by Maajid Nawaz
What had caused this shift was a mixture of mutual discrimination and suspicion at home, and a growing awareness of events overseas. Bosnia was particularly crucial in bringing about a shift in identity among Britain’s Muslims. In Bosnia, white, blond-haired, blue-eyed indigenous European Muslims were being massacred just because they were Muslim. The slaughter did the opposite of its intended effect. In reaction to these atrocities, Muslims in Europe began reasserting their religious identities even more. It was a natural defense mechanism. But it also exacerbated self-segregation and triggered the shift in our self-identity to politically Muslim.
Into this fray jumped groups advocating politicized Islam, the Islamists. No other phenomenon has contributed to the rise of Muslim identity politics as much as these groups. Emerging in a postcolonial Middle East and South Asia, these groups quickly realized that an ideology that utilized (rather than undermined) the Islamic emotions of the people would be far more potent than Arab socialism. Islamist groups quickly spread and multiplied, arriving in Europe along with Arab asylum seekers and South Asian immigrants.
I would later believe passionately in this approach to politics. But that would be later. Essentially, the rise of Islamist groups was a key factor in shifting Muslims away from their national identities toward a more exclusively Muslim one. It has taken me awhile to resolve many of these pressing challenges posed by identity in our globalized world. Initially, retreating into group identities can be a useful tool for lobbying to overcome legal and institutional discrimination. However, there comes a point when class, economic, and cultural divisions can only be bridged by increasing mutual integration and participation among all in society. Instead of mutual integration, however, 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 balkanization of Western, and other, societies.
This is where I am now on these issues. But there’s a long way to go before I reach this conclusion. First, I need to explain how I became an Islamist in the first place.
I was back in the same park with the usual posse. Osman was with me, as was a friend called Nas. Nas’s original name was Christian Nathaniel—he was from a Greek Orthodox background. He was into the same music as us, and the fact that his skin was of a Mediterranean complexion was enough for the skinheads to consider him a Paki. If their prejudice wasn’t so threatening, their worldview would have been pathetically comic. Under the influence of the times, Nas had converted to Islam and had changed his first name from Christian to Nasir.
Once again we were spotted by Mickey and his crew; there were about half a dozen of them. They were carrying baseball bats, and no doubt were strapping knives. They caught us by total surprise, so we split in different directions. Eventually, once we’d properly tooled up at my house, we reemerged looking for the rest of the posse, and headed back to our rendezvous point on the street corner opposite my house. Osman, Nas, and I were the only ones who made it back; the others must have gone their separate ways.
Then, and I don’t know if this was luck or learning, we saw Mickey and his entire crew heading our way. We were completely outnumbered. There were some posts on the side of the road, and they began banging their baseball bats against them, like some sort of war cry. But by now we were battle-hardened. This time, despite being grossly outnumbered, we stood our ground. This was right outside our home; we could see our front door. If we didn’t have a right to walk here, then where on God’s earth could we walk? I had my knife strapped to my back as usual. Osman had a green backpack on his.
The stand-off continued, and despite their outnumbering us, Mickey began to look nervous. We were only three, yet we were refusing to stand down and this made him doubt himself. Next, to our surprise, Mickey stepped forward and asked to talk. For a moment, Osman and I exchanged confused glances. Mickey had never before uttered a single word to us. It took us a moment to get used to seeing Mickey as anything other than a knife-wielding demon that only knew the word “Paki!” Once we composed ourselves, Osman indicated to Mickey that he should go over the road, while he too crossed over and waited for Mickey to join him. The war cry dimmed, and a worried-looking Mickey walked over to join my brother. What followed was a tense few minutes. My brother and Mickey were deep in conversation. Nas and I were switching between watching them and watching Mickey’s mates; Mickey’s mates were staring the two of us down. Everyone was poised, hands wrapped around baseball bats or fingers ready to unhook knives, in case it all kicked off.
After about ten minutes, we noticed that the talking had stopped. Mickey and my brother were making their way back across the road. They crossed over, halfway between the two groups and shook hands. This was nuts. I watched in disbelief as Mickey returned to his friends and told them to stand down.
“That’s enough, lads,” he told them. “No more trouble here.”
“Eh?” I asked Osman. “What did you say to him?”
Osman looked at me with a level of confidence in his eyes and told me what had happened: “I told him we’re Muslims and we don’t fear death. We’re like those Palestinian terrorists he sees on the television blowing up planes. We’re suicide bombers. We’ve been taught how to make bombs, and I’ve got one in my backpack. If you even try to make a move, I’ll set mine off. Trust me, I don’t give a shit. If we have to take ourselves out to take you out, then that’s what we will do.”
“Damn, man! What did Mickey say?” I asked.
“He believed me when I told him he was messing with the wrong guys.”
Osman’s bluff played on Mickey’s racism, no question about it. Mickey may or may not have watched the news, but he knew his Combat 18 literature. This depicted Muslims as terrorists, and suggested that we were all murderers given half the chance. So when Osman said he had a bomb in his backpack, and that we had links to suicide bombers, it confirmed every prejudice that Mickey had come to believe about us.
“If we feared death,” Osman had told Mickey, “we’d be running away from you. Why would we be standing here when we’re completely outnumbered? It’s because we have the power to call backup and fight you to the death.”
Calling for backup was the sort of language Mickey understood. It’s what he’d done previously, and so he figured that this must have been something that we were capable of as well. If he’d even bothered to question the racist propaganda he’d swallowed, Mickey might have seen through this. But this was someone who considered the Greek Orthodox Nas a Paki. In his warped worldview, such statements made sense.
The discussion between Osman and Mickey was the end of our trouble with Mickey’s racists. Mickey had decided that we were too dangerous, too connected to take on, and had made his peace with us instead. While Mickey was explaining his climb-down to his crew, there was still one question that played on my mind. Just as I had done that time at the police station, I decided I needed to ask something, to understand.
“Hey, can I ask you a question?” I asked.
“All right,” Mickey replied. I saw a different look in his eyes for the first time. The venom had vanished. Now there was wariness, a sliver of fear in his gaze.
“I want to know why you started all this in the first place,” I said. “Back in the park that day when you hounded Chill. You seemed to know his name. What happened?”
Mickey paused, for once a little unsure of himself. But his reply was pathetic. “We’re tired of all you lot taking our women. We saw your mate Chill pulling all these white girls, and we’d had enough.”
It was, frankly, ridiculous. The driving force behind that original attack was as simple as old-fashioned jealousy, with a racist bent. Mickey had seen the way that hip-hop h
ad interested the girls, how they all wanted to get in on the scene.
Osman’s successful bluff affected me more profoundly than any other event up to that point. I realized for the first time the futility of relying on men. For all the security that knowing people like Rowan had brought, there was only so far this could go. Rowan was a rock, and I owed him much, but there was no way he could always be around. And while packing knives offered limited protection, it just escalated matters without addressing the root problem.
That problem, put simply, was respect. When I asked Mickey why they had started on us, he looked at me and talked to me in a different way. He was no longer looking down on me. He was, in fact, scared. And that came from the assertive new identity Osman had adopted. Islamism. It had done what years of knife fights could not. It had won the psychological war and defeated our enemy. For the first time, I caught a glimpse of its power, and how it was capable of transforming my standing at a stroke. Osman, who by this point had become a committed Islamist, had been banging on about this for a year, but I’d never really taken him seriously. I was still a B-boy: that was my culture and my rule book for climbing the obstacle course that was my life.
The violence I’d been subjected to, the police discrimination, a greater awareness of foreign conflicts such as Bosnia, all made me highly receptive to the Islamist message. I was desperately looking for answers. But it was that afternoon in the park, and the fear in Mickey’s eyes, that triggered my decision to take things further.
With a defeated and retreating enemy, I finally understood what my brother had been talking about. I realized Islamism could give me the respect that I’d craved since primary school. Hip-hop had helped us a great deal; it created new friends, but it hadn’t been enough to defeat our enemies. It hadn’t been enough to provide me with the courage to help Matt. Yet on that day, grossly outnumbered, I stood my ground with Osman, and we won because we invoked Allah. In one conversation, Islamism did what hip-hop couldn’t do. It was alive, beating in the hearts of men, and it was prepared to sacrifice everything to regain lost dignity. It wasn’t interested in singing “Fuck tha Police.” Islamism was shouting from the tops of mountains “Fuck all y’all!”
And I wanted a dose of that courage.
CHAPTER SIX
When Babri Mosque Fell in India
It’s important to grasp how Islamism differs from Islam. Islam is a religion, and its Shari’ah can be compared to Talmudic or Canon law. As a religion, Islam contains all the usual schisms of any other faith. There are ancient creedal disputes, from which we have the two major denominations of Sunni and Shia, each giving rise to numerous sects within their ranks. From methodological disputes, legal theorists and traditionalists debated whether scripture was best approached through systemized reasoning or oral tradition. From juristic differences, major schools of law emerged. And from a devotional angle, lapsed, traditional, fundamentalist, and extremist Muslims have always existed. Superseding all these religious disagreements, and influencing many of them politically, is the ideology of Islamism. Simply defined, Islamism is the desire to impose any given interpretation of Islam over society as law. Understood in this way, Islamism is not another religious schism, but an ideological thought that seeks to develop a coherent political system that can house all these schisms, without necessarily doing away with them. Whereas disputes within Islam deal with a person’s approach to religion, Islamism seeks to deal with a person’s approach to society.
As a political project, Islamism was inspired by the rise of European fascism. Like its European ideological counterparts, Islamism was not safe from its own schisms. Some groups wanted to bring about the “Islamic System” by working alongside the status quo; these were political Islamists, like the Muslim Brotherhood. Others were more revolutionary, wishing to upturn the status quo.
To the untrained eye, such Islamist groups seem “moderate” because they rise above sectarian disputes and tend not to be fundamentalist in devotional matters, focusing more on politics. But though religious fundamentalism may take on social issues, it is Islamism that seeks real power. As with Mussolini’s fascists, who were also socially progressive, it is the totalitarian aspect of Islamism that gives rise to major concern. Much later on, Islamism would influence religious fundamentalists, too. This gave rise to a militant strand, Jihadism, and the emergence of groups like al-Qaeda. Jihadism then is the merger of literalist religion with Islamist politics.
My own journey into Islamism resulted in me joining a revolutionary group, known as Hizb al-Tahrir (HT). Sitting between political Islamists and the militants, HT aims to unify all Muslim-majority countries under an “Islamic state,” appropriating for it the term Caliphate, or Khilafah in Arabic. They hope to attain power by means of a military coup and seek to impose one version of Islam over society. My journey started in 1992 with Osman walking down the high street in Southend and being handed a leaflet. Because Southend was so white, it was normal for us to stop and talk to any brown face we saw. The pamphleteer was a man called Nasim Ghani, a British Bangladeshi Muslim who, like us, had grown up in Southend and was now studying medicine at Barts in London. He was someone we could relate to easily; he was articulate and smart. It felt impressive to us that he was studying medicine because you had to be bright and committed to do that.
The leaflet that Nasim handed Osman was about the Babri Mosque in the northern Indian town of Ayodhya. Built by the first Moghul emperor Babar, the mosque had been there since 1528 and had long been a flashpoint between Hindus and Muslims. Hindus believed that the site was the birthplace of the Hindu deity Lord Ram. Religious violence at the mosque was first reported in the 1850s, and in 1984 Hindus began a campaign to “liberate” the site, replacing the mosque with a temple for Lord Ram. When a court order ruled that the mosque be protected, Hindu supporters decided to take matters into their own hands. A crowd of 200,000 broke through the cordon around the mosque and tore it down, using a mixture of hammers and their bare hands. Eyewitnesses reported that the extra police who had been sent to protect the mosque just stood back. The episode was the trigger for some of the worst violence India had seen for decades. Over 2,000 people died in the riots that followed.
I still remember the rather offensive title of the leaflet: “Hideous Hindus Massacre Muslims.” That one leaflet changed the course of my life. It laid bare the behavior of the Hindu extremists in a shocking and inflammatory episode. Osman, spurred on by the likes of Public Enemy’s Professor Griff, had taken an interest in politics. He followed the “Intifada” that had been going on against the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, and the role of Yasser Arafat’s PLO. This struggle for Palestinian liberation, and the crushing Israeli response (with American support), had long been a running sore in international relations. It was undoubtedly a factor that justified the Islamist narrative of victimhood—for a lot of us. The conflict, and the accompanying Western insouciance, came across as manifestly wrong. Identifying with the resistance movement reinforced what we were experiencing on the streets of Southend: it was Muslims who were on the receiving end of things, and the state didn’t care. It helped me push my identity away from being British or Pakistani, and toward defining myself as exclusively politically Muslim.
The Intifada had been going on since 1987, so by the early 1990s it wasn’t anything new. It caught Osman’s attention because of the first Gulf War in 1991, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, and combined United Nations forces removed him. Saddam Hussein, albeit a brutal tyrant, was a champion of the Palestinian cause, and his provocation of Israel (the threat of launching Scud missiles at Israeli towns) kept the issue in the news.
But the Babri Mosque incident in India was something different. The destruction of an ancient Muslim place of worship felt particularly shocking. The number of people killed in the subsequent violence was horrific. It strongly reinforced the message that Nasim’s leaflet and Hizb al-Tahrir were pushing
. Southend, Gaza, Bosnia, Iraq, India: wherever you went in the world, the story was the same—Muslims were unprotected and under attack, and now was the time to do something about it. After all, we didn’t believe in turning the other cheek.
Nasim was everything the mosque imam in Southend was not. Here was someone who was young, slick, and successful, and without a beard. He was studying and living in London, which for us on the edge of Essex felt like a glamorous lifestyle. Osman was exactly the right person, in the right place, at the right time to receive that leaflet. Osman was receptive to such a message, and when Nasim suggested he come to a talk to discuss the idea further, Osman agreed.
Nasim would turn out to be not just any pamphleteer. He was on the path to becoming the leader of HT in the UK and the founder of the organization in Bangladesh. As someone who has gone on to co-found movements myself and has met numerous political leaders of all stripes, I can tell you that Nasim is one of the most committed recruiters I have come across. He is not especially handsome, intelligent, devout, or articulate, yet he combines just the right level of all these traits to give him a dependable-leader quality. I have rarely encountered anyone with such a skill to say the right thing at the right time, in order to convince a person to follow him. He’s not someone who leads through sheer force of his personality or authoritarianism. He is pragmatic, rather than dogmatic. An ordinary guy, but extraordinarily good at being one.
Osman started going with Nasim to his talks and study circles, and pretty soon became a changed person. Everything we’d been doing together—going to clubs, chasing women—was now anathema to him. And I thought he was crazy. “What’s wrong with you, man?” I’d ask. I’d mock him and laugh at him, but to my surprise he’d just take it. He stopped going out with our group of friends, told women to stop calling for him at our house. Generally, he just retreated.