, Abi bought the book and read it to make up her own mind.
By then, my belief that she was dangerously on the wrong side needed no more confirmation. Abi’s response had been a classically liberal one: “Let him write his book. If you don’t like it, go and write your own book against him.” That is Abi through and through.
My father was affectionately known to all as Mo. From an early age he grew up with a lot of responsibility. Both his father and elder brother died when he was young, which left him as head of the family before he was married. In the old days in Pakistan, when a man died, his wife would often return to her parents’ family. The absence of a welfare state left only blood relatives as the safety net. But my father wanted to do things differently. He asked Tai Ammi, his brother’s widow, to stay with him so that they could bring up his two orphaned nieces, Nargis and Farrah, as his own daughters. This ensured that Tai Ammi did not have to remarry again merely for convenience. Over forty years later, Tai A
mmi remains a widow out of love for her late husband.
My father started out working for Pakistan’s navy and trained as an electrical engineer. Unfortunately he contracted tuberculosis and was honorably discharged on medical grounds. The navy paid for his treatment and wanted him to return to work. However, he didn’t respond to conventional treatment and the navy lost hope. My father then went to see a hakeem—an herbalist trained in ancient natural remedies—and he provided a number of powders. Curiously, these worked where modern medicine failed, and I suppose I owe my life to an obscure herbalist who has probably long died somewhere in the Land of the Five Rivers.
My father resumed life as an electrical engineer: he laid a lot of the electrical foundations in what is now the Pakistani capital, Islamabad. He laid down political foundations too, and it is this proud defiant streak in him that has rubbed off on me. He had been doing some work for the Dawood Group—a powerful industrial group in Pakistan. The company was immensely powerful politically, and unions were prohibited. At this time Pakistani workers, heady with Soviet socialism, became aware of their organizing power. Upset with working conditions and knowing that employers would never concede rights unless forced to, my father set up the first trade union in his industry.
Dawood’s response was to try to shut them down. My father and his fledgling organization were taken to court. This was real David and Goliath stuff, and my father’s eventual victory was a huge coup at the time. Dawood was forced to allow the trade union to operate.
My father married Abi in an arranged marriage when he was thirty-four and Abi just eighteen. He moved to the UK and used his experience as an engineer to get a job with the Oasis Oil Company in Libya, where he worked until his retirement, and where we were to visit him later on.
Because of this, I had an awareness of Gaddafi’s tyranny long before it became common knowledge. My first memory of trouble in Libya harks back to the late eighties. I asked my father why the name of his company had changed from Oasis to Waha. My father explained that Colonel Gaddafi had nationalized the company and kicked out all Westerners in revenge for American airstrikes that had killed his son.